Not all mosques that Muslims are seeking to build in the United States are facing vocal opposition in the local community. A new mosque in Boise, Idaho, has opened with strong support from local Christians.

A derelict building in the capital of Idaho that housed a church four years ago has been converted into a mosque for members of the Bosniak – Bosnian Muslim – community, which includes about 260 refugee families.

The mosque was dedicated this summer with support from much of the non-Muslim community, around the same time the proposed Islamic Center two blocks from the World Trade Center was greeted with anger from many Christians.

"It's mostly Bosnian," said Mosque Secretary Denis Miljkovic, "but everyone is welcome. Whoever brings a good heart, a good attitude."

Despite anti-Muslim sentiments and hate crimes flaring up from California to New York to Florida, the new mosque's mostly Christian neighbors have been much more welcoming of their community's Muslim population. Southwest Ada County Alliance spokeswoman Betty Bermensolo told The Idaho Statesman that she hadn't heard any negative comments about the Bosnian Islamic Center.

"There's a fear of the unknown that's always going to be there, unless people go in and give [the Bosnians] a chance to enlighten them," Bermensolo said.

In September, when a Florida pastor in Gainesville threatened to host an "International Burn a Koran Day" on the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a Boise woman stopped by the Bosnian mosque to bring congregants a copy of the Koran, according to Samed Ceric, the mosque's former president.

While most residents and community leaders are supportive and understanding, some Islamophobes have emerged to voice opposition to the mosque and the Muslim community in general. Some who opposed the mosque have driven by yelling obscenities or giving congregants the finger while others have left hate-filled messages on the mosque's answering machine, according to Ceric.

He said living with the legacy of 9/11 has not been easy for the Muslim community in America; but he also noted that Muslims who worked in the World Trade Center were among those killed by the terrorists. "We're against the terrorists, too," Ceric told the Idaho Statesman. "Why judge me like them? We're fighting them harder than anyone."

Miljkovic explained that people act out against Islam because they don't understand the religion. Abdul Yoonas, a Muslim who has lived in Boise for more than three decades, agreed, explaining that the news media is constantly portraying Islam and Muslims in a negative light.

"You just have to open the newspaper and see letters written by people who have misinformation," Yoonas said. "When people know more about Islam, the negative perception goes away."

Many of the community's Bosniaks are refugees who fled their homeland during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s. But Muslims had begun settling in Boise about a decade earlier. According to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, the first Muslim community in Boise came together in 1982 with 15 to 20 people. Several years later, the community spread to the more affordable Treasure Valley, where currently about 4,000 Bosniaks live, according to Miljkovic.

In 1989, the Muslim community moved their worship out of individual homes and into the first of several rented spaces. In 2002, the community finally bought a building specifically for worship.

After the 9/11 attacks, some within the Muslim community in the Idaho capital feared that there would be a backlash targeting their own mosque thousands of miles from the site of the terrorist attacks on New York's Ground Zero. But instead, interfaith groups formed a human chain around the mosque while their Muslim neighbors conducted Friday prayers inside.

In August 2009, about 40 Muslim families joined together to form the first Bosnian Islamic Center. They initially rented the space, but about five months ago they raised a half million dollars and bought the 10,000-square-foot building.

During the three-year Bosnian War, which began in 1992, the Bosnian Serb army led an ethnic cleansing campaign to massacre Bosnian Muslims in territory it controlled. The war culminated with the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed.