SAN DIEGO — As an elementary faculty scholar on the Islamic Middle of San Diego within the early aughts, Sarah Youssef stated she doesn’t keep in mind there being guards on patrol or gates conserving out hazard.
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However Youssef, now a school freshman who leads an area gun violence prevention group, stated she remembers when the middle employed Amin Abdullah to protect the ability. Many have been comforted by his presence but in addition involved about what it signified.
Years later, neighborhood members’ — and Abdullah’s — deepest fears got here to move.
Two shooters tried to storm the Islamic Middle earlier this week. Together with Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, who managed the middle’s retailer, and neighborhood member Nadir Awad thwarted their assault however sacrificed themselves. Their fast actions on Monday have been praised as sheer heroism that will have saved dozens of lives, with about 140 kids and academics inside the middle’s partitions.
However their deaths additionally underscored the threats going through mosques and different homes of worship as hate rhetoric intensifies internationally and is keenly felt this week in San Diego.
Youssef stated it was unimaginable that one of many shooters lived inside blocks of the middle “and had such a brainwashed thought of what this faith was.”
But San Diego is not any stranger to hate crimes. Whereas the town reported it noticed a 64% lower in race-based crimes and a 46% drop in crimes based mostly on sexual orientation identification from 2024 to 2025, spiritual hate crimes elevated 150% throughout that very same time interval.
In 2019, a gunman killed one individual and wounded three others on the Chabad of Poway synagogue, about 20 miles from the Islamic Middle. The shooter later stated he was impressed by the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 folks.
In recent times, neo-Nazi flyers have been dispersed all through the town, a swastika defaced a school campus and a Jewish fraternity at San Diego State College was vandalized.
Investigators consider the gunmen who attacked the mosque have been radicalized on-line and shared the will to create a white ethnostate. They espoused neo-Nazi propaganda of their writings and expressed hatred for Muslims, Jews, the LGBTQ neighborhood and others, based on regulation enforcement.
The shooters’ darkish worldview, native residents and religion leaders stated, was born from normalizing hate rhetoric on-line and in politics. “You’re going to internalize” the regular stream of such anti-Muslim messaging shared on-line, Youssef stated. “Nobody is born hateful.”
Hussam Ayloush, the CEO and govt director of the Middle for American-Islamic Relations’ California chapter, warned that “none of us is immune. We aren’t protected.” He spoke throughout a self-defense webinar for mosques Wednesday in response to the assault, including: “As we watch, Islamophobia grows, anti-Muslim rhetoric grows.”
Abdullah, the Islamic Middle’s guard, exchanged gunfire with the shooters and radioed in a lockdown along with his remaining breaths, police stated. Kaziha, a neighborhood chief who managed the mosque retailer for practically 40 years, turned folks away from the bullets. And Nadir Awad, whose spouse is a trainer on the faculty, ran towards the gunfire when he heard capturing throughout the road from his residence, police stated.
“Don’t suppose, ‘I’m remoted, I’m in a liberal state, I’m in a liberal metropolis, I’m in a blue state,’ and so forth. Hate can attain wherever,” Ayloush stated.
In 2023, the Islamic Middle of San Diego, which housed the elementary faculty and a mosque, was flooded with hate flyers, prompting the imam to rent extra armed safety for the campus. Abdullah’s daughter stated he was generally anxious about taking lunch away from his submit as a result of “one thing dangerous” might occur.
“He can be so vigilant in defending the masjid, defending the kids,” Hawaa Abdullah stated of her father, utilizing the Arab phrase for mosque. “He wished to save lots of his meals until after he left the job as a result of he was afraid that if he went on his break, one thing dangerous will occur.”
Islamophobia is on the rise throughout the nation. CAIR acquired 8,683 complaints nationwide in 2025, the best quantity recorded since 1996, the group stated.
In the meantime, in San Diego County, antisemitic incidents have risen since Israel started its assault on Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assaults. The Anti-Defamation League recorded a 150% improve regionally from 2024 to 2025, with 139 incidents together with harassment, vandalism and assault.
Nationally, the ADL counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025, marking a big lower from 2024, when 9,354 incidents have been recorded.
Regardless of the nationwide downward development, Jewish leaders say safety measures like armed guards, metallic detectors and surveillance round colleges and synagogues stay at an all-time excessive. In line with Heidi Gantwerk, president and CEO of Jewish Federation of San Diego, Jewish establishments throughout the U.S. spent some $785 million on safety final yr.
“We pay a tax to be Jewish within the nation proper now,” Gantwerk stated. “Greater than 60% of hate crimes, spiritual hate crimes, are in opposition to Jews, and we’re 2% of the inhabitants.”
Earlier this yr the town council voted 8 to 1 to undertake the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, described as a “sure notion of Jews, which can be expressed as hatred towards Jews.” Some advocates praised the vote as sending a “clear, unequivocal message that it understands the menace antisemitism poses not simply to Jews, however to all San Diegans,” based on the American Jewish Committee.
“The structure of antisemitism is that it’s a mutually reinforcing system of bigotry and oppression, with different types of hatred, be it anti-Blackness, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, anti-LGBTQ phobia,” stated Vlad Khaykin, head of advocacy on the Simon Wiesenthal Middle, a Jewish human rights group. “This stuff are inclined to rise collectively.” The Islamic Middle’s attackers are believed to have held a equally sprawling hate-based ideology.
Muslim residents, nevertheless, say San Diego has lagged in combating Islamophobia. Tazheen Nizam, the manager director of CAIR San Diego, stated assembly requests with Mayor Todd Gloria and regulation enforcement have repeatedly been ignored.
“They’ve turned their backs on us,” Nizam stated.
In an emailed assertion, a spokesperson for Gloria stated conferences have taken place between the mayor’s workplace and Muslim neighborhood leaders.
“Mayor Gloria has been clear that violence, hate, antisemitism, and Islamophobia don’t have any place in San Diego,” the assertion stated. “The Metropolis will proceed working with regulation enforcement, religion leaders, and neighborhood organizations to assist the protection of communities of religion throughout San Diego.”
The sheriff’s division stated it by no means acquired a request to fulfill with CAIR San Diego and can proceed to supply additional patrols to all locations of worship inside its jurisdiction.
However Youssef and different members of the Islamic Middle say they’re annoyed and offended the assault “was allowed to occur” after what they describe as years of indifference to anti-Muslim hate.
“As a neighborhood, we’ve sensed the rise in Islamophobia through the years,” she stated. “After I was little, we didn’t have the quantity of safety we do now. We didn’t have these metal gates or an armed safety guard.”
Alicia Victoria Lozano reported from Los Angeles. Dennis Romero reported from San Diego.
