By Ibrahim Al-Marashi
Ibrahim Al-Marashi, IE University; California State University San Marcos
On Monday, May 18, two assailants, a 17 and an 18 year old, attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, the site of both a mosque and school, killing three adults. The assailants were wearing Nazi SS insignia, and had the words “race war” written on their weapons.
The attack underscores European history’s centrality to the global far right’s discourse and ideology. It was the latest deadly manifestation of the weaponisation of European history to justify violence in America in the present.
But this is not just a US problem. Europe’s history was also explicitly referenced in the manifesto of the 2019 Christchurch shooter in New Zealand. The Christchurch attack was itself inspired by Anders Breivek’s 2011 attack in Norway, which was primarily motivated by a violent white nationalist worldview.
These attackers all drew inspiration from Adolf Hitler and the SS to justify both antisemitic and Islamophobic violence. But within the white nationalist imaginary, European history begins much earlier. It extends to visions of a pure white race in the Greek and Roman eras, and to idolisation of historical figures such as Charles Martel, the Frankish leader who defeated a Muslim army in Tours in 732.
It also leans heavily on the imagery of the European Crusades to retake the Holy Land, which began in the 12th century. The Knights Templar – the Crusade-era order of Christian warrior monks – has captured far-right popular imagination in Europe and the US, especially among the alt-right.
Political actors across the spectrum invoke the past to grant legitimacy in the present and suggest inevitability in the future. But for far-right leaders, European history is especially easy to weaponise. It provides a ready-made set of memes, metaphors, images and tropes that legitimise hate speech – and hate crimes – in the name of protecting Christian Europeans from the perceived threat of Jewish and Muslim invaders.
Warning signs
In 1992, I set foot in the Islamic Center of San Diego for the first time. As an undergraduate student at UC San Diego, I was there to announce that our Muslim Student Association was fundraising for the very first Bosnian Muslim refugees who were arriving in our county. We had to have this meeting because most of the congregation at the mosque had no idea there were even Muslims in the former Yugoslavia.
Track forward to May 2026, two assailants used a camera to record their massacre in the Center and broadcast it on Discord, with the words “race war” etched onto their pistols. The practice of writing on firearms is not an isolated incident in the history of Islamophobic attacks, nor is recording them on video.
In March 2019, an Australian-born man attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He killed 51 people and filmed his attack, broadcasting it on Facebook. The video is still in circulation on the internet today.
The Christchurch attacker used five guns inscribed with the names of various European historical figures and battles against Muslims, as well as the racial slur “kebab remover”, a sinister euphemism for ethnic cleansing that is linked to the 1991-1995 Bosnian civil war.
The phrase is an homage to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, the very warlord whose crimes against humanity led so many Bosniak refugees to flee the country – and many of those who reached the US settled in San Diego. It was Karadžić who conflated “kebabs” with the Bosniak Muslims, and “remove kebab” is still an Islamophobic meme among the European far right, where the continent’s ubiquitous kebab shops are often equated with Muslim immigration.
The New Zealand attacker also etched battles from the Crusades on his weapons, and his online manifesto named Anders Breivik as his hero. Breivik detonated a bomb in central Oslo in 2011, killing 8 people before massacring 69 more. Breivik was obsessed with the medieval Crusades, dressing up as a Knight Templar in his own manifesto.
The New Zealand neo-Crusader attack inspired two attacks in the US the following month. In April 2019, three members of a Kansas militia calling itself the Crusaders were arrested before they could carry out a plot to bomb an apartment complex housing Somali Muslim families and a mosque.
In the same month, a 19-year-old student walked into a synagogue in northern San Diego County and opened fire on the congregation that was commemorating the last day of Passover, killing a 60 year old woman and injuring three others. This same attacker had previously tried to burn down a local mosque, inspired by the Christchurch shooting.
This assailant was a nursing student at Cal State University San Marcos where I teach, and was studying in a building just across from my history department. He told students he admired Hitler, and his colleagues reported it to our administration, which failed to act on the warnings of his weaponisation of history.
Weaponised history legitimises violence
Following in the footsteps of the New Zealand shooter and the Cal State San Marcos shooter, both of the San Diego mosque shooters engaged in their deadly assault to motivate future copycat attacks.
Their manifestos reportedly envision their shooting as inspiring a “crusade”. They even called themselves the “Sons” of the New Zealand attacker.
On April 24 2026, I returned to the Islamic Center, not as a student, but as a history professor giving a community lecture. And as a historian, I was uniquely qualified to warn them that, based on my study of the history of past Islamophobia in our area and globally, there was an increased risk of violent attacks, including on the Center itself. Tragically, my fear became manifest just a few weeks later.
In that lecture, I lamented that while Crusader history is ubiquitous, neither on my campus nor in the entire San Diego area is there a single class or program devoted to the history of both Muslim Americans and Arab Americans. This is a class I have been pushing and fighting for since 2012, when I permanently moved to the area.
We can combat the radicalisation that stems from a racist, fantasised version of European history. We can do this by not just teaching classes on Europe’s military conquests and crusades, but also the rich, lengthy history of ordinary Muslims and Arabs coming to both the US and Europe, trying to make a better future for both their children and their newly adopted countries.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Adjunct Professor at IE University, California State University San Marcos.
Pogo says
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is Adjunct Professor at IE University, California State University San Marcos
And
https://www.middleeasteye.net/users/ibrahim-al-marashi
And more
https://www.bing.com/search?q=Ibrahim+Al-Marashi
R.S. says
Thanks for the links, Mr. Pogo. If even the British government plagiarizes his article, he must be an eminent scholar in his field. And the few articles I’ve read seem to support his reputation as a knowledgeable person. I’m just deeply puzzled by the comment that follows by one JC, who appears to suggest a line-up order of discussing Far-Right extremism. Seems to me that unconstructive extremism ought to be challenged wherever it appears. I believe the author is right on the money with his comment about “the radicalisation that stems from a racist, fantasised version of European history.” Consider that this country bears a form of that fantasy in its self-glorification in view of its holocaust of 60 to 100 million indigenous people and the abduction of another indigenous people of Africa to build its wealth. There are a lot of “mea culpa” in order before we’d brandish blame onto others.
JC says
Before the Muslims can start talking about Far Right terrorist in Western Countries, they should talk about their own Far Right Terrorists/Beliefs in their own Muslim Majority Countries. Fun fact, most of them are run with similar viewpoints as the Far Right folks they hate in Western Countries.
PaulT says
Dead wrong JC.
Like any other American citizen Dr Al Marashi has every right to draw attention to persistent attacks on members of the religion he practices. Remember that oesky 1st amendment clause “……no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
The right wing, including the current administration, claim the threat of white nationalist terrorism is negligible and plays down domestic attacks on Muslims, though they do profess outraged at attacks on Jews.
As the article points out both religions are a target of the (nominally Christian) white supremacist, pro-Nazi movement. It is growing rapidly in both the US and Europe and somehow pretendss to be a ‘crusade’
Yet Kash Patel’s FBI has dismissed that threat. preferring to use its resources to seek out non-criminal immigrants and investigate anyone Donald Trrum considers bis political ‘enemy’.
Al says
The Muslims are always the victims is bs. Most of the conflicts in the world in the last 30 years have been caused by the Muslims and their brotherhood but let’s ignore that. I don’t think any of these attacks are justified but you never see these esteemed professors write about the Muslim ones. Another leftist one way street of we can do it okay but if they do it it’s a travesty. It’s a travesty no matter who does it.
Pierre Tristam says
Piling 2026 bullshit on top of centuries of crusader history bullshit a-la-Tasso won’t make either right. “Most of the conflicts in the world in the last 30 years have been the doing of American, Israeli, Russian and a few African countries’ doing. Muslim-majority countries have their share to be sure (you’d be on stronger ground arguing the pathological backwardness and intentionally regressive cultures of Arab and some Muslim-majority countries like Afghanistan and Iran), but now as in history, they have a long, very long way to go to catch up to the genocidal violence of their western neighbors. “An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians,” Brown University reports. Those deaths are primarily the responsibility of American intervention and its consequences.