The shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego was a heinous crime that deserves to be looked at in depth and at length. And, to a certain extent, it is — but not the way the tragedy pleads to be looked at.
The New York Times’ headline on its deep-dive on the root causes that drove two young men to kill three people outside the house of worship pretty much said it all: “San Diego Killings Follow Rising Anti-Muslim Rhetoric.”
This was all, every bit of it, attributable to anti-Muslim sentiment. This was what drove two men to attempt a mass shooting which was repelled by a security guard at the mosque, but not before the guard was fatally wounded, along with two other community members.
The problems with this narrative are manifold. Yes, the alleged killers hated Muslims. If one is to believe their manifesto, it’s also clear that they hated virtually everyone, and from a mix-and-match list of targets that doesn’t fall neatly anywhere on the political spectrum.
As religious commentator Rod Dreher wrote in The Free Press about the manifesto the two shooters left behind, “the pair hated Muslims, Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, ‘MAGAtard boomers,’ liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.” Above all, they seemed to hate themselves.
“The manifesto reads like what you might expect teenagers marinated 24/7 in intersecting currents of internet hate to produce: crude, stupid, self-pitying, and overflowing with rage at all the people these self-described National Socialist Ecofascists identify as the Enemy,” Dreher noted.
What allows such rage to fester? The normalization of rage and slaughter of our enemies, innocent of actual violence they may be. See, they’ve committed a different kind of violence: The violence of being in opposition to one’s political aims, which is enough to justify the worst sorts of sanguinary air-quotes “justice.”
In this respect, then, it’s odd that the shooters chose the Islamic Center of San Diego as a target for their rage, because the clergy and clerisy there seem to have had one thing very much in common with the teens: They really, really hated Jews and wanted to see them dead.
Long before the shooting, in November of 2023, the conservative Washington Free Beacon published an article that didn’t get the attention that it should have. Again, the theme is in the title, but it’s key: “These Mosques Pray for the Annihilation of Jews. They Also Receive Money From the Biden Administration.”
Also key is the date: This is one month after Hamas and its associated groups murdered, raped, and kidnapped thousands of Israelis because of their murderous grievances, too. Cheering them along was Imam Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego, who said that killing thousands of innocents, including babies and the infirm, was merely self-defense.
“When people are occupied, then the resistance is justified,” he said in a sermon on Oct. 20, 2023.
“We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist. The terrorist is the one who started the occupation, not the one who is defending himself.”
This is just the pull-quote from the sermon, and it gets worse from there. The key issue at the time was that the mosque received $150,000 to prevent terrorist attacks with little oversight as to how it was spent.
Now that we have a shooting on our hands — one which, from all available evidence, looks spurred on by generalized hate and a debasement of the American mind, not Islamophobia specifically — the full sermon deserves some scrutiny.
Other comments the imam made during the controversial segment of the sermon:
- “Resistance when people are occupied becomes a human right. People have the right to resist.”
- “People have the right to defend their lives and the lives of their community members… their land, their properties, their dignity, their honor.”
- “We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist. The terrorist is the one who start the occupation, not the one who is defending himself and his brothers and sisters.”
- “Teach our kids about the history of Palestine. About the occupation, about the suffering. Don’t tell me that, ‘Oh it’s too graphic for our kids to watch.’ If our kids are victims of Islamophobia… then they are at the age to be taught what’s going on in Palestine and what’s going on in Gaza.”
In other words, radicalize your kids just like these monsters were radicalized, somewhere, by someone. Just radicalize them against the Jews, who can be raped and slaughtered as a “human right” because it’s “resistance,” and he says “what we are witnessing” started 75 years ago with Israel’s re-founding.
This is akin to a sermon celebrating 9/11 just days after it happened — and the brutality of Oct. 7 was documented in lurid digital detail by the people who perpetrated it, and who were quite proud of their barbarism.
These are people who, according to an exhaustive report about sexual violence during the attacks, even shot women in the genitalia just because… well, why not? And the Islamic Center of San Diego celebrates it.
This doesn’t make the shooting these two young men carried out any less reprehensible, and it doesn’t make the Islamic Center of San Diego specifically responsible for inviting it upon themselves. In fact, it’s entirely probable these savages knew nothing about this sermon or the savagery the mosque espoused. That doesn’t mean the center isn’t part and parcel with the general movement in America toward normalizing political violence.
It doesn’t help any when we wallpaper over this by claiming, as The New York Times did, that this was the result of “anti-Muslim rhetoric.” If we don’t recognize butchers wherever they may be — and castigate those who celebrate them — this will only repeat itself ad infinitum, albeit with different targets every time.
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