In this interview for puntorojo, Cecile Estelle is in dialogue with Mari, a congregant at the Islamic Center of San Diego, about the recent terrorist attack that killed three beloved members of the community.
Cecile: The terrorist attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego was horrific. How has this impacted the local Muslim community and what has been the response?
Mari: I think the most the immediate response to any kind attack on our mosques, any kind of intrusion into our space, is that it’s a violation of our sacred space. And that is the fundamental grounding principle of this experience, that a mosque is a house of worship, a place of devotion, a place where we gather to worship the Divine.
It’s from this base that we can build from to understand the holistic impacts on our community, the Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD). It’s not a mosque in the “Western” or Eurocentric understanding of a space of worship. It’s not just a place where people go to pray. Our Imam (Taha Hassane) and his family live there, and we also have a school inside the mosque. When we walk past the classrooms during Ramadan, the classrooms are being used as prayer spaces, because they are right next to the prayer space itself, the musallah, (an open area used for Islamic prayer (salah). To walk into the women’s section, we walk by those classrooms, we see kids’ art on the walls before we even see the musallah itself. We have the majlis (meeting or assembly space). We have so many programs and groups that meet in the extension. So, we’re very integrated within our community, and the community is very integrated within us.
The violation of that space by people intending to cause harm is already on its own something that we would be, under any other circumstances, incensed at. Just the fact that people walked in with the intent to cause harm is a violation, because this is a space of devotion. Also, the ICSD is very open and welcoming of everyone, without judgment or question or prerequisite. That’s what a mosque is supposed to be. Just ten minutes before the shooting happened, there was a group of students there to learn about Islam. Just the intrusion of people intending to cause harm upon us, in our space, is the first thing.
The second thing is there were so many people in the mosque when the shooting happened. There were 150 students and their teachers in the classrooms. There were people praying. There were people in the store. The risk to them is horrifying to think about.
We’re also reeling from the loss of 3 very dear community members who everyone knew, who everyone saw, who almost everyone called uncle and brother and referred to them in these dear familial terms. Honestly, to see people call them by their full names on the news is so odd. Those are our collective uncles. The ICSD is so close knit, and these men specifically were so giving to their community… everyone knew them and everyone loved them.
Brother Amin (Amin Abdullah, the security guard at the mosque) would give me pep talks during finals. These people were so invested in our community, and our community was so invested in them. Our relationships were so casual and habitual. The loss of them, I think, is something that the entire Muslim community of San Diego is grieving as though we’ve lost a family member, because it really feels like that for a lot of people.
These members of our community were so dear to us in so many ways, that losing them is beyond us. It’s beyond what we can comprehend. An act of violence that lasted, like, 20 minutes on a Monday morning. And now they’re gone. We weren’t expecting it.
Many of us were not expecting any of this. Well, you know, we’re brown, Muslim, whatever, in America, right? It’s been like this since before I was born. I’m younger than 9/11. Violence against Muslims isn’t new. You take precautions; you check the exits when you first walk in. You wonder why Brother Amin has a gun. Well, we know why. But then, at the same time, our community seems so integrated. We were already worried about something happening. You just can’t expect it, though. The community was vulnerable and not prepared for this.
Because for us the Islamic Center of San Diego has done everything in its power to gain the goodwill of the broader community. Imam Taha, bless him, working with city officials, and the police—people he’s very brave in talking to—because the amount of composure it takes to have a normal conversation with some of these people who do not respect or treat Muslims with good will. But he does it for the sake of the community’s safety.
Cecile: Including people who he knows are Zionists, people who he knows are not allies to the community…
Mari: …and for the sake of the community. He has done everything in his power to ensure the safety of the Islamic Center and of the Muslim community of San Diego by trying to gain goodwill. Through working with people who don’t care about us; through having to constantly convince people we’re human enough to get to live. All that, and still, it’s not enough, right? Because it’s the crime of being Muslim in America.
Cecile: The burden is always on the oppressed to have to remain with open arms, right?
Mari: Exactly.
Cecile: There is a little bit of dissonance there, right? I saw the picture of Brother Amin that you’re talking about. He’s there with so many weapons on his belt. But I know the whole community at ICSD is very peaceful, so there is that dissonance of “this is so stupid that we have to do this. We know why we have to do this, but this isn’t who we are, but this is what the outside world looks like, and we have to protect ourselves.” Brother Amin is known as a protector in the community. I saw his daughter speak a few days later. It was really powerful, what she said…
I know that he knew that this was his role, and he did his job, and he was prepared to die, if that’s what he had to do to protect the kids, and that’s what he did. But what a shame that this is the world we live in.
Mari: As his son said in the interview, too. It’s the way he would have wanted to go out, you know? Him, instead of 150 people. He was prepared for it- his friends and family said that. He knew the risks of the job and chose to do it for the sake of protecting us. He was always on alert, always, always. I remember one time I was driving past and saw someone I knew. I pulled up, honked really loud, and yelled salaams at her. And Br. Amin didn’t even jump, because he saw me the second I slowed in front of the mosque. He was there calm as anything, and I knew he had already seen it was me, and not a threat.
When my friends and I would talk for hours outside the mosque, he was always watching over us—on the highest of alerts—to protect our community. He was always out there constantly scanning the area. That was the fulfillment of what he felt was his purpose. Yet, it doesn’t make it any easier for any of us. It’s comfort, but it’s not relief.
His loss is not fair to his wife. It’s not fair to his eight kids. It’s not fair to the people he cared for, or to the father he took care of.
Honestly, we’re scared and angry and mourning. But we have to keep going. The teachers, may God strengthen them and give them ease, went back in and are piecing themselves back together. We have to keep going, we have to figure it out. We can’t let them win, man. If we fall into despair, if we fall into fear, if we stop going to the mosque or taking the kids to school or standing up for what’s right, we let them win.
Cecile: Do you want to talk about the vigils and speak-outs?
Mari: The day of the attack, we immediately began to discuss in our circles what to do. Out of fear, no one wanted to gather on Monday night, so people started writing op-eds and writing letters. People started to share their thoughts feelings and understandings of the broader context in which this happened, and the ways in which the City of San Diego, and especially [Mayor] Todd Gloria, have failed us.
On Tuesday night, we organized a vigil, and it took place at the small park that’s next to the ICSD, where during Ramadan, you can see families and their children playing in there, gathering there and hanging out. A lot of the Muslim congregants of the ICSD live in that neighborhood. That is, like, our community park. We had a vigil there, and we had overwhelming community support. So much of the community came out to support us.
On Thursday, we held the janazah, the funeral prayer. We had more than 2,000 people in attendance. The park was filled to bursting. We filled every space possible, out of sorrow, out of community, out of love.
Thursday was the burial, which was restricted to only the families.
And that, I think, sank in the reality of the situation for many of us.
Muslim funerals are very involved and intimate. The family washes the deceased, shrouds them, bears them in… the process of grief is one they share with the community there to support them. The Ummah is one body, and every time one part of it is hurt, all of it hurts. We really learned that, but we also live it.
Cecile: Anti-Arab and Islamophobic racism is on the rise. Do you think this terroristic attack is connected in any way to current wars and rising threats to Arab and Muslim communities by the far right and fascist movements aligned with MAGA?
Mari: Completely, totally, unquestionably. Just in the week before that attack on the Islamic Center, members of this government, influential people, and across rightwing circles—and not so rightwing circles—have been spouting non-stop Islamophobic rhetoric and hate.
We can link this trend all the way back to especially after 9-11, and the intentional effort by people in power to target, criminalize, and construct the Muslim communities in the US as “terrorist” to justify brutality and repression against our people. Criminalization acts as a form of psychological terror on our communities to “keep us in line”.
Cecile: All this anti-terror propaganda had to be built up to justify the decades-long wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. And now, nobody blinks when. when Donald Trump literally calls for genocide of the Iranian people.
Mari: Yes, it is a construction of terror to justify war; in order to create an effective, easy target for the American public to hate, so they can tolerate, ignore, and normalize mass death on us rather than telling the government: “hey, stop bombing and killing those people”.
It’s connected to the US’s latest imperial nightmare projects: the US and “israeli” war on the Palestinian, Iranian, and Lebanese people. The racist propaganda fueling these horrible wars enables the re-manufacturing of Arabs and Muslims as “terrorists” and creates another batch of dehumanized brown people to attack in their mosques and communities inside the US, while the US and “israeli” regimes murder these same people abroad inside their homes and communities.
It’s this conjoined effort, in order to promote and continue their imperial projects and to manufacture public support.
From Monday, from all the live streams, all the YouTube videos, everyone who was sharing things about the terror attack on our mosque on Monday—the comments were an absolute cesspool. A horrible case study of exactly how this hate-filled rhetoric impacts us and has effectively manipulated many people to channel that hate into violence against Muslims.
it’s the same rhetoric: “these people are terrorists, these people hate us, these people hate this other group, so then we must therefore hate them, even though we have no basis for understanding them.” These racist people are putting words in our mouths, and that leads to other people putting bullets in our heads.
It is incredibly tied to the US’s imperial projects and the construction of Muslims as “terrorists”.
We can’t separate the two while “western” imperial projects are still feeding and feeding off this system. When Guantanamo is still open. When Abu Zubaydah is still being held without charges.
Cecile: And when we still have close to 10,000 people in Zionist torture cells.
Mari: When the US, showing its hand, has called off an attack on Iran because Saudi Arabia is worried about the Hajj. Saudi Arabia, of course, the imperial West’s lapdog, who have manufactured so much of the fundamentalist Wahhabism that has become an excuse for the US to feed people into torture cells across the so-called “Middle East”, aka the Muslim world. So much of it is related to the imperial projects of the West, and how they will create, manufacture, foment, and fund dangerous movements to serve their imperialist ends—only to then use that to justify attacking Muslim and Arab nations and people for oil or land.
Cecile: The attackers have been identified as two teenagers who met through an online fascist, white supremacist platform. What do you think specifically motivated this attack against the ICSD and the Muslim community?
It’s important to note that these teenaged terrorists lived a block away from the mosque.
Unfortunately, I have read their so-called “manifestos”. It’s heavily implied that they wanted to do a copycat of the Christchurch shooting (the terrorist attack at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, happened in 2019, where a fascist gunman murdered 51 people and injured 40 others while they prayed inside).
And we can see that in the pattern of events. Camouflage, the weapons, the specific attack at an Islamic school attached to a mosque. That specific pattern is consistent with the events of the terror attack at Christchurch.
Think God that that these terrorists who attacked our Islamic Center didn’t achieve their goal and were deterred by the heroism of the three brothers that prevented them from killing more.
The specific point that this was meant to be a repeat of the Christchurch shooting is an important note- it shows there was a precedent, and there is a glorification in online spaces of mass murders like the one in Christchurch, and there are those wanting to repeat these atrocities.
Cecile: and look at who their example is, the U.S. state and military, which is the biggest mass murderer of Muslim and Arab people in modern history.
Mari: Especially in San Diego, with all the military crawling around. So, they’re not just copycats of Christchurch and all these other mass shootings, they’re copycats of the state. I also think that hate is taught. No one is born idolizing murderers. There was some kind of radicalization process, there was some kind of instilling of certain values and ideologies into these two teenagers. And I think it can’t be stressed enough that there was an online community where these things were circulating. The fact that this terror act, the shooting on our mosque, was livestreamed to Discord where someone recorded it and shared the video is more proof of that. The fact that the video of the shooters killing themselves in one of their mother’s cars was also livestreamed, copied, and circulated, shows that there is a community online who glorifies this kind of violence, and they’re not doing it in secret.
Cecile: We know that the FBI has access to people’s phones. We know that they have no problem spying on Muslim people. If they were actually going after “terrorists”, as they say, then they could have stopped this actual terrorist attack. Or maybe they could get in that Discord and arrest every single person who’s glorifying this, because those people are a danger to the public, if we’re really “concerned about terrorism”. I mean, I’m not here to promote the police state, but it’s important to point out the hypocrisy of this idea that we’re “fighting terrorism”.
Mari: Also, in the manifesto, one of them specifically cites a number of inspirations including famous mass murderers, neo-Fascists, antisemites, and Islamophobes. There are online [influencers] named that are openly promoting violence against people they see as “other,” including Muslims and Arabs. There is a whole media apparatus behind this; and then when two people following those circles commit an act of terrorism the media and cops then say it’s a “mental health issue” and thereby avoid talking about the systems of racism and violence driving these horrific attacks.
The mother of one of the shooters reported him to the police “as suicidal” at 9 am the morning of the attack and that he had taken various weapons from the house. We now know it wasn’t a suicide note, but a terrorist manifesto explaining the motivation for the intended attack on Muslims.
Cecile: …and what would it look like to have actual prevention programs that address this fascist online culture that is activating these youth to try to commit mass murder? The level of surveillance that we have in this country is already massive and expansive, but they do not use this to find and stop those planning mass murder, they instead use it against the victims.
Mari: Exactly, because If there was an effective prevention system being enacted, it could have an impact in stopping these activated fascists. The state has no interest in repressing the far and fascist Right.
Cecile: So, it is left to Brother Amin to be the prevention.
Mari: The police knew for two hours that there was a mentally unstable teenager with guns and a BMW running loose in the community.
According to community members, the San Diego Police Department dispatched police to all the public schools in the area, but not the ICSD. Since the shooters lived so near to the mosque it should have been among the first places the police checked, warned, and secured. But they didn’t. Knowing that a potentially activated shooter was in the neighborhood, it would have been very easy for them to call for a complete lockdown of all schools in the area—including that of the ICSD—but they didn’t. There are plenty of examples of how the police have carried out school lockdowns for much less serious reasons, but not this time.
It really just shows that we can’t rely on people who don’t care about us. We mean nothing as people to the state or its agents. The cops who are now at the mosque’s entrance see us as part of their job. The cops aren’t going to risk their lives to protect us. Who are we to them? Look at Uvalde, may God rest the victims’ souls. They won’t risk their lives to protect us, we’re not worth all that to them. It’s really, truly, up to us to ensure our own protection. We keep us safe, seriously.
Cecile: At a press conference in response to the attack, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria was pressed by community members who showed and claimed he bears some responsibility for what happened. Can you explain why people are accusing the mayor?
Todd Gloria is the quintessential example of a Democrat, one who is rhetorically liberal and plays up identity politics when useful, but in practice is always lands on the right-wing side of every political issue and always lines up with the oppressor. Like, he enthusiastically backs and funds the bloated police budget and is aggressively pro-Zionist.
He is also actively causing harm to our communities. He has not made a single effort ever to build goodwill or community with the Muslim community of San Diego, which makes up a significant part of San Diego’s population. In fact, he’s actively alienating our community. CAIR and community members have been telling him for years now that we’ve been seeing an increase in threats and harassment, that we’re scared, that we need protection, and he hasn’t even deigned to meet with us.
He has funded the police at the highest levels and has given them extensive power and license to brutalize communities, including in 2024 when he authorized the violent repression and arrest of 65 members of our community participating at the UCSD [Palestine solidarity] encampment.
He has allowed the police to collaborate with ICE who have abducted more than 10,000 people in San Diego over the last year alone. Everything he has done in office has shown us that he does not actually care about marginalized people, about brown people, about Muslims, about queer people. He does not think of us as people. He pulls the identity cards as often as he can, but if protecting us means risking his funders and voters, he’ll gladly throw us under the bus.
Cecile: But he is very eager to step up and conflate anti-Zionism and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign with anti-Semitism, because we dare to speak out against the genocide in Palestine.
Mari: Of course. Because he perceives Zionists as his base, a base that funds him well.
During Todd Gloria’s press conference after the shooting, the Chief of Police praised the use of Flock Safety’s AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the shooters’ car—even though it made no difference in preventing the terrorist act or stopping it once it started. People from the neighborhood arrived at the ICSD before the police did. Community members found the car at the same time police did. The Police and their “Flock” cameras did not, and do not, make us safe.
Cecile: I mean, for us to be safe, we need to live in a less violence-based society that doesn’t spend half of our tax dollars to fund imperialism, war, and genocide.
Mari: Right. the City of San Diego is spending so much money on arming its police, on funding a completely useless and widely unpopular camera system, while Todd Gloria lies in front of the camera claiming that somehow that the police and ALPRs prevented the shooters from claiming more lives. That the police put their “lives on the line” to “save” those inside. But did they really do anything? They knew for two hours that two armed, mentally unstable, and potentially radicalized people were on the loose in the area, and couldn’t seem to find them, stop them, or warn anyone at the ICSD. The family had had previous issues related to firearm safety, and police knew back then that [one of the shooters] had neo-Nazi writings and hate speech on his laptop! They’ve known the shooter was being radicalized for two years! They completely failed in protecting the Muslim community.
We in the Muslim community of San Diego and our supporters feel this was a completely preventable situation, a completely preventable act of terrorism against our community.
But I don’t think that’s what they want. I think it is a show by Todd Gloria and the SDPD to demonstrate that they don’t really care about us, and maybe they even feel that this will keep us “a little more in line”. If they had wanted to protect us, they could have done more. They would have done more. They just don’t care about Muslims.
So why do we think that they will protect us? We do not need more police. More police did nothing. All told, we had about a hundred cop cars line up outside the Islamic Center after the act of terror. Why? The shooters were already dead. The cops said they had “neutralized” the threat. But no, the two shooters were already dead at their own hands. Community members found them at the same time the cops did. All those police did nothing.
Todd Gloria and the police do not care about our communities, they do not place any importance on our well-being, and I think it is to their benefit to keep us scared. It is to their benefit that we do not want to organize, it is to their benefit that we were too scared for our lives on Monday night to protest at Todd Gloria’s office for letting three of our community members die so unnecessarily.
By speaking out and challenging Gloria and the police, we are shattering the illusion that the police protect us in the Muslim community. In fact, the police are an agent of the terror state, just like ICE. They are designed to cause harm to our people and designed to keep us in line. The police will not protect us. Todd Gloria will not protect us. The surveillance state will not protect us. It is ultimately we who must protect ourselves. We have to find solutions for ourselves.
Cecile: What can be done to protect Muslim communities from further attacks?
Mari: There are organizations that are starting programs to de-radicalize people. This is a short-term solution.
Cecile: maybe we could start by unseating the most radically violent person in charge of the country right now…followed by the abolition of capitalism and this violent society that we live in.
But, you know, the entire system is broken. The Democrats aren’t stopping him; the Democrats aren’t putting forth anything new or different. They’re not going to give us a presidential candidate that’s any different from the likes of Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris. Donald Trump isn’t the problem. Donald Trump is a metastasized tumor on the problem that is the larger system.
Mari: Ever since [George] Bush, we have had a bipartisan political system that has enacted domestic and international terror against Arab and Muslim people, among other groups, for their imperial gain. Violence against us serves the empire. We can’t really go out and protest for Palestine if we’re scared of what could happen to us. We can’t demand that Todd Gloria step down and resign if we’re scared of being shot and killed or put on a watchlist or something. We cannot be politically active if we are afraid—and that also serves the empire.
There is something far greater playing out here. We’re seeing a system of far Right and fascist radicalization, fueled by a system of institutional hatred and oppression, and I’m not saying only against Muslims, but against all racialized, criminalized, non-white, non-cisheteronormative people.
From imperial wars and genocide against Arab and Muslim people, to the glorification of fascist terrorism, to the easy accessibility of weapons of mass murder, and to a white supremacist regime that is placing a target directly on our communities—this is what we are up against in society today.
As difficult as it may seem, we can fight back in defense of our communities by building solidarity between oppressed and repressed peoples, build mass movements against war and fascism, and become stronger than the forces of hate and violence. We can’t fall into despair or be afraid. We are people of hope, of hope for a better world, of a constant striving to create it, and it’s when we unite that we’re the strongest.
Cecile Estelle is a Palestine Solidarity activist, organizer, and member of San Diego Socialists
Mari is a student at the University of San Diego and an organizer in her Chicane and Arab communities. She also teaches part-time at an Islamic school.
