The recent shooting outside the Islamic Center of San Diego is being framed as a simple story of anti-Muslim hatred, but the facts point to a far darker and more complicated culture of normalized political violence.
According to Western Journal, establishment media quickly settled on a familiar narrative. The New York Times, in a lengthy examination of the attack, ran its piece under the headline, San Diego Killings Follow Rising Anti-Muslim Rhetoric. The implication was unmistakable: This was all, every bit of it, attributable to anti-Muslim sentiment, a direct line supposedly running from harsh words about Islam to the bullets that killed three people outside the mosque, including a security guard who managed to stop what appears to have been an attempted mass shooting.
That framing is politically convenient, but it is also intellectually lazy. Yes, the alleged shooters expressed hatred of Muslims, but if one takes their manifesto at face value, their animus extended to virtually every identifiable group in modern society, from racial and religious minorities to political factions across the spectrum.
As religious commentator Rod Dreher observed in The Free Press, 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. Dreher added that, above all, they seemed to loathe themselves, a self-consuming rage that is increasingly familiar in a generation steeped in online nihilism.
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. This is not the profile of a coherent ideological soldier marching under a single banner, but of young men who have absorbed the broader cultural message that enemies are everywhere and that violence is a legitimate outlet for grievance.
What allows such rage to metastasize into bloodshed is not merely prejudice against one group, but the normalization of dehumanization itself. Increasingly, political and cultural opponents are not seen as fellow citizens to be persuaded, but as existential threats whose very existence constitutes a form of violence that justifies retaliation.
In that sense, it is grimly ironic that the Islamic Center of San Diego became the target of these young mens fury. The leadership at the mosque, far from modeling a message of peace and coexistence, has itself trafficked in rhetoric that glorifies violence against Jews and frames mass murder as a legitimate form of resistance.
Long before the shooting, in November 2023, the conservative Washington Free Beacon published an investigative report that received far less attention than it deserved. Its headline was blunt and disturbing: These Mosques Pray for the Annihilation of Jews. They Also Receive Money From the Biden Administration.
The timing of that report was crucial. It came just one month after Hamas and allied terrorist factions stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, murdering, raping, torturing, and kidnapping thousands of Israelis including babies, the elderly, and the disabled in an orgy of violence that shocked even a world accustomed to terror.
Cheering on that barbarism from the pulpit was Imam Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego, who portrayed the slaughter of civilians as a justified act of self-defense. When people are occupied, then the resistance is justified, he said in a sermon on Oct. 20, 2023, just days after Hamas gunmen had live-streamed their atrocities for the world to see.
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.
Those lines were merely the most quotable excerpts from a sermon that, by all accounts, grew even more extreme as it went on. At the time, the central policy concern was that the mosque had received $150,000 in federal funds, ostensibly to help prevent terrorist attacks, with minimal oversight regarding how the money was used or what kind of ideology was being promoted under its roof.
Now that a shooting has taken place outside that very institution a crime that, based on the available evidence, appears to have been driven by generalized hatred and a degraded moral culture rather than by Islamophobia alone the full content of that sermon demands renewed scrutiny. When a religious leader publicly sanctifies violence against Jews as resistance, it is not unreasonable to ask whether such rhetoric contributes to a broader climate in which political bloodshed is normalized.
Other comments the imam made during the controversial segment of the sermon reinforced the same theme: that the conflict is not about specific acts of terror, but about a supposed 75-year-old injustice tied to the founding of the modern state of Israel. In effect, he urged his flock to view the brutalities of Oct. 7 as part of a long, righteous struggle, rather than as the deliberate targeting of innocents.
In other words, radicalize your kids just like these monsters were radicalized, somewhere, by someone. The message, stripped of its pious language, is that Jews can be raped and slaughtered as a human right because its resistance, and that what we are witnessing is merely the latest chapter in a decades-long narrative of grievance.
This is the moral equivalent of a sermon praising the hijackers of Sept. 11 in the immediate aftermath of that atrocity. The difference is that the savagery of Oct. 7 was recorded in high definition by the perpetrators themselves, who boasted of their crimes on social media, leaving no room for denial about what they had done or whom they had targeted.
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 yet, as the reporting on Imam Hassanes sermon makes clear, the Islamic Center of San Diego celebrates it, cloaking barbarism in the language of liberation and human rights.
None of this mitigates the evil of the shooting carried out by the two young men outside the mosque. Their actions remain reprehensible, and nothing in the imams rhetoric makes the Islamic Center of San Diego responsible in a direct, causal sense for the attack, nor does it justify any notion that the congregation invited such violence upon itself.
Indeed, it is entirely plausible perhaps even likely that the shooters knew nothing about the sermon or the mosques ideological posture. Yet that does not absolve the institution of its role in a wider American drift toward excusing, romanticizing, or outright celebrating political violence when it is directed at the right targets.
It is precisely this double standard that is obscured when legacy outlets insist, as The New York Times did, that the San Diego killings were simply the product of anti-Muslim rhetoric. If we refuse to acknowledge that butchers and their apologists exist on all sides, and if we decline to condemn those who glorify them with equal vigor, we will continue to see this cycle of hatred and bloodshed repeat itself, each time with a different set of victims and a freshly tailored narrative to explain it away.
Login