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In 1994 Ghazi Y. Khankan, director of the New York office of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, commented about York and his group based on their history in Brooklyn. He said, "It's a cult, in my opinion, and in Islam there are no cults. They consider their leader a prophet, which means they have deviated from the Islamic way." The superficial similarity of York's beliefs to those of the Heaven's Gate cult led to some worried newspaper articles after that group's mass suicide during the appearance of Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997, in which the cult was reported to have said that a spacecraft was following the comet.