The World’s Oldest Hatred Surfaces in the San Diego Mosque Shooting

hree men were not. Amin Abdullah, 51, a security guard, was killed as he rushed toward the attackers—an act of heroism that kept the death toll from climbing higher. Nadir Awad, 57, whose wife taught at the mosque’s school, was also killed, as was Mansour Kaziha, 78, a beloved elder known in the community as Abu Ezz. The two attackers, aged 17 and 19, died shortly afterward in their car, one having shot the other before turning the weapon on himself.

You may first wonder who this titular Tarrant actually was, the man these teenagers saw themselves as “sons” of and effusively praised as “our biggest inspiration.” He was the terrorist who massacred more than 50 peaceful worshippers, including children, in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019—the worst terrorist bloodbath in that peaceful country’s modern history. He left behind not only a horrific death toll and grieving communities, but also a manifesto of his own and a live-streamed, high-tech style of terrorism that apparently inspired his latest enthusiasts in San Diego.

Yet Tarrant was only one of the many “heroes” honored by the San Diego attackers. Their hall of fame also includes the terrorist who attacked the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and killed 11 innocent souls. It also includes the one who attacked the Chabad of Poway in California in 2019, killing another innocent person and wounding three others. It even includes—among “honorable mentions”—a most unexpected extremist from my home country: Arda Küçükyetim, who shocked Turkey in 2024 by stabbing random people in the garden of a mosque while wearing the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division’s logo. 

All of this anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish terrorism converges into a single worldview, because of what these two deranged boys in San Diego believed: the great replacement theory—the conspiracy framework that originated in European far-right circles and has metastasized across the English-speaking world. Its core claim is that white populations in Western countries are being deliberately replaced—through immigration, intermarriage, and declining birth rates—by non-white peoples, with Jews orchestrating the operation from behind the scenes.

That is why the manifesto begins by declaring Jews “The Universal Enemy,” the one that is “to blame for all the wrong in the world” (Four times, it repeats, in caps, “IT IS THE JEWS.”) Then it moves on to spew hatred against Muslims, who “masquerade as ‘human’ while all they do is take up space and resources.” Hence, it says, white people “have to get rid of this pest,” that is, Muslims. “They must be isolated and exterminated.”

In other words, here we have a monstrous ideology that manages to be simultaneously anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim. Jews are cast as the puppet masters; Muslims and other minorities as the unwitting instruments of white dispossession. All are “invaders,” so all must go away. And if they do not, they will be all legitimate targets of unexpected “blitzkriegs.” The way the manifesto puts it, in its very conclusion, is quite chilling:

This monstrosity, of course, comes at a time of deep divisions and bitter tensions between Muslims and Jews, not just in the Holy Land and the broader Middle East, but also here in the United States. It was simmering for decades but became much more acute after the terrorist attacks of October 7 and the catastrophic war in Gaza. Campus protests have sometimes shifted into antisemitism, as Jewish students have reported feeling unwelcome and unsafe. Some pro-Israel voices, in turn, have made sweeping and unfair generalizations about Muslims.

Hence we are definitely not at a good point in what the late great Bernard Lewis called “the Judeo-Islamic tradition.” Instead, we are in the “darkest hour” of that tradition, as I called it in the epilogue of my book, The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World.

Yet still, we should be able to realize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite its ripple effects across the world, is ultimately about two peoples claiming the exact same land, both with very understandable attachments of their own. If we could somehow resolve that land dispute peacefully—inshallah, as we Muslims say—Jews and Muslims would have no reason to be enemies.

That is because Jews and Muslims are linked by a shared Abrahamic heritage—traditionally understood as the children of Isaac and Ishmael—whose religions are quite similar and naturally compatible. Both are faith traditions based on staunch monotheism and legal practices such as dietary rules, dress codes, and family laws. No wonder this religious affinity allowed for a long history of peaceful Jewish-Muslim coexistence—from medieval Spain to the Ottoman Empire. It no doubt fell short of our modern liberal values of equal rights and civil liberties—as Muslims were explicitly dominant over other religious communities—but it was often remarkably tolerant and pluralistic for its time.

So, Jews and Muslims can aim to peacefully resolve the national conflict in the Holy Land, while being good neighbors, if not friends. But they cannot possibly make peace with those who hate them simply for who they are—for being Semites who supposedly defile the Lebensraum of proud Aryans by their mere presence.

This matrix was quite evident to Jewish scholars and intellectuals of 19^th century Europe. Theirs was a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not on anyone’s horizon. Instead, facing the rising tide of European antisemitism, many Jews looked at Islam not with suspicion but with sympathy. They saw in it a kindred tradition: rigorously monotheistic, deeply textual, rooted in the same Abrahamic soil, and equally despised by European racists for being “Oriental.”

That is why, as scholar Susannah Heschel has observed, “Jews were among the finest scholars and greatest admirers of Islam in Europe.” They elevated Islam “as a rational religion with an intimate relationship to Judaism.” This was most evident in 19^th century Germany, where pioneering Jewish scholars such as Abraham Geiger and Gustav Weil studied Islam with an unusual degree of sympathy and respect, if not “Islamophilia”—complicating the categorically negative image some Muslims have today for the Western study of Islam, or “Orientalism.” 

That is also why England’s first—and so far only—Jewish prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was accused by his critics of favoring the Islamic Ottoman Empire over Russia,—which was “Aryan,” meaning white—simply because of his Semitic identity—that he “as a ‘Jew,’ was conspiring with the Muslim Turks in a plot to destroy Euro-Christendom.”

The Jewish-Muslim friendship continued into the early 20^th century as well. When the Nazis came to power, some Muslims, such as the much-recalled mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, infamously allied with them—but others did not. Among those were King Mohammed V of Morocco, who saved his country’s Jews during the Holocaust, and Republican Turkey, which welcomed more than 100 Jewish academics fleeing Nazi Germany.

Since then, unfortunately, Jewish-Muslim friendship has increasingly faded into distrust, growing worse with each generation. Today, relations are often quite bleak, as there are vocal propagandists on both sides who claim that “the other side” is so full of hatred and enmity that it deserves our own hatred and enmity in return.

But there are also bright spots, and hopeful moments where Jews and Muslims recognize their common humanity, common values, and common enemies. After the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Muslim Americans organized a campaign called “Muslims Unite for Pittsburgh Synagogue.” They raised more than $200,000 intended for medical costs, funerals, and support for victims and families. And after the attack on the San Diego Mosque, many American Jewish organizations raised their voices. The American Jewish Committee announced:

This is the right spirit. No community should feel alone when it is targeted, whether by bloodthirsty fanatics or draconian states.

Also, all communities, including Jews and Muslims, should stand together for the liberal values of the West, including the founding principles of America, which offer all of us liberty, opportunity, and equal justice. Because if that foundation cracks, and movements of hate get their way, they will come after all of us—synagogue after synagogue, mosque after mosque.