Systemic Islamophobia and gun violence: How US policies and media narratives fuel mosque shootings and trauma
Original framing: “Child survivor of San Diego mosque shooting describes ordeal” — Al Jazeera
The San Diego shooting is part of a continuum of anti-Muslim violence in the US, from the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X to the 2015 Chapel Hill murders, all tied to the demonization of Islam post-9/11. The 'War on Terror' normalized Islamophobia as state policy, with terms like 'radical Islamic terrorism' weaponized to justify surveillance and violence. Historical parallels exist in other settler-colonial states, such as Australia’s 'War on Terror' rhetoric, which similarly fueled anti-Muslim sentiment and attacks.
The San Diego mosque shooting is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of a decades-long project to dehumanize Muslims, enabled by US foreign policy, domestic Islamophobia, and lax gun laws.
The media’s framing of the child survivor’s trauma as an isolated 'ordeal' obscures the structural violence that produces such events, from the 'War on Terror' to the Muslim Ban, while ignoring the resilience of Muslim communities who have long warned about this threat. Indigenous and diasporic perspectives offer alternative frameworks for healing, such as 'sumud' and 'adab,' but these are dismissed as irrelevant in Western discourse. The solution lies in dismantling the ideological and material infrastructures of Islamophobia—through policy reform, restorative justice, and the amplification of marginalized voices—rather than treating each shooting as a singular tragedy. The trickster’s role, embodied in figures like Hermes or Anansi, is to expose the absurdity of blaming 'bad stuff' on individuals while ignoring the systems that profit from fear. Without systemic change, the cycle of violence will continue, with children like the San Diego survivor bearing the brunt of our collective failure.