Vacaville’s Shame Is Now Public

The mosque in Vacaville has been there since 1994.

Thirty years. 

It was there before some of the people screaming at the town hall were born. It was there through multiple presidents, through wars in the Middle East, through 9/11, through two decades of “war on terror” rhetoric. It was just there. A building where people prayed.

The request that sparked all of this was not for a minaret that would tower over the city. It was not for a call to prayer broadcast on loudspeakers. It was not for a training ground or a weapons depot. It was for better plumbing. Washing facilities. The Islamic practice of wudu requires ritual washing before prayer, and for thirty years the community had made do with inadequate solutions. They wanted to update their building. They wanted to use their own money to fix their own bathrooms so they could practice their faith with basic dignity.

That was the request. Better pipes. Better drains. A place to wash before prayer.

And for that, a woman stood up in a civic building and said that “all Islamic growth must be halted.”

She did not say the plumbing was wrong. She did not say the zoning was improper. She did not say the building permits were incomplete. She stood in front of a city council and said that a religion practiced by nearly two billion people was a “totalitarian world dominance takeover” that must be stopped. She printed out Google results. She said she had typed “Islamic terrorism” into a search engine and found ninety-two pages. She held this up as evidence. A printout of what she wanted to find, found because she wanted to find it.

This is what passes for research in the minds of the mob. Confirmation bias with a printer. She listed slavery, torture, rape, murder, beheading, and stoning as “justifiable crimes” under Islam. She said this while standing in a country built on the bones of enslaved people, on land stolen through genocide, in a state named after a fictional kingdom from a Spanish novel. She did not see the irony. She never does.

The meeting was supposed to be about zoning. About planning. About the mundane work of local government. But the people who came did not want to talk about pipes. They wanted to talk about existence.

They said Islam was incompatible with America. They said Muslims could not assimilate. They said the faith itself was a threat.

And then Hassan Sabbagh stood up.

He is the founder of Nature of Sound, a creative community solutions platform designed to empower individuals and communities toward charity through entertainment. He has spent years building volunteer opportunities and career development programs. He has worked with the Solano Partnership Against Violence. He founded the Solano Anti-Trafficking Coalition. He helped secure a three million dollar grant to provide shelter and trauma-informed care to survivors of human trafficking. He has worked with local partners to get survivors access to telehealth prescriptions within twenty-four hours. He is exactly the kind of citizen the mob claims to want.

He was there to speak for his father. A man who came to the United States alone at sixteen years old in the 1960s. A man who enlisted in the Army as a path to citizenship. A man who served in the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties until his body broke. A service-related injury left him disabled. His son grew up without a father who could play catch. Without a father who could run or move the way other fathers moved. The price of his father’s service was paid in mobility, in health, in the ordinary joys of fatherhood that were taken from both of them.

“My father is a practicing Muslim and a disabled U.S. Army veteran,” Hassan said. “So when people say Islam is not compatible with America, I have to ask what part of that story isn’t American?”

No one answered. There is no answer that works. The bar that the bigots keep moving became visible in that moment. First the demand is assimilate. Learn the language. Follow the laws. Serve the country. But when someone does all of that, when they enlist and fight and sacrifice and bleed, the demand shifts. The demand was never about assimilation. The demand was about not being Muslim. That was always the demand. Everything else was theater.

Hassan was not there to demand anything. He had no formal relationship with the mosque. He is not religious. His family encouraged him to read the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran, but never forced him to submit to anything. He was there because his father, a man who gave his body to this country, wanted a place to pray with basic dignity. That was all. A place to wash before prayer. A place to exist.

And for that, someone in the line threatened to slap him.

Let me say that again. The people who came to warn the council about the violence of Islam threatened physical violence against a man standing in line to speak. The people who warned about totalitarianism tried to silence a citizen with the threat of a slap. The people who warned about the suppression of speech tried to suppress speech with their fists.

This is always how it works. The violence they claim to oppose is the violence they bring. The intolerance they claim to fear is the intolerance they practice. They are not warning against a threat. They are the threat. They look in the mirror and see the enemy they describe.

The moderator tried to calm things down. “Not so much about singling out Islam,” she said, “as like it was any other religion.”

But that was a lie. The entire meeting was about singling out Islam. A woman had just read a list of crimes she attributed to the entire faith. The crowd had come to oppose not a building but a people. The moderator’s words were not neutrality. They were surrender. They told the mob that their behavior was acceptable, that their fear-based rhetoric was just part of the process, that a town hall could be turned into a referendum on whether an entire religion had the right to exist in their city.

The city council was not even fully present. The body that should have been there to enforce order, to protect the process, to ensure that a public meeting remained a public meeting, was incomplete. The crowd sensed the vacuum. They filled it with fear.

This was not the first time. The Facebook group “Vacaville community & crime” had been circulating the same rhetoric for weeks. Comments told a young woman defending the mosque that she had a “brain deficiency” and that she “wouldn’t last 1 day in a Muslim country with her hair.” The same people who claimed to defend American values told an American citizen that she should be grateful for the safety of her country while they stripped that safety away. They told Muslims they were not here to assimilate while demanding they assimilate. They told them they were not American while standing in a room with the son of a veteran who had given more to this country than they ever would.

The mosque has been there for thirty years. The people who pray there have been part of Vacaville for thirty years. They are not newcomers. They are not invaders. They are neighbors. They are doctors and teachers and engineers and veterans. They are the people who live next door, who shop at the same stores, who pay the same taxes, who breathe the same air.

But to the mob, they are the other. They are the threat. They are the enemy that must be stopped, even if the only thing they are asking for is better plumbing.

The bigotry on display was not unique to Vacaville. This is the playbook. It has been used against Catholics who were said to be loyal to the Pope instead of the Constitution. It was used against Jews who were said to be loyal to their own kind instead of the nation. It was used against Japanese Americans who were said to be a fifth column during World War II. The target changes. The rhetoric does not. They always claim to defend Western civilization. They always claim to protect the Constitution. They always claim to speak for the real Americans. And they always end up on the wrong side of history, looking back at their own words with the weak excuse that everyone thought that way at the time.

Not everyone thought that way. Not everyone thinks that way now. Some of us see a man who served his country and now wants a place to pray. Some of us see a son who grew up caring for his disabled father and now stands up for his dignity. Some of us see a community asking for basic facilities and wonder what kind of person would turn that into a referendum on terror.

Hassan Sabbagh has spent his life helping people. He survived child exploitation and human trafficking. He has worked for thirty years to support survivors of crime regardless of their faith or background. He is exactly the kind of citizen the mob claims to want. He is exactly the kind of American they claim to defend. And they threatened to slap him while he waited in line.

You do not get to claim you are defending America while threatening the son of an American veteran. You do not get to claim you are opposing violence while threatening violence. You do not get to claim you are protecting Western civilization while standing in a city named after a Spanish novel, on land taken from indigenous people, in a country built by enslaved labor, and pretend that the real threat is a building where people go to pray.

The woman with the Google printouts is not a researcher. She is not a scholar. She is not a patriot. She is a person who typed what she wanted to find and found it. She is a person who stood in a civic building and said that a religion practiced by nearly two billion people must be halted. She is a person who looked at a disabled veteran’s son and saw an enemy.

The people who clapped for her are not defenders of the Constitution. They are the same people who have always been there. The ones who stand up at town halls and demand that someone be excluded. The ones who wrap their fear in the flag and call it patriotism. The ones who move the bar every time someone clears it. First assimilate. Then serve. Then sacrifice. Then stop being Muslim. Then stop existing.

That is what this was. That is what it always is. A demand that someone stop existing.

The mosque will probably get its plumbing. The law is on its side. The Constitution that the woman with the printouts claimed to defend actually protects the free exercise of religion. The courts will sort it out eventually. But the shame will remain. The shame of a town hall turned into a hate rally. The shame of a moderator too weak to name what was happening. The shame of a mob that threatened the son of a veteran and called it patriotism.

You cannot wash that away with better pipes. You cannot fix it with a permit. The people who showed up to oppose a bathroom renovation exposed something that no renovation can fix. They showed who they are. They showed what they value. They showed that for all their talk of Western civilization and American values, they are willing to discard the son of a veteran, the dignity of a community, and the principles of the Constitution they claim to love.

All to stop a building from getting better plumbing.

That is not patriotism. That is not defense. That is not civilization. That is a woman with a printout, a mob with a threat, and a town that has to live with what it showed the world.

Vacaville has shown its face. The question now is whether it is willing to look in the mirror.

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