San Diego1 mosque member shot dead; 2 gunmen killed themselves nearby.
Children at the campus Al-Rashid School were evacuated safely, police said.
San Diego police have not stated a motive; the center remains closed.
Sources: Al Jazeera Online, New York Post, Le Monde.fr, Yahoo News, South China Morning Post
WHY MOSQUES ARE TARGETS
Mosques are soft targets by design — open to all, unarmed, with predictable prayer times that concentrate worshippers. The same accessibility that defines a house of worship makes it geographically and temporally easy to attack.
THE POST-9/11 BASELINE
FBI hate-crime data shows anti-Muslim incidents jumped roughly fivefold after September 2001 and never returned to pre-2001 levels. They spike again during Gaza escalations, with mosque vandalism and threats running well above the population-share baseline for two decades.
WHO TRACKS IT
CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations, founded 1994 — runs the largest US database of anti-Muslim incidents. Its annual civil-rights report consistently records more complaints than the FBI's hate-crime statistics because most incidents never get classified as hate crimes by local police.
THE CHRISTCHURCH TEMPLATE
The 2019 Christchurch shooter livestreamed the attack and posted a manifesto online. Subsequent mosque and synagogue attackers — Poway, El Paso, Buffalo, Halle — cited him directly. The replication pattern is now a documented feature of how attacks on houses of worship propagate.
THE SAN DIEGO CONTEXT
San Diego County hosts one of the larger Muslim populations on the US West Coast — roughly 120,000 people, anchored by Somali, Iraqi, and South Asian communities. El Cajon, just east of the city, has been a primary US resettlement site for Iraqi Christians and Iraqi Muslims since the 2003 war.