The West's increasing campaign against Islam

This article examines the recent attack on a mosque in San Diego, carried out by two teenagers who subsequently took their own lives. San Diego, located on the Pacific Coast of Southern California near the US–Mexico border, is the eighth most populous city in the US and the second largest in California, with a population exceeding 1.4 million residents.

California is home to a significant Asian American population, accounting for approximately 31% of the total Asian American population in the US, which stands at around 18 million. This translates to roughly 5.6 million Asian Americans residing in the state. Among them, Filipinos constitute the largest ethnic group, numbering approximately 1.4 million, followed by Chinese Americans at around 650,000. Individuals of Indian origin are estimated at 505,000, while the Pakistani American population is approximately 54,000. Notably, nearly a quarter of this Asian American population identifies as Muslim, amounting to roughly 1.4 million individuals. Given its size and visibility, this community remains vulnerable to targeting by anti-Muslim groups.

The car that the two teenagers were riding in carried a lot of hate material against the growing Muslim population in the US. Two journalists, Sheila Dewan and Jill Cowan, wrote a detailed story about the rise of what they call "Islamophobia in the United States and Western Europe". Commenting on the San Diego Mosque attack they wrote: "To some, the killings seemed like an inevitable result of a swell of Islamophobia in the United States and around the globe. Anti-Muslim rhetoric on the right has become louder, with Republican politicians raising concerns about new Muslim schools and growing Muslim communities, and at the extreme, suggesting Muslims don't belong here."

They continued: "Hatred against Muslims is a longstanding problem. But the escalating conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East, the war in Iran and reverberations of both throughout American politics have ushered in a new phase of overt discrimination and fears of violence. Politicians like Representative Randy Fine of Florida have enthusiastically embraced Islamophobia, saying it is rational and more of it is needed." President Trump himself has a history of criticising Muslims and Islam, and has recently posted inflammatory messages on the internet about the war on Iran - including an Easter message in which he declared that a whole "civilization would die." He was referring to the state of Iran.

Some of his advisers from the extreme end of the political spectrum have gone much further in their hatred of the Muslim population. Lora Loomer, an adviser to President Trump, suggested that all Muslims present in the US should be deported, and even called them an "invasive species." Defense Secretary Peter Brian Hegseth has termed the ongoing Iran war a continuation of the crusades launched centuries ago by European Christian militias to conquer Jerusalem and drive out the Muslims who then occupied the city.

Loomer's remarks show how mainstream Islamophobia has become, said Nader Hashemi, the director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. "These used to be fringe movements, at the margins of society," he said. "Now Laura Loomer has direct access to the White House." He further added, "So no surprise, then those things get internalised by people who then commit these acts of violence." He was obviously referring to the attack on the mosque at San Diego.

Imam Taha Hussanne, the director of the mosque, said that security features had steadily been added in recent years including a tall metal fence and cameras. "Looking at what is happening, the madness of this world and the dehumanization of the Muslim community, you do expect something like this to happen," he said. According to its most recent report, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest association representing American Muslims, received more civil rights complaints last year than it had recorded in any year since 1996. The Islamophobia Index, a measure of the public's enforcement of negative stereotypes, has risen significantly from 2018 to 2025. While there is growing opposition to antisemitism across various segments of American society, Muslims say that, in contrast, the discrimination they face has been met with complacency - or worse.

Even as Muslim Americans have won more visibility and political power in parts of the US, there has been increased vitriol against them. One obvious example of this is the hatred against Zohran Madani, the recently elected mayor of New York City. His rise in the political system was accompanied by millions of negative social media posts and commentary from pubic officials who called him, among other things, a terrorist, a jihadi and a supporter of Sharia law. In late January, US Representative Ilhan Omar, one of two Muslim women serving in Congress, was attacked by man with a syringe. These attacks were motivated by the victims' religion rather than the colour of their skin. There were about half a dozen politicians of Indian origin who were not affected by these assaults.

On college campuses across the US, Muslim students have expressed concerns about open discrimination and harassment, as documented in several well-researched reports commissioned in the aftermath of protests over the Israeli war in Gaza. At Harvard, Muslim students told school investigators that physical assaults, online harassment and the publication of their photographs and personal information had created "an atmosphere of intimidation," according to the 2025 report of the university's task force on anti-Muslim bias.

A similar task force at the University of California warned that President Trump's return to power in January 2025 "had emboldened off-campus vigilantes as well as repressive faculty on our campus to step up their harassment of those speaking about or teaching Palestine issues." Muslim students felt that measures similar to those taken against antisemitism were needed to address discrimination against the Muslim community. The UCLA task force accused the school's chancellor, Julio Frenk, of prioritising the work of a parallel committee addressing antisemitism. "The asymmetry of your response is glaring," members of the group focused on anti-Muslim sentiment wrote to Dr Frenk in March 2026.