Quebec Muslim cemetery vote not necessarily a racist reaction

A narrow vote against creating a Muslim cemetery in Saint-Apollinaire, Quebec, a small town near Quebec City, has raise hackles all around. The province of Quebec, so progressive in so many ways, does seem to have a real problem with Islam, and many outsiders are calling the decision discriminatory and racist. However, I'm not sure that's necessarily the case.
As I understand it, the vote was only offered to the 70 immediate neighbours of the proposed cemetery. 49 of these 70 bothered to register to vote, and only 36 of those actually did vote. The result was 19 against and 16 for (with one spoiled ballot), a narrow margin of just 3 votes. As an exercise in local democracy, therefore, this was not a resounding success (in fact, it was downright embarrassing).
But I am not so sure that it was necessarily a vote against Muslims. It is more likely to be a knee-jerk not-in-my-back-yard reaction. A vote on a new Christian cemetery may well have turned out essentially the same. Given that the proposal was for a wooded area right on the edge of town, it could just as easily be a vote for environmentalism as one against Islam.
Interestingly, Sunny Létourneau, the woman who was instrumental in forcing the referendum in the first place and in galvanizing and organizing the "no" vote, does not live close enough to the site to qualify for a vote. But her main argument is that Quebec needs to ensure that its cemeteries are non-denominational - she is equally opposed to the many Catholic-only cemeteries in Quebec.
And I totally see where she is coming from. As one letter in the newspaper pointed out, we don't designate neighbourhoods for the living for Muslims or Catholics or whatever other faction, so why should we do so for the dead?
The Quebec Islamic Cultural Centre that is calling for the new cemetery says that traditions carried out in other cemeteries may conflict with their beliefs (such as cremation), but I would have thought that different traditions could easily be accommodated in the same cemetery. I'm sure that in any regular cemetery, some bodies would be buried and some cremated. And Jews and Christians seem perfectly able to share cemeteries, so why not Muslims too.

UPDATE
A few weeks later, Quebec City Council has stepped up and sold the Quebec Muslim community a parcel of city land adjacent to a Catholic cemetery (and therefore already zoned for burials). So, they now have somewhere to bury their dead and, I guess, all's well that ends well.