After San Diego attack, a reckoning on Muslim leadership in America

Three Muslim men were murdered at the Islamic Center of San Diego last month. Amin Abdullah, the security guard, met the attackers with gunfire and kept them from reaching the classrooms, where roughly 140 children were learning. He saved those children with his life.

The men who killed him were two teenagers who were radicalized online, armed with weapons taken from a parent’s home and steeped in the ideology of white nationalist accelerationism.

The FBI says they left behind writings filled with anti-Muslim, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ hatred. They displayed Nazi symbols on their weapons and gear. They did not discriminate in their hatred.

Families are now in unimaginable grief. The San Diego Muslim community is reeling.

As an American Muslim woman, I mourn with them. As the head of an organization that has built coalitions with Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh Americans for years, I know that this attack was an attack on all of us. Hate against one faith endangers every faith. We sink or rise together.

Mourning also requires honesty. This is my truth.

I am a Muslim woman who lived in Irvine. I was a public school teacher. I raised my own children and other people’s children to love this country and to love their faith. I was the youth and families commissioner for the city of Irvine for six years. I served on the Irvine Public School Foundation.

Then, I was pushed out of community circles in Southern California, not by Islamophobes, but by my own coreligionists because I refused to toe the line of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

So, when I watched CNN and other major news networks across the country turn to CAIR within hours of the San Diego shooting, as if CAIR were the natural voice of American Muslims, I knew I had to speak.

CAIR is one organization among many, with a documented history that has long troubled federal investigators, moderate Muslims and Muslim women like me.

In 2009, the FBI publicly stated that, following the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial, it did not consider CAIR an appropriate liaison partner. That history did not disappear.

Yet here we are again, with CAIR positioned by the media as the Muslim voice on a tragedy.

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And what did that voice say? Hussam Ayloush, CEO of CAIR California, told the country he was “deeply disturbed, but not at all surprised” by the attack, and tied it directly to comments by national lawmakers trying to address extremism.

Within hours of three Muslim men being murdered by neo-Nazi teenagers, the message was: We told you so, and here is who to blame.

That is not leadership. That is opportunism.

I have seen this posture up close. Just a couple of months ago, I organized an interfaith event at the Skirball Cultural Center, bringing together Muslims from around the world with leaders of the Jewish community to share ideas and find common ground.

CAIR and the Southern California Shura Council called for a boycott. The event was titled “Breaking Bread.” They boycotted a dialogue.

That is who CAIR is. They do not want peace. They do not want reconciliation.

Muslim Americans do not need an organization that turns every tragedy into a grievance campaign. We need leaders who can stand at a press conference and name antisemitism and Islamophobia as two heads of the same monster.

We need leaders who can grieve tragedy without immediately pivoting to a list of political enemies. We need leaders who build bridges with our Jewish neighbors, who know that the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, the supermarket shooter in Buffalo, the church shooter in Charleston and now the mosque shooters in San Diego all drank from the same poisoned well.

The media must do better. Every time producers book CAIR, they hand legitimacy to one organization and silence the rest of us. There are Muslim women’s organizations, reformist scholars, interfaith leaders, Pakistani American civic groups, Iranian American voices, Bosnian American voices, Sufi communities, Ahmadi communities and ordinary mosque-goers across this country who do not see CAIR as their voice. We exist. We have been here all along. Pick up the phone.

To my fellow American Muslims: Our faith calls us to protect life, to stand for justice, to honor our neighbors. Our country has given us freedoms our grandparents could only dream of. We owe Amin, Mansour and Nader more than recycled talking points. We owe them a Muslim American leadership built on faith, patriotism, pluralism, women’s leadership and moral courage.

To our Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Sikh and secular neighbors: thank you for grieving with us. We grieve with you, too, when your houses of worship are attacked. The accelerationists who killed three Muslims want all of us divided and afraid. The answer to them is to give them the opposite.

Anila Ali is a former resident of Irvine, and is president of the American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council.