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gaza genocide
The San Diego Mosque Hate Crime and the Political Leaders Who Lit the Fuse
When powerful men and women with microphones and platforms tell the public that Muslim Americans are enemies, invaders, and less than human, some people listen. Some people act. Two teenagers in San Diego just did.
May 20, 2026
A hate crime had struck close to home. On the TV screen, more than four dozen police cars, blue lights swirling in a cold, mechanical rhythm. The news ticker crawled across the bottom of the TV screen, sanitizing horror into a newsbreak: police responding to an "incident" in San Diego's Clairemont Mesa neighborhood. An incident. I didn't think much of it at first. Then my phone rang. A friend. I couldn't bring myself to answer. Moments later, a text came through, cryptic, short and to the point: "Check on the Imam, shooting at the Islamic Center."
The world stopped.
I scrolled through my contacts, found the number, and dialed. My heart hammered against my chest with every ring. Then his voice. I closed my eyes. "We are okay. The school children are safe. We evacuated the mosque," Imam Taha said.
I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding. But okay, I would learn in the minutes and hours that followed, that was not the whole story. Three men who had been okay that morning would never be okay again.
The politicians who run their election campaigns casting American Muslims as enemies owe this community more than thoughts and prayers.
Under the steady and visionary leadership of Imam Taha Hassane, the Islamic Center of San Diego has grown into far more than a place of worship. It is a living, breathing hub of culture and education, a place where faith leaders of every denomination and neighbors of every background have always found an open door and a welcoming table. It is, in the truest sense of the word, a community, one that has spent decades building bridges in a city that repaid the generosity with bullets.
In less than 10 minutes, hate stole the life of three human beings. Amin Abdullah, who welcomed you with a curious smile when you came in, a father and a husband. Mansour Kaziha, a husband, father, and grandfather who greeted his community every day from behind the mosque store counter. And Nader Awad, who, as bullets tore through the air around him, ran into the fire to save others. Three men. Three families shattered. A community in mourning.
This hate crime did not occur in isolation. It comes amid an unprecedented and metastasizing culture of Islamophobia in the United States, where politicians have discovered that Muslim hate is a reliable path to election and commentators have built empires of followers on the broken backs of a vilified community. The names attached to this campaign are not fringe figures shouting into the void from dark corners of the internet. They are sitting senators. Elected congressmen. A president of the United States and his closest advisers. They speak from podiums, not podcasts, and have press secretaries, not anonymous accounts. And they have never—not once—been made to answer for what their words have unleashed.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump claimed that “Islam hates us." His close associate Laura Loomer wasted no time making the blood of victims useful to her agenda. Hours after the shooting, questioned the shooting calling it “The mosque that was 'supposedly' shot up today… people who attend this mosque want us all to be killed." Three men were murdered, and she called the victims a threat.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) says of Islam, “The enemy is inside the gates.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wants Big Brother to monitor Muslim neighborhoods. Congressman Randy Fine (R-Fla.) is the most explicit in spewing hate, declaring, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.”
Imagine the cry if another congressman said we need more Jewish hate.
A Washington Post investigation found that since the beginning of 2025, more than 100 members of Congress have mentioned Muslims or Islam in social media posts, with two-thirds of those posts referencing radical Islam, Sharia law, extremism, or terrorism. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, these statements have amplified Islamophobia and created an environment that fosters discrimination against Muslims. Hate and Islamophobia appear to be a winning election strategy for Republican candidates in November.
When powerful men and women with microphones and platforms tell the public that Muslim Americans are enemies, invaders, and less than human, some people listen. Some people act. Two teenagers in San Diego just did.
I will say something that many might find abhorrent, but that I believe with every fiber of my being: The murderers Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez were also victims. Not of the same order as Amin, Mansour, and Nader, for nothing diminishes what was taken from those three men, their families, and community. But victims, nonetheless. Victims of a political and media ecosystem that fed them a steady dose of dehumanization, paranoia, and hatred of Muslims. They were radicalized by adults who knew exactly what they were doing but faced no accountability for it. Trump, Loomer, Tuberville, Fine, and many others did not pull the trigger, but they loaded the gun with the bullets of hate and pointed it at a place of worship. The blood of five people—including those two teenagers—is on their hands.
The failure is not at the federal level only. In the City of San Diego, Mayor Tod Gloria's performance of solidarity rings hollow against his record of deliberate exclusion. His administration refused to call for even a symbolic ceasefire as genocide unfolded in Gaza. He declined to meet with Muslim and Arab community leaders, fearing the political cost for acknowledging Palestinian life. Most recently, his City Council moved to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, a Zionist tool to silence voices critical of Israel’s malevolent policies. Every one of these decisions sent a message to San Diego's Muslim community: We don’t value you unless you’re dead, and your lives are worth less than the political comfort of those in power. That message was heard far beyond City Hall.
That dismissal, that deliberate erasure was incubated, fertilized, watered, and brought to lethal bloom by years of sanctioned dehumanization of Muslim Americans and sent a signal to every hateful actor watching: This community is fair game.
San Diego Mayor Gloria, who dismissed our cries in life, has no standing to console us in death. The politicians who run their election campaigns casting American Muslims as enemies owe this community more than thoughts and prayers.
The blood in San Diego does not belong only to two lost teenagers. It belongs to everyone who fed them, directly or indirectly, the ideology of Muslim hate.
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Establishment Democrats Still Don't Get Why They Lost in 2024
No amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies.
May 20, 2026
As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.
Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.
To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris' 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.
Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)
If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.
Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What's missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.
At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.
His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administration had, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.
Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign's vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump's comms discipline: "Trump's message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it's good. Those vibes were tough to argue with."
He is heavily focused on vibes: "The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own."
Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too "girls and gays" coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.
Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn't mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social media influencers, independent expenditures, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is meaningless if those voices aren’t making a compelling argument. In 2024, Democrats’ biggest political liability was that voters had no idea what four more years of a Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris was running back Biden’s infamous campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Such an approach couldn’t work in 2024, given all the public discontent and anxiety.
When Flaherty steps back from the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand this problem quite well. He points out that Democrats, in focusing on picking up comparatively well-off, suburban voters, have shed too many votes elsewhere. "The resulting [Democratic] coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn't big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base." He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace "economic populism with teeth."
Progressives in the Democratic Party would certainly agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Flaherty understands enough to give lip service to this idea, but is either unwilling or unable to continue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: Democrats should embrace this reality, codify it in their political platform, and let it ring out loudly in all their campaign messaging. Like many in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Flaherty shows a remarkable ability to diagnose the party’s political ailments without being able to clamor for a cure.
This trend continues. Flaherty touches briefly on the discord between Harris and pro-ceasefire activists, but he is eager to wave away the negative impact it may have had on her campaign. He writes that the Biden's administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza hurt the campaign "but not in the ways people think." He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who characterizes Biden's support for Israel (and Harris' inability to create daylight between herself and Biden) as a "giant, rotting fish around [the campaign's] neck."
This is actually exactly how progressives think that Gaza hurt the campaign. Those of us who were pro-ceasefire, and who clamored for Harris to reject the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had pushed, worried that the moral stain of US complicity in Gaza would be impossible to wash out, even as the Democrats switched standard-bearers midstream. We worried that critical constituencies—young people, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been bombarded on social media with an unending stream of carnage from Gaza would be unable to hold their noses in the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even against Trump. Harris’ campaign faltered because 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support her. With such a stark drop off in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue where the Democratic Party policy was firmly out of step with popular sentiment among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect can’t simply be brushed aside.
Flaherty admits that, by the time the Harris campaign got going, they were “playing around the edges.” That is, campaign staff were permitted only to make marginal tweaks to a campaign that was already underway; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of survivors struck by some environmental catastrophe. But this was a tragedy of the Democrats’ own making; Flaherty himself was a deputy manager of Biden’s aborted 2024 campaign.
Donald Trump’s political career is nearing its end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the broader American electorate: universal healthcare, debt-free public college, AI regulation, and an end to endless war all rank as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.
Otherwise, there is no amount of consulting, brand management, influencer outreach, or narrative shaping that can save a campaign with no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat its failures.
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Occupation and Genocide Anywhere Are a Threat to Democracy and Freedom Everywhere
Not only is taking a stand against the overwhelming devastation that has been unleashed on Palestinians a duty, but also an obligation for people desiring peace and liberation for all.
May 20, 2026
Earlier this year a number of participants announced their withdrawal from Australia’s Adelaide Festival’s "Writer’s Week" following the disinviting of Australian-Palestinian author, Randa Abdel-Fattah. The event was subsequently cancelled.
This made me think of United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese’s words—“The occupation of Palestine must be understood as part of a broader project of domination. This is not merely about the physical borders of historical Palestine. It is a systematic assertion of permanent supremacy that knows no border…”—delivered in her Nelson Mandela Lecture.
Indeed, the impact of the ongoing genocide and occupation not only echo far beyond Palestine, because of our shared humanity, but also because of the impact it is having on freedoms across the globe. The censorship of Abdel-Fattah is yet another example of this, and it is not only happening in Australia. Even in South Africa, a country that charged Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), artists are facing attempts to constrain their work.
The global wave of solidarity with Palestine has been used by some governments as a pretext to diminish freedoms by attacking the right to protest and political participation. While some did this by using laws that were already in place, others enacted ambiguous or unduly expansive legislation criminalizing Palestine solidarity and weaponizing the battle against antisemitism.
Protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.
For instance in the US, Project Esther was released by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank also responsible for the odious Project 2025. The strategy’s recommendations have made their way into the policy of the Trump administration. This includes suing, firing, deporting, and defaming activists, organizations, and institutions by effectively claiming that involvement in advocacy for Palestine is material support of "a terrorist support network.” And also clamping down on college and university campuses where “more than 3,100 people have been arrested or detained.”
The United Kingdom, on the other hand, used counterterrorism legislation to ban Palestine Action. This despite an intelligence assessment report undermining the government’s claims by finding that most of the groups’ activities are “not terrorism” and the ban risked wrongfully criminalizing people. While the ban has been found to be unlawful, since put into effect in July 2025 terrorism arrests have increased by 660%, with the majority of these linked to it.
Across Europe Palestine solidarity was particularly targeted, like in Germany where the homes of pro-Palestinian activists have been raided and support for Israel has become a prerequisite for citizenship.
The effects of these actions will not be limited to Palestine advocacy and puts all movements at risk by diminishing freedoms that enable organizing across issues. So protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.
Research by investigative journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory, Andrew Loewenstein, identified over 120 countries that have bought weapons or some form of repressive technology from Israel, all principally tested on Palestinians.
Israel provided military and strategic support to apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola, resulting in mass casualties; it is among the countries that armed perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide and Myanmar at a time it was found to be committing a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against its Rohingya Muslim population.
In modern times Israel’s offerings have included drones, spyware, and surveillance tools. Like the Israeli-made spyware being used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an immigration agency that has been found to not only undertake abusive practices, but also violate its own policies.
For us in South Africa though, this is no surprise. The "homeland" of Bophuthatswana, where I was born and raised, was a product of the South African apartheid regime’s segregationist policies—which Israel took interest in—and stripped Black people of South African citizenship.
Like other homelands when it declared "independence" in 1977, it was shunned by the world. Despite its official stance, Israel was the only country to quietly recognize Bophuthatswana through informal connections and a quasi-diplomatic mission. A Jerusalem Post editorial in 1992 even referred to Bophuthatswana as "Africa’s Little Israel."
The backdrop of this relationship was the “clandestine alliance” between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Not only did the two countries collaborate on nuclear, but Israel would also become South Africa's largest weapons importer after the 1977 UN arms embargo and support the regime’s attempt to undermine sanctions.
It was a relationship of mutual admiration, an ideological alignment that in recent times is only matched by India’s admiration of Israel.
Apartheid had far-reaching consequences that extended beyond South Africa's borders. Along with unlawfully occupying Namibia, a colonial legacy embraced by the regime, it also launched hostilities in countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Similarly, Israel continues to conduct atrocities and aggression not only against the Palestinian people, but also in places like Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria. More recently, more than 300 people have been killed and scores injured following Israel's 10 minute assault in Lebanon—despite a two-week Middle East ceasefire, which Israel would afterwards claim did not include Lebanon. In the same way apartheid was deemed a threat to international peace and security, so too is the occupation and genocide in Palestine.
Not only is taking a stand against the overwhelming devastation that has been unleashed on Palestinians a duty, but also an obligation for people desiring peace and liberation for all. Because beyond the bombs, Israel has used international humanitarian law to try to justify the murder of civilians—a template being adopted by others like the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.
Like the people of South Africa and oppressed people everywhere, the people of Palestine too will continue to make their rightful claim to freedom. And for the sake of humanity everywhere, people of conscience must continue to stand with them and keep the fire of freedom within reach.
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