Response to the Shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego
by Grant Oliphant, CEO & President, Prebys Foundation
Standing in community yesterday with hundreds of others at the memorial for the three victims of the recent attack on San Diego’s Islamic Center, I kept thinking of a stanza from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye that I had sent my son only a few days earlier,
“Shoulders” is about a protective father carrying his sleeping son across a rainy street with the utmost care. “His ear fills up with breathing,” the stanza reads. “He hears the hum of a boy’s dream/deep inside him.” In reading those words, I physically remembered that sensation, and I knew that my son, now a father himself to his own boy and newborn daughter, would recognize it too.
The way the speakers at the memorial talked about the three victims — Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha — reminded me so much of the father in Nye’s poem. They shared how devoted the men were to their families and community, how gently and persistently they shouldered their responsibilities, how protective and loving they were, and how strong in their faith.
Inside the Islamic Center the day these men were murdered were children and teachers they died protecting. The memorial speakers described them as heroes and martyrs, but they also described them the simple way one would a father carrying a child across a street with particular care. Targeted by the vilest hatred, these men responded as they apparently lived, safeguarding the children and families whose dreams hummed in their hearts and rested on their shoulders.
It was clear that the hurt-shaped hole they leave is massive. But what really struck me at the memorial was how speaker after speaker proposed to fill that hole: with an ever deeper and more resolute commitment to community, faith, and love.
The opposite reaction would be understandable. We live in an age of machine-driven ignorance and cheap hatreds when even the highest office in the land is frequently used as a platform to sow racism and division. The young killers who perpetrated this heinous attack, their minds poisoned by algorithms and rage calculated to ensnare them, bought into the oldest of falsehoods, that their lives could somehow be improved by eradicating differences they didn’t even understand.
It is an impoverishment of spirit that could leave its victims stripped of hope and is clearly meant to. But in this case, it did not, and what I heard and saw yesterday tells me, it will not. Still, the rest of us must do our part.
Acts like this do not happen in a vacuum. This violence unfolded against a broader backdrop of hateful rhetoric targeting communities of difference across our region and country. It is not enough to condemn the violence when it erupts — we must also be willing to name, condemn, and demand an end to the lies, hatreds, and othering that feed it.
Sometimes it seems as though we are meant to believe that we are hopelessly divided in this country, that it is just baked into the culture or that antipathy and violence are our future rather than our past. But repeatedly we are also given evidence to the contrary — by the defiant expressions of love from Islamic mourners, by the ecumenical gathering that formed around them, or just a few days earlier by the hundreds of people who showed up to participate in the Burnham Center’s launch of OneSD.
The gathering voices of hatred and division may be loud and attention grabbing. But the forces of community, belonging, connection, and love are gathering too, and they deserve far more of our attention. In moments like this, philanthropy, civic leadership, faith communities, and residents all have a responsibility to come together — not only in mourning, but in action — to build the kind of San Diego where every person can live, gather, and worship safely and with dignity.
Part of that work must include investing in young people, so they feel rooted in their communities, connected to one another, and empowered to become the next generation of rising civic and community leaders. At Prebys Foundation, we believe creating a more inclusive and compassionate future requires long-term investment in belonging, opportunity, and leadership, especially among our youth.
Our hearts are with the families who lost loved ones, the worshippers and students traumatized by this violence, and the entire Muslim community across San Diego. And with our hearts must go our actions.
Nye’s poem isn’t really about one father — it’s about all of us. It ends:
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
If we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
In the face of tragedy and hardship, the oldest of human wisdoms is not hatred but love. In our mutuality, in the helping hand and grace we extend to one another, in the community we build together, lies our strength and our salvation.
