After the attack on San Diego, the Islamic leadership is reckoned

Three Muslim men were killed at a San Diego mosque last month. Amin Abdullah, a security guard, met the attackers firing guns and prevented them from reaching the classrooms, where about 140 children were studying. He saved those children with his life.

The men who killed him were two young men who were fanatics on the Internet, armed with weapons taken from their parents’ home and steeped in the ideology of accelerating white nationalism.

The FBI says it left behind documents full of anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and LGBTQ hatred. They show Nazi symbols in their war and their things. They did not discriminate against their hatred.

Families are now in unimaginable grief. San Diego’s Muslim community is on the move.

As an American Muslim woman, I mourn with them. As the head of an organization that has built alliances with Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Sikh Americans for years, I know that this attack was an attack on all of us. Hatred of one faith endangers all religions. We sink or rise together.

Mourning also requires honesty. This is my reality.

I am a Muslim woman who lived in Irvine. I was a public school teacher. I have raised my own children and other people’s children to love this country and love their faith. I was the commissioner of youth and families for the city of Irvine for six years. I worked at the Irvine Public School Foundation.

Then I was kicked out of public gatherings in Southern California, not because of Islamophobes, but because of my religious fanatics because I refused to align with 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 Muslims, I knew I had to speak up.

CAIR is one organization among many, with a documented history that has long troubled organizational investigators, moderate Muslims, and Muslim women like myself.

In 2009, the FBI publicly stated that, following the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trial, it did not consider CAIR to be an appropriate liaison partner. That history never disappeared.

Yet here we are again, CAIR positioned by the media as the voice of Muslims in crisis.

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What did that voice say? Hussam Ayloush, CEO of CAIR California, told the country he was “deeply disturbed, but not at all surprised” by the attack, and echoed the comments of national lawmakers trying to tackle extremism.

A few hours after three Muslim men were killed by Nazi youths, the message was: We told you so, and here is what is to blame.

That is not leadership. That is taking advantage of opportunities.

I have seen this posture up close. A few months ago, I organized an interfaith event at the Skirball Cultural Center, bringing together Muslims from around the world and Jewish community leaders to share ideas and find common ground.

CAIR and the Southern California Shura Council called for a boycott. The event was titled “Breaking Bread.” They boycotted the dialogue.

So is CAIR. They don’t want peace. They don’t want to reconcile.

American Muslims do not need an organization that turns every tragedy into a grievance campaign. We need leaders who can stand in a press conference and call out antisemitism and Islamophobia as two heads of one monster.

We need leaders who can grieve without quickly joining the political enemy list. We need leaders who build bridges with our Jewish neighbors, who know that the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh, the supermarket shooter in Buffalo, the church shooter in Charleston and now the mosque shooter in San Diego all drank from the same poisoned well.

The media must do better. Every time producers write CAIR, they give legitimacy to one organization and silence the rest of us. There are Muslim women’s organizations, reformers, religious leaders, Pakistani American civil society organizations, Iranian American voices, Bosnian American voices, Sufi communities, Ahmadi communities and ordinary Muslim pilgrims across the country who do not see CAIR as their voice. We are here. We have always been here. He picked up the phone.

To my fellow American Muslims: Our faith calls us to protect life, stand for justice, respect our neighbors. Our country has given us the freedom that our grandparents could only dream of. We owe Amin, Mansour and Nader more than recycled talking points. We owe them a Muslim American leadership built on faith, patriotism, pluralism, female leadership and moral courage.

To our Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Sikh and secular neighbors: thank you for grieving with us. We grieve with you, when your houses of worship are attacked. The terrorists who killed three Muslims want us all to be divided and afraid. The answer to them is to give them the opposite.

Anila Ali is a resident of Irvine, and is the president of the American Muslim & Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council.