It sickens me to write this, to report on the latest manifestation of the hate that has enveloped my country and spread out across the world like a giant oil spill, but the death of Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman and mother of five, is a moral obscenity – a crime for which the War Party must take responsibility.

On last Wednesday, in the quiet San Diego suburb of El Cajon, California, the teenage daughter of Shaima Alawadi returned home to find her mother drowning in a pool of blood. There were signs of forced entry at the back of the house. Someone had broken in and beaten her mother nearly to death with a tire iron.
Next to her body was a note: “Go back to your own country, you terrorist.”


A similar note had been found tacked to the family’s door a few weeks earlier, but Shaima had dismissed it as a kid’s prank.
This kind of hate is nothing new for San Diego. In 2010, a plan to build a mosque in nearby Temecula resulted in a series of protest demonstrations by local nut-jobs. A woman in a hijab was hauled off a Southwest Airlines flight in at San Diego airport in 2011 by TSA agents, and told the captain didn’t “feel comfortable” with her on the flight: this was around the same time braying demagogue Peter King (R-New York) was holding hearings on the “Muslim fifth column in America.” Last year, a similar “go back to where you came from” message was delivered by someone who repeatedly punched a Muslim cab driver, who had been observed praying. See here, here, and here for more evidence of the climate of hate darkening the otherwise sunny skies of this California redoubt of bigotry and military families.
If you want some idea of what’s going on in Southern California, these days, take a look at this video of a demonstration in Yorba Linda,


http://youtu.be/NutFkykjmbM


where an inter-religious charity event for the homeless was surrounded by hundreds of screeching banshees, screaming their hatred of Muslims. And lest you think this is just a fringe phenomenon, note that no less than three elected officials addressed this hate-fest: congressmen Ed Royce and Gary Miller, and Villa Park councilwoman Debra Pauly – all three of them Republicans, naturally.
As children and women in hijabs walk with quiet dignity into the charity venue, the crowd unleashes its fury of hate: “Go home, go home, go home!” they yell. Is it a coincidence that this is the very same message in the note from Shaima’s killer?

I’m betting on the latter, but I’m open to being surprised. From ‘ANTIWAR’