Islamic Prayer at San Francisco Park Interrupted by 'Hateful Verbal Attack'

San Francisco police are investigating after a Muslim group gathered for prayer at McLaren Park on Monday morning in celebration of Eid al-Adha was subjected to verbal attacks by a man captured on video.

Around 50 people were preparing to pray around 8:30 a.m. when the man walked by with his dogs and began to shout racist, Islamophobic statements, including “Your religion is full of hate” and “You come from a f—ed-up country.” SFGate first reported the incident.

The video shows the man yelling, “You’re not welcome here,” and multiple vulgarities before walking off. The morning prayer ended up bringing around 200 people.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned the “hateful verbal attack.”

Eid al-Adha, which commemorates the story in the Quran of the journey and sacrifice of the prophet Ibrahim, is supposed to be “a joyous occasion,” executive director Zahra Billoo of the CAIR Bay Area office told KQED.

“People were gathering to celebrate a religious holiday, they were also minding their own business. Unfortunately, this man interfered, insulted and acted so out of line in an Islamophobic way,” she said. “People should be safe and comfortable when they go out in the community and when they are practicing their religion and this man ruined that for these worshipers.”

Officers responded around 9:25 a.m. and “were advised that a verbal altercation occurred where the subject made verbal threats to a group,” San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Paulina Henderson said in a statement.

No injuries were reported, and the investigation is ongoing, Henderson said.

A board member for the Islamic Center of San Francisco, the mosque whose members were gathered at McLaren Park, said he had “never seen anything like this in San Francisco before.”

“We felt very unsafe, and it was shocking the way the man was so casual with his racism and xenophobia,” Shahbaz Shaikh said in a statement.

A recent report conducted by CAIR found that the organization received 8,061 complaints nationwide in 2023, the highest number in its 30-year history.

“Unfortunately, we are living in a period of heightened Islamophobia,” Billoo said.

According to the Institute of Policy and Understanding, 250,000 Muslims reside in the Bay Area.

After the second San Francisco mayoral debate Monday night, where the five major candidates were asked to comment on how minority communities could be kept safe in the city, Billoo expressed hope that the next mayor “will understand the connection between foreign policy and violence abroad and violence in our communities,” citing the war between Israel and Hamas and the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

“So long as our elected officials support or stand silent as people are killed by the thousands in other countries, we will not be safe in the San Francisco Bay Area,” she added.

Billoo pointed to a January statement from Mayor London Breed in which she said the city “has been angrier, more divided and less safe” since the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. Though Breed did not veto the resolution, Billoo called the statement “very problematic.”

“[Breed] cannot say things like that, nor can any mayor and expect that our communities in the San Francisco Bay Area will not be impacted,” she said.

“This hateful incident in San Francisco is unfortunately a reminder that there are many people out there who, if given the opportunity to harm Arabs and Muslims, would, and it’s high time that our elected officials change course,” Billoo said.