After the San Diego Attack, Hamas-Linked CAIR Looked Everywhere but at Its Own Rhetoric

When a mosque was attacked, advocacy groups rushed to blame “Islamophobia” in America. The rhetoric in their own backyard went largely unexamined — and much of the media seemed comfortable leaving it there.

There is no excuse for murder. No justification for threatening children, and no defense for attacking a mosque. Those things should be stated plainly, and they are.

But they should not serve as a shield against harder questions — including questions about the ideological climate much closer to home.

In the days following the deadly shooting outside the Islamic Center of San Diego, officials of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)and allied activists moved quickly to establish a narrative: this was the product of “Islamophobia,” political rhetoric, and a cultural climate that had normalized hostility toward Muslims.

The narrative settled into place fast.

What did not arrive — not in local coverage, not in national pickup — was any serious examination of the rhetoric circulating within parts of the same activist and religious ecosystem directly connected to the story.

The omission repeated itself across outlet after outlet.

After a while, it stopped looking accidental.

A Verdict Before a Motive

Investigators had not yet established why the shooter acted when CAIR figures began explaining it publicly.

Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, was unequivocal: “There’s a lot of concern that our elected officials have been contributing to what got us here.”

She also noted, pointedly, that many of those now condemning the attack had stayed silent during what she described as Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza — folding a separate political grievance into a moment of grief before the facts of the shooting were even public.

CAIR national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell went further: “Anti-Muslim hate is out of control in this country. This was the predictable result of it.”

CAIR’s Ahmed Rehab urged leaders to stand against “otherizing, dehumanizing hate mongering.”

Across interviews, the implication was basically the same: American political culture helped produce the violence. Elected officials bore responsibility. The climate made violence inevitable.

That may be true. Rhetoric can shape behavior, and the argument that hostile political language creates danger for vulnerable communities is not frivolous. But the people making that argument showed little interest in applying the same standard inward.

The Context No One Mentioned

Imam Mohamed Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego is not a peripheral figure in this story. He has publicly championed CAIR’s activism, and appeared alongside CAIR representatives on multiple occasions. He also serves as a religious adviser to the Muslim Students Association at UC San Diego — an organization critics and researchers have long associated with Muslim Brotherhood activism in North America.

After October 7, Hassane delivered remarks that were not, by any reasonable reading, ordinary political commentary:

When people are occupied, then the resistance is justified. Resistance becomes a human right.

We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist.

This is not ordinary political rhetoric. It treats “resistance” as morally self-justifying, while pushing questions about violence and terrorism into the background.

Whatever one thinks of the underlying politics, that kind of rhetoric is not irrelevant to a discussion about terrorism.

None of it appeared in the coverage.

Viewers were presented with the imam’s community as a target. Never as a place where ideas that can lead to jihad activity were also in circulation.

Questions the Coverage Never Asked

The ideological context extends beyond sermons. Institutions connected to the activist ecosystem surrounding the Islamic Center of San Diego have also faced scrutiny over educational materials — specifically, textbooks that the Islamic Services Foundation, which has been associated with Islamic schools and curricula across the United States, has produced.

Some of the cited passages are notable. One textbook describes non-believers as “the worst of creatures” destined for hellfire. (That’s straight from the Qur’an, 98:6.) Another warns they “may be next.” A third frames Muslim decline as the consequence of abandoning jihad.

None of this proves responsibility for violence. But it raises obvious questions about the ideological atmosphere surrounding institutions and figures that coverage presented as straightforward civil-rights actors.

The issue is not whether every student exposed to this material becomes a jihadi. Obviously most do not. The issue is whether ideological environments built around grievance, sanctified “resistance,” and hostility toward outsiders deserve the same scrutiny routinely applied to American political rhetoric.

In the San Diego coverage, they did not get such scrutiny.

One Standard, Selectively Applied

CAIR’s post-San Diego argument rests on a theory of causation: rhetoric shapes attitudes, attitudes enable hostility, and hostility can produce violence. It is a coherent framework — and one CAIR applies with striking consistency to its political opponents, but almost never to itself.

When American politicians use sharp language about Sharia, CAIR draws a direct line from speech to danger. The connection is treated as self-evident. When religious figures within CAIR’s own orbit describe armed “resistance” as a human right, or frame political violence as the legitimate response to occupation, suddenly the causal logic becomes far more cautious. Connections that were treated as obvious in one direction become inappropriate or overly simplistic in the other.

That asymmetry was not examined in the San Diego coverage. It was invisible in it.

What the Coverage Chose Not to Show

Local television coverage followed a familiar script. Since the attack, viewers saw roughly the same setup: reporters outside the mosque, community leaders condemning hate, CAIR representatives explaining the broader climate of “Islamophobia.”

CAIR figures were presented as civil-rights voices. Officials were pressed to answer for a culture of hate they had allegedly allowed to fester.

It is legitimate journalism to ask questions. It is incomplete journalism not to ask whether advocacy groups were using the incident to advance a broader political narrative.

Audiences were not told about Hassane’s post-October 7 sermons. They were not told about the ideological lineage of organizations connected to the story. They were not given the tools to assess whether the people presenting themselves as authorities on anti-Muslim hate might also be participants in a broader ideological ecosystem that warrants scrutiny.

When scrutiny moves in only one direction, audiences receive a narrative — not a full picture. A picture that would include a stunning level of hate coming from Southern California mosques.

The Accountability That Wasn’t

The failure here is not that CAIR made its case. Advocacy groups advocate — that is what they exist to do. The failure is that journalists allowed advocacy to substitute for reporting. Genuine accountability journalism would have pressed CAIR on its own rhetorical environment. It would have asked whether figures who justify “resistance” without qualification bear any responsibility for the atmosphere they help create. It would have treated the ideological world surrounding the Islamic Center of San Diego as a subject worthy of examination rather than one placed beyond scrutiny by default.

And to be clear, it is good that local stations covered the attack seriously. A deadly shooting outside a mosque is unquestionably newsworthy. The problem is not that the story was covered. The problem is that so much of the coverage effectively handed the narrative over to CAIR and allied activists, allowing them to frame the violence as proof of a broader indictment of American society before investigators had even established a motive.

Anti-Muslim bigotry is real, and attacks on Muslim communities deserve serious coverage. That is not in dispute.

That reality does not eliminate the need for scrutiny elsewhere.

What is in dispute is whether the standard of accountability being demanded of American political culture is one CAIR and its allies are willing to apply to themselves. After San Diego, CAIR looked outward — at politicians, commentators, and a culture it held responsible for violence. Very little attention moved in the other direction.

Much of the media seemed comfortable with that imbalance.