Some character spent his Christmas Eve standing outside a Bernal Heights mosque, ripping pages out of the Quran, and menacing Muslims with a Thor-style giant hammer, in the latest incident of Muslim harassment in San Francisco.
Bernal Heights’ Islamic Center of San Francisco is the Bay Area’s oldest mosque, having been established in 1959, and it's one of the oldest in California. But in those 65 years, the place has seen its share of xenophobic and anti-Muslim persecution. The latest of these incidents was on Tuesday, as KGO reports that someone harassed the mosque’s attendees on Christmas Eve, standing outside the mosque ripping pages out of the Quran and verbally badging anyone who went in.
The Center posted surveillance video of the one incident on their YouTube channel. “On Dec 24th a man who has harassed the mosque before stood in front of the mosque for over 50 [minutes] harassing Muslims coming to pray,” the mosque posted in a description of the clip. “In this clip you can see him walking around with what looks like a hammer (we think its a toy one now) and tears pages out of the Quran.”
Indeed, the toy hammer looks like something out of the Thor comic books. And the man in the video has apparently been a repeat offender. The mosque’s secretary Zuhaib Siddique tells KGO, "We've had run-ins with him, about three to four times.”
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) executive director Zahra Billoo says they’ve had more reports of San Francisco mosques being targeted for harassment in 2024 than any other year on record. "We are experiencing a 30-year high in Muslim, anti-Palestinian racism and our call is to elected officials and to law enforcement to send a very clear message that hate will not be tolerated in S.F. against any ethnicity," she told KGO.
Indeed, one mosque in Nob Hill was vandalized twice during Ramadan services earlier this year. And the Bernal Heights Islamic Center of SF itself had beer bottles chucked through its windows in a previous incident in 2021.
Related: Lower Nob Hill Mosque Vandalized, Congregants Harassed At Least Twice During Ramadan [SFist]
Image: Google Street View
