After San Diego attack, a reckoning on Muslim leadership in America

Three Muslim men were murdered at the Islamic Center of San Diego last month.Amin Abdullah, the security guard, met the attackers with gunfire and kept them from reaching the classrooms, where roughly 140 children were learning.

He saved those children with his life.The men who killed him were two teenagers who were radicalized online, armed with weapons taken from a parent’s home and steeped in the ideology of white nationalist accelerationism.The FBI says they left behind writings filled with anti-Muslim, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ hatred.They displayed Nazi symbols on their weapons and gear.

They did not discriminate in their hatred.Families are now in unimaginable grief.The San Diego Muslim community is reeling.

As an American Muslim woman, I mourn with them.As the head of an organization that has built coalitions with Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh Americans for years, I know that this attack was an attack on all of us.

Hate against one faith endangers every faith.We sink or rise together.Mourning also requires honesty.

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Never miss a story I am a Muslim woman who lived in Irvine.I was a public school teacher.

I raised my own children and other people’s children to love this country and to love their faith.I was the youth and families commissioner for the city of Irvine for six years.

I served on the Irvine Public School Foundation.Then, I was pushed out of community circles in Southern California, not by Islamophobes, but by my own coreligionists because I refused to toe the line of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).So, when I watched CNN and other major news networks across the country turn to CAIR within hours of the San Diego shooting, as if CAIR were the natural voice of American...