Faith and community leaders emphasize love following St. Cloud mosque break-in

ST. CLOUD ― A group of roughly two dozen faith leaders and community members gathered in the St. Cloud Islamic Center Thursday to discuss the impact of a break-in at the mosque a week ago and encourage peace and love.

On Sept. 8, two people broke into the Islamic Center in the early hours of the morning and spent two hours damaging several doors, rooms and ceilings of the mosque, vandalizing the walls with blood and taunting security cameras with knives. Estimated damages and upgrades to the mosque are anticipated to cost between $15,000 and $20,000, said St. Cloud Islamic Center President Mohayadin Mohamed at a press conference Thursday.

The St. Cloud Police Department located Logan Oliver Smith, 23, of Rogers, and Victoria Catalina Veliz, 25, of New Hope, at a nearby hotel a couple of hours after the break-in was reported and police are investigating the incident as a bias-motivated crime. Smith and Veliz are currently being held at the Stearns County Jail on felony burglary charges.

The attack comes as the second on a mosque in Minnesota within a week, and the fifth attack this year. On Sep. 6 a man broke into the Tawfiq Islamic Center in Minneapolis, causing more than $50,000 in damage. He is also suspected of stealing donations.

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"Just a week ago today this place was attacked and desecrated, unfortunately," said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of CAIR-MN, the Minnesota chapter of the national Islamic civil liberties and advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations. "But fortunately, today it brought all of us together to show the unity and strength of our community and our resolve that these voices and these individuals who aim to try to create terror in our community will not win, that they will always bring us together and make us more resolved to make sure our places of worship are not only protected, but continue to be what they are, places of sanctuary for all of us."

Hussein and others who spoke Thursday reflected on their time using the Islamic Center as students while attending St. Cloud State University and said the space has always been a sanctuary and gathering spot for the community.

"[This act] doesn't represent St. Cloud people. We just want to be clear that wherever you come from, you're not deter[ing] us to come to the mosque. And it doesn't represent the good people in the St. Cloud metro area," Mohamed said. "We believe that love is going to overcome hate."

'Hate and responding to hate is a community issue'

Representatives from local religious groups like Jewish Community Action, First United Methodist Church, the St. Cloud Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Catholic Charities, Arrive Ministries and the Evangelical Lutheran Southwestern Minnesota Synod also spoke at the meeting, expressing their support for the Muslim community and outrage concerning the break in.

At the meeting, Islamic leaders said they were grateful for all the support from the St. Cloud community, but called on more residents in St. Cloud to be outspoken against hate and racism.

"To Mohayadin's point, the majority of the folks here ― and I've lived in St. Cloud ― are hardworking, working class [people] who usually are not supportive of any of these hate groups. But sometimes the ignorance or the silence around these incidents creates the perception that there's a larger percentage of people that are okay or complicit," Hussein said. "Minnesota now has the ugly truth of being the state that has the most amount of attacks against mosques in the country. … We have seen this uptick, this year is not the only year we've seen an increase. Minnesota still is the only state where a mosque was bombed by a militia group in 2017. So we have this burden of carrying these attacks."

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Hussein said Muslim community leaders across the state are not afraid but are consciously looking for ways to improve security for their mosques. CAIR-MN has been working with 17 of 92 mosques in Minnesota to access Department of Homeland Security grants designed to make houses of worship more secure and prevent incidents like this from happening again.

"We know hate movements in this country did not wither away after the election of the current president, these movements continue to exist. And we're seeing a great deal of chatter online, especially now in even darker spaces... So we're definitely concerned about how difficult it is also to track some of these activities," Hussein said. "We also know [from] the Muslim community here in Minnesota ― particular to being predominantly East African, from Somalia and Ethiopia ― that Islamophobia is racialized. So we see that a lot, that sometimes the attacks are based on these multiple identities of being immigrants as well as also being Black."

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Hussein said he is thankful there are organizations and interfaith partners in St. Cloud that are "continuing to push for inclusion, pushing against some of these voices," but said we all need to do that work.

"We oftentimes think about hate as being an impact on only the community that is targeted. I'm really concerned for our democracy, I'm concerned for those voices outside the United States, the enemies of our country, who see these polarizing moments and situations and would like to take advantage and use these moments to turn our neighbors against each other, and to act violently for it. And that's something I'm concerned about specifically around election time," he said. "Sometimes those who are egging on our neighbors to attack our neighbor or to cause harm may not even be living in the United States, could be a Russian troll or God knows who else. So we have to realize that hate and responding to hate is a community issue. And addressing it means that we are only going to be safer as a society. And that is a commitment we do need."

Stronger together

Majid Igale, the Greater Minnesota Outreach Coordinator for CAIR-MN, said he was grateful the mosque was empty last week when the vandals broke in, because often people will stay in the building overnight to pray or wait for the morning or night prayer.

"Thankfully, no one was here. In the footage you can see that the vandals were here to cause more damage than they ended up doing. You could see the male vandal actually taunt the camera with a knife and show that he was here to harm somebody, which is a great fear, you know, for our community," he said. "I think today, there is solidarity. We're coming together as neighbors, as community members, as leaders and even as regular civilians to show how strong we can be together. But in cases like this, we need more than just solidarity. We need to come together and repair and to stand together, no matter what the circumstances are. I truly believe that divided we can be easily conquered, whether we're Muslims or interfaith or whatever you may be. But together, we're showing them."

You can donate to a GoFundMe created to support the Islamic Center and the community following the break-in at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-mosque-recover-from-burglary?qid=d76c43fa025437c7b230b96d6a1d458e.

Becca Most is a cities reporter with the St. Cloud Times. Reach her at 320-241-8213 or bmost@stcloudtimes.com. Follow her on Twitter at @becca_most.

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This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: Faith leaders emphasize love following St. Cloud mosque break-in