The attack on the Islamic Centre of San Diego was part of the normalisation of anti-Muslim sentiment in North America.
On 18 May 2026, a deadly attack occurred outside the Islamic Center of San Diego, one of the largest mosques in Southern California. Two heavily armed teenagers opened fire, resulting in the deaths of three men, who sacrificed their lives to protect the community, and the two suspects – aged 17 and 18 – whom the police found dead of self-inflicted wounds in a vehicle a quarter of a mile away.
This tragedy is not merely another entry in America’s grim ledger of mass shootings: to treat it as an isolated burst of violence is to misunderstand the pattern. The United States has grown disturbingly accustomed to mass shootings in schools, churches, synagogues, concerts, and shopping malls. But when the target is a mosque, the act does not emerge from a vacuum of randomness alone. It is incubated in a cultural atmosphere where anti-Muslim suspicion has been steadily normalised, repackaged as politics, and laundered through the language of security, patriotism, and “civilisation.” The Muslim families who gathered at the centre, and the children attending the Islamic day school on the premises, already knew fear, a fear that settles in the body, in memory, in the silence before stepping out the door.
The incident is now being investigated as a possible hate crime. Early reports suggest the assailants were teenagers influenced by anti-Muslim rhetoric and generalised hate ideology. A security guard who attempted to intervene was killed. Children were evacuated in panic. These are not just statistics; they are fragments of a society’s moral failure. And this failure is not new.
In Canada, the memory of the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting still lingers as a national wound. Six worshippers were murdered during evening prayers – men who had come seeking nothing more radical than peace and community. Then came the 2021 attack in London, Ontario, where four members of a Muslim family were deliberately run down in an act of targeted violence that orphaned a child and shocked a country that often prides itself on tolerance.
These are not disconnected tragedies. They form a continuum.
Mosques across North America have endured bomb threats, vandalism, harassment and armed intimidation. Muslim women wearing hijab describe navigating public spaces with a constant awareness of vulnerability. Parents quietly calculate risk before sending children to religious classes. A sanctuary, by definition, should not require security assessments.
The deeper danger lies in how such hostility becomes thinkable. Hate does not begin with violence; it begins with permission. And permission is often granted not by fringe actors alone, but by the steady drip of political and media rhetoric that reduces an entire faith to a problem to be managed.
The normalisation of anti-Muslim narrative accelerated dramatically after Donald Trump entered the political stage in 2015, transforming suspicion of Muslims from the margins into political currency. Demonisation of Muslims reached a peak when calls for banning Muslims from entering the country entered mainstream discourse. Even when softened later, the underlying message lingered: suspicion is acceptable, exclusion is defensible, fear is rational.
Words matter more than their speakers often admit. No serious argument suggests that political rhetoric directly loads a gun. But it is intellectually dishonest to deny that sustained demonisation alters the moral weather. It lowers the threshold of empathy. It tells the unstable that their fears are shared, their anger justified, and their fantasies of “defence” socially intelligible.
There is also a troubling asymmetry in the public response. When perpetrators are Muslim, entire communities are subjected to interrogation, as though collective guilt were self-evident. When Muslims are victims, the language shifts: “isolated incident”, “mental health crisis”, “tragedy without context”. The imbalance is not merely semantic. It shapes whose suffering is politicised and whose is quietly absorbed.
This is not only a Muslim concern. It is a democratic one. A society in which people are fearful in their places of worship is a society in which civic trust is already eroding. Democracy does not collapse only through coups or constitutional crises; it erodes when fear becomes routine and belonging becomes conditional.
Canada and the United States now face a clear test. They can either confront anti-Muslim hatred with the same moral urgency applied to other forms of extremism or continue treating it as ambient background noise – regrettable, periodic but ultimately tolerable.
Condemnation after each tragedy is no longer sufficient. What is required is political discipline: a refusal to weaponise identity for electoral gain; a media culture that resists outrage as spectacle; and digital platforms that acknowledge their role in accelerating ideological radicalisation.
Above all, there must be a cultural insistence on one principle: no group should be rendered suspect by default. Because history is unambiguous on one point. When people are repeatedly described as alien, dangerous or incompatible, it is only a matter of time before someone decides that elimination is a form of clarity.
The families affected in San Diego deserve more than condolences. They deserve an honest reckoning with the climate that made their fear predictable. And Muslim communities across North America deserve something that should never have been in question: the simple, fundamental right to gather, to pray, and to live without looking over their shoulder.
This article first appeared in Crescent International
Javed Akbar
Javed Akbar is a Canadian writer whose opinion columns have appeared in the Toronto Star and various digital platforms, where he writes on current affairs, public policy, and global issues. A retired management accountant, Javed was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal of Honour.