Amin Abdullah decided to become a security guard because he wanted to defend the innocent. He worked at the Islamic Center of San Diego for more than a decade, greeted everyone who walked through the door, and on the first day of Dhul Hijjah, one of the holiest weeks in the Islamic calendar, he died doing exactly what he said he would. Mansour Kaziha kept the mosque alive, the handyman, the cook, the caretaker, the man the imam said was “everything” to that community. Nader Awad worked at the school. Three men. Three bodies returned to families during a week that was supposed to be sacred.

The two teenagers who killed them drove to the largest mosque in San Diego County with stolen guns and hate writing on their weapons. They are dead now too. The police are calling it a hate crime. The mayor said hate has no home in San Diego. The condolences are arriving. We have been here before. And, we will be here again.

Here is what I want to ask: what exactly is a hate crime supposed to mean when sitting senators say the enemy is inside the gates, when congressmen post “no more Muslims” on their public pages, when a representative says mainstream Muslims “should be destroyed” and the same week gets appointed to the House Foreign Affairs Committee? What does the word hate mean when it is not a feeling someone harbors privately but a project someone funds, staffs, and deploys?

In 2024, Israel increased its global public relations budget by $150 million. The Israeli Foreign Minister announced this money would fund what his government called “consciousness warfare.” The following year, documents leaked from Stagwell Global, a PR firm whose founder is tied to the Likud Party, revealed the findings of research commissioned by Israel’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The research found that Israel’s most effective tool for recovering lost public support was not defending its conduct in Gaza. It was fomenting fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism.” The Muslim boogeyman, deliberately constructed, deliberately maintained, because a country whose Muslim citizens are busy surviving is a country whose Muslim citizens are not organizing against a genocide carried out with American weapons and American money.

The word Islamophobia was always too small. It describes a phobia, an irrational fear in a person’s chest, a bias to be unlearned, a mind to be changed. It does not describe a foreign government paying nine figures to ensure that Americans fear their Muslim neighbors more than they question the bombs their taxes are buying. It does not describe the 8,683 anti-Muslim complaints recorded by CAIR in 2025, the highest number in 29 years of record-keeping. It does not describe what it feels like to pray in this country right now, to look around a room full of people you love and understand, with your whole body, that there are people in positions of enormous power who have decided your death is useful to them.

The mother of one of the shooters called the police two hours before the attack. Her son was suicidal and her car was gone and three of her guns were missing. Officers spent those two hours checking a mall. At 11:43 in the morning, the first shots were fired a few blocks from where they were standing.

Two hours. I keep returning to those two hours not because I think faster police response is the answer, but because of what those two hours contain. Somewhere inside them, two teenagers were driving toward a mosque on the holiest week of the Islamic calendar, and everything that had been said to them, by senators, by congressmen, by a foreign government’s PR operation, by the wall-to-wall machinery of the last two years, had already done its work. The gun was already loaded long before they picked it up.

What is the Muslim community in San Diego supposed to do with this? What is any Muslim in this country supposed to do with a nation that permits its elected officials to call for your destruction, and then, when your people are killed in a house of worship, sends a mayor to stand over the caskets and say hate has no home here? The mosque is closed. Eid al-Adha begins this week. Families who were supposed to be marking one of the holiest days of the year are instead sitting with the absence of men who greeted everyone with a smile, who kept the lights on, who taught children Arabic and Quran and how to exist in a country that has never fully decided whether they belong in it.

Islamophobia is the wrong word not because what happened in San Diego isn’t rooted in hatred but because hatred alone did not kill those three men. An industry killed them. A strategy killed them. A $150 million budget line and 45 congressmen in a caucus founded to make Islam sound like an invasion and a senator who says the enemy is inside the gates and a president’s adviser who, the day after the shooting, said the victims were undeserving of sympathy and the mosque should be raided by ICE, all of this, in aggregate, across years, killed them as surely as the bullets did.

The people who built this machine will spend this week posting condolences. Some of them will call it a tragedy. None of them will call it what it is: the predictable, documented, and in some cases deliberately engineered outcome of telling a country that its Muslim citizens are a threat to be eliminated.

Amin Abdullah is dead. He wanted to defend the innocent. The least the rest of us can do is be honest about who made him necessary.

Share