Three people are dead and two suspected gunmen — aged 17 and 18 — were found dead in a car from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds, following a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego in the Clairemont neighbourhood on Monday. Among the victims was a security guard at the centre. Families waited for hours as children were evacuated from a school operating inside the mosque complex. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl confirmed that “there was definitely hate rhetoric involved” and that the FBI is conducting a parallel investigation. Two of the victims, Mansour Kaziha and Nader Awad, have been identified. A parent who had long feared such an attack, Montaser Barbakh, told reporters that places of worship are “increasingly under attack.” The investigation is ongoing; full suspect identities and motivations have not yet been publicly confirmed.
The received wisdom
The immediate liberal and mainstream-media response frames this as the predictable endpoint of years of normalised anti-Muslim rhetoric. The argument is structural: when political leaders, media personalities, and online communities repeatedly characterise mosques as hotbeds of extremism, Muslim Americans as a fifth column, and Islamic practice as incompatible with democratic citizenship, they create a cultural permission structure in which young men with violent inclinations find ideological justification. The 17-year-old and 18-year-old who drove to a mosque in San Diego with weapons were not born hating; they learned it from somewhere.
This framing has a powerful empirical basis. The FBI’s hate crime statistics have shown steady increases in anti-Muslim incidents in years following high-profile rhetorical escalation — spikes after the 2016 campaign, after the travel ban, after events that focused public attention on Muslim identity as a political category. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has documented a consistent pattern. And parent Montaser Barbakh’s statement — that he had long anticipated this — captures something real: that Muslim Americans in many communities have been living with an elevated sense of threat for years. That experience deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed.
A different read
The right-of-centre contribution to this conversation is not, or should not be, to minimise the horror of what happened or to contest the hate-crime designation. Police and FBI have explicitly confirmed hate rhetoric was involved. The facts are not in dispute.
The more useful conservative observation is about what follows — and, specifically, about the limits of a purely structural explanation that locates the cause entirely in political rhetoric and bypasses individual agency and specific radicalisation pathways. The two suspects were teenagers. They appear to have been radicalised to the point of planning and executing a mass-casualty attack on a house of worship. Understanding how that happened — what platforms they used, what communities they were part of, what specific content drove them from diffuse prejudice to lethal action — matters enormously for prevention. Attributing causation primarily to broad political rhetoric, while morally satisfying, can actually impede that understanding by collapsing a specific causal chain into a general social critique.
This is a distinction that criminologists working on radicalisation have made carefully. The pathway from ambient hostility to mass violence involves specific nodes: online communities, specific ideological content, social isolation, grievance amplification. The two teenagers who died in that car had access to something — information, ideology, community — that moved them across the threshold from prejudice to murder. Identifying what that was is the law enforcement and counter-extremism task. Blaming political rhetoric in the abstract, while not wrong, does not do that work.
There is also a parallel argument that conservatives sometimes resist but should not: the same structural logic applies to Islamic extremism. When governments and civil society are willing to say that certain mosque networks, certain online platforms, certain ideological ecosystems contribute to Islamist violence, they apply the same structural analysis. Consistency requires applying it here as well — to whatever online and ideological ecosystem produced these two young men. The principle is the same; only the politics are different.
What this attack also underscores is a security reality: houses of worship in the United States are soft targets in a way that comparable facilities in Israel, parts of Europe, and conflict-adjacent democracies are not. The presence of a security guard at the Islamic Center of San Diego — one who died doing his job — reflects a community that had already concluded it needed protection. The question of whether faith communities should bear the cost of hardening their own facilities, or whether this is a state responsibility, is a legitimate policy debate that neither party has resolved satisfactorily.
The deeper concern Barbakh expressed — that places of worship are “increasingly under attack” — is not a partisan observation. Churches, synagogues, and mosques have all experienced targeted violence in recent years. Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018; Christchurch in 2019; numerous Black churches. The pattern crosses ideological and denominational lines. What they share is symbolic concentration of a targeted identity in a predictable, accessible location. That is a security problem as much as a political one.
What to watch
- Full suspect profiles: When investigators release full details of the suspects’ backgrounds, online activity, and stated ideology, watch whether any specific platform or community is implicated — that will drive both legal proceedings and regulatory pressure.
- Congressional response: Watch whether the San Diego attack produces any legislation. The post-Pittsburgh response produced new security grant programmes for houses of worship; a similar expansion is the most likely near-term policy response.
- FBI hate crime investigation: Whether federal charges are filed — and on what basis — will set a precedent for how this category of attack is prosecuted under the current administration.
- Community security funding: The Islamic Center’s security guard was the first line of defence and paid with his life. The adequacy of federal non-profit security grants — administered through FEMA’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program — will come under scrutiny.
— J