Here are the bare bones of yesterday’s story: Two teens traveled to a well-known mosque in San Diego, shot three people to death, and then took their own lives. I’m sorry that they avoided justice before the law for what they did, and they certainly would have gotten it, given that in California, their target was a protected class. A civilized society cannot survive extremists engaging in targeted assassinations.
Still, that’s not the focus of this post. Instead, I want to point out two interesting things that won’t be highlighted in media reports.
First, this mosque was not a nice place in terms of traditional American norms. Amy Mek has been tracking the Islamic Center of San Diego for a long time and notes that it has an interesting history when it comes to its practices and parishioners (emphasis in original):
I have long covered this mosque and am very familiar with its shocking, decades-long track record of terror ties (9/11 hijackers) and extremism.
🔺A 2005 investigation by the Center for Religious Freedom (Freedom House) identified the ICSD as one of only a handful of U.S. mosques found in possession of Saudi government-published “hate ideology” materials, extremist Wahhabi literature filled with calls for intolerance, hatred of non-Muslims, and jihad.
🔺A congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks revealed the FBI believed the San Diego mosque was responsible for laundering millions of dollars in cash from Saudi Arabia to the Al Barakat Trading Company and other businesses tied directly to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
🚨Two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, regularly worshipped at the ICSD before they helped crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Fellow worshippers assisted them in obtaining Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, purchasing a car, and securing local housing.
The pair even accessed funds wired from the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through a personal bank account belonging to an ICSD administrator.
🔺Jehad Serwan Mostafa, an American-born San Diegan and now one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, was a regular attendee at the ICSD. He later joined al-Shabaab (al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia), where he rose to senior leadership. Current head Imam Taha Hassane (who has led the mosque since shortly after 9/11) claimed he was “shocked” to learn of Mostafa’s extremism.
🔺Yet just the day after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, Imam Hassane posted on Instagram (now deleted):
“Resistance is the only option for a people under occupation.”
In an October 20 sermon he doubled down:
“Resistance is justified… resistance when people are occupied becomes a human right.”
In December 2023, Taher Herzallah of the Hamas-linked American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) spoke at the ICSD and told the congregation to make Zionists feel “very uncomfortable on campus.”
🚨He explicitly urged them to follow the example of the Gazans on October 7.
In addition, the Imam’s wife is a virulent antisemite:
None of that means the shooting was justified. I note it only because perhaps the mosque’s sudden prominence will make Americans aware of a very powerful local chapter of Islamism that promotes decidedly un-American and often anti-American values. And if they grow curious, they might discover that the nice neighborhood mosque near them, the one where the smiling Imam makes appearances at ecumenical events with the local rabbi, priests, and ministers, isn’t so nice after all.
Second, I was struck by a detail about one of the victims, a security guard named Amin Abdullah. According to reports, he was a very nice man who acted with great bravery when the psychopathic teens showed up. He was also “a father of eight.”
In America before the 1960s, eight would have been considered a larger family, but not by that much. It’s a little difficult to get a precise handle on how many children families had in America’s early years, but a good guesstimate can be obtained by looking at the number of children born and the total fertility rate, then averaging them decade over decade.
In the 1860s, Americans averaged about 5 children per woman, a number that steadily declined to a low of around 2.1 during the Depression (slightly above the replacement rate). That number climbed after WWII, peaking at a baby-boom high of about 4.6, more than double the replacement rate. Today, the average number of births per American woman is 1.6, well below the replacement rate.
I thought of that this morning when I looked up the obituary of my old piano teacher, a staunch Jewish Democrat, who died at 90. She had three children during the baby boom era. Out of those three children, she left behind only one grandchild.
This is a typical trajectory for America’s middle class. You won’t see photos of American families looking like this anymore:
The Noonan family of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1920s.
Admittedly, the Lawrence family was large even by the standards of the day, but large families were still de rigueur. Now, though, not so much. Instead, you get young people substituting travel scrapbooks for children. (Boy, are they going to be surprised when they’re old and have no kin to care about them.)
But it’s different among American Muslims. On average, Muslim women have 2.4 to 2.5 children, with recent immigrants clocking in at 2.6 children. Considering that, as noted, the average American fertility rate is 1.6 childen per woman, which includes Muslim women’s contribution, you can see that American Muslims are a very fast-growing subset of the American population.
The only group having more children is Orthodox Jews, who have an average of 3.3 children per woman (compared to 1.4 children for non-Orthodox Jews). However, there are fewer than a million Orthodox Jews in America compared to almost 4 million Muslims. Aside from the fact that Orthodox Jews show no predisposition toward mass violence or the takeover of the American system, they’re not catching up anytime soon.
Even Hispanic women, who used to have about 3 children on average, are now down to 1.8 or 1.9—again, below the replacement rate.
The future belongs to those who show up. Ordinary American women, for whatever reason, have checked out. Muslim Americans are still looking to the future.
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