The San Diego chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) condemns the unspeakable act of anti-Muslim hatred and violence committed at the Islamic Center of San Diego (ICSD) that killed our beloved community members Amin Abdullah, Nader Awad, and Mansour Kaziha (AbulEzz). May their memories be a blessing.
ICSD is an institution of peace, prayer, community, and education in San Diego. No one should ever fear for safety in a place of worship or at a children’s school. We are outraged that this most basic expectation has been stripped from Bright Horizon Academy students, ICSD staff, and the greater San Diego Muslim community.
Please donate what you can to the ICSD Victim and Family support fundraiser at https://bit.ly/supporticsd
ICSD has welcomed JVP San Diego on many occasions to collaborate in community and to learn together. Members of this masjid are our friends, allies, and family. We have organized together countless times. We know ICSD to be a pillar of justice, peace, and unity in San Diego.
Our hearts are heavy with grief for the three brave martyrs and their families. Monday’s horrifying acts of violence and anti-Muslim hate are a direct result of the policies and actions of our government leaders. For many years, and increasingly over the past two and a half years, local, state, federal, and international politicians—with the complicity of the media—have continued to promote racist, Islamophobic rhetoric.
Here in San Diego, as recently as 2024, county elected officials stoked anti-Muslim hate when they fought to remove ICSD’s Imam Taha from San Diego County’s Human Relations Commission based on Islamophobic lies and libel.
Instead of passing actionable resolutions protecting vulnerable minority community members, earlier this year, San Diego City Council ignored testimony from dozens of Muslim and Arab community members and passed a resolution that equates criticism of Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians with anti-Semitism.
We have witnessed San Diego County law enforcement pepper spray ICSD’s Imam Taha while he supported and peacefully defended UC San Diego students and community members in May 2024 during the raid of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment on the UCSD campus.
We have witnessed our elected officials at every level of local and state government refuse meetings with our Muslim and Arab comrades and friends. These same politicians have poured our tax dollars into mass surveillance, yet these tools did nothing to save lives at ICSD, despite the mother of one of the assailants calling the police hours prior to the shooting.
Our local media stations remain silent on the mass murder of Muslim children abroad and on the efforts of our community members here to organize against these injustices, manufacturing consent for the devaluation of Muslim lives.
For decades, ICSD and other Muslim institutions in San Diego have been targets of violence, and our politicians and media have stood silent. Their placating words ring hollow now, in the face of tragedy they helped fuel.
As our comrade Ammar Qadan recently wrote in the San Diego Union Tribune:
“By shutting the door on our grief over Gaza and actively suppressing our right to speak out, local leadership signaled to the Muslim community that our safety, our voices and our pain do not carry equal weight in America’s finest city.”
We also recognize the complicity and antagonism of some of our local Jewish communities who have organized heavily to penalize advocacy and education regarding Palestinian rights, normalizing the killings of predominantly Muslim Palestinians in Gaza that we have watched live-streamed endlessly over the past 2.5 years. To our fellow Jews who have helped stoke fear and hatred of our Muslim community, we invite you to learn together with us that our safety is inexorably bound together.
Today and every day, JVP San Diego stands with our Muslim siblings against Islamophobia and white supremacy. Now is the time to join together to organize for the safety of our neighbors and for our collective liberation.
We must hold our elected officials and media accountable for their complicity in promoting violence toward our Muslim and Arab communities.
We must continue to hold ourselves accountable to unlearning anti-Muslim and racist biases ingrained in US society and education.
We invite you to join us in redoubling our commitment to combating Islamophobia and to undermining the US-Israel alliance that normalizes anti-Muslim hate.