Omar Suleiman

He went to a mosque and then he went to a synagogue.

Look, the idea of

scapegoating minority populations and attributing to them a disproportionate sense of power and a nefarious element where they can't be trusted.

And unless we wipe them out, then they're going to wipe us out, underlies many of the bigotries that exist.

I mean, look, after Trump announced his Muslim ban, there was a shooting in Canada, an attack in Canada on a mosque in Quebec.

where six people were killed.

The shooter explicitly said that the reason why he went to that mosque in Quebec and shot dead six Muslim worshippers was because he was afraid that because of the ban on Syrian refugees in the United States, they would come to Canada, and he didn't want them to feel welcomed in Canada.

So there is a connection.

And I think it's when you are able to dehumanize large groups of people and attribute a nefarious element to them, then unfortunately in a world that's becoming more and more polarized where people are able to construct their entire worldviews based on an algorithm that their social media caters to,

you're going to have some of these attacks happen, and there's going to be an unfortunate connection between them.

So what I tell people is that, you know, I think with all of these people that shoot up synagogues and shoot up mosques, and even before that, actually, the Charleston, South Carolina shooting at an AME church,

You know, when he went there, he actually said that before he murdered nine worshipers in that church, he was taken aback by how nice they were to him.

He sat there for two hours before he turned a gun on many people who were over the age of 80 years old and murdered them in cold blood.

So this is what I talk about when I say that as human beings, we have the propensity, unfortunately, to become worse than devils, or we can choose to be angelic when we choose worship and righteousness over ourselves.

So that's a spiritual crisis as well, and a crisis of meaning and emptiness where I think people are willing to inflict great pain on others when they can't make sense of the pain in their own lives.

in the very beginning of the rise of, at that time actually, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, like when Islamophobia was at the center of many of the presidential candidates' campaigns at the time.

So this must have been 2015.

Yes, 2015.

the mayor of Irving at the time, Beth Van Dyne, who is now a Congresswoman, had put out the idea that Muslims were operating a Sharia court in Irving, Texas.

And suddenly there was a hysteria, because again, there's the idea that Muslims are here to dominate, Muslims are here to overthrow everything that you have in the United States.