‘Fear has no place in our society,’ Muslim center leader says after car rams Burien building
BURIEN — Every Friday night, Ahlam Nur joins other women at the Muslim American Youth Foundation in Burien to unwind. They pray, chat, play basketball, play the card game UNO and share a meal.
This Monday morning, a car hurtled through the parking lot outside the community center and rammed into the center’s prayer room, smashing a metal-cased window and shattering glass across the room’s red and gold carpet before backing up and driving away.
The space was empty because the hit-and-run occurred around 9:15 a.m., between prayer times. But the incident has shaken the community that uses the center, which opened less than a year ago in a former fitness club near Highway 509 and which serves hundreds of young people. Police have obtained surveillance video and are investigating.
“It’s terrible what happened,” Nur, 21, said at a news conference Tuesday, surrounded by the center’s supporters, Muslim and non-Muslim. “Everyone deserves to have a place they can call a second home.”
Burien police Chief Ted Boe, who attended the news conference, said investigators don’t yet know what motivated the driver. Surveillance video shows a late-model silver Toyota Corolla drive under a metal chain to access the community center’s parking lot before slamming into the building at a speed “fast enough to do a lot of damage,” Boe said. The driver left a bumper and hub cap behind, the chief added.
“It cannot be a coincidence” or an accident, considering the car rammed the prayer room, rather than another part of the large building, said Yahya Suufi, executive director and imam at the Muslim American Youth Foundation.
Burien contracts with the King County Sheriff’s Office for police services. Interim Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall “called me last night, expressing her commitment to whatever investigative resources they can offer,” Boe said.
Multiple Muslim institutions have been targeted recently, noted Aneelah Afzali, executive director of the American Muslim Empowerment Network at the Muslim Association of Puget Sound.
In October, someone set fire to the Islamic Center of Tacoma and someone threw an explosive device into the Islamic Center of Olympia. In December, a mosque in Mountlake Terrace was burglarized.
A Sikh temple in Federal Way was ransacked in September and a Catholic church in Tacoma was set ablaze in October, Afzali added, urging people from all backgrounds to band together against prejudice and violence. Arrests have been reported in the Tacoma incidents and the Mountlake Terrace break-in.
“As much as there might be shattered glass, our hearts and our spirits remain strong,” she said. “These kinds of attacks,” whether against mosques, churches, synagogues, temples or other houses of worship, “do not have any place in King County, in Washington state or in our country.”
Suufi was alone in the building Monday morning when he “heard some sort of blast,” he said. The scary sound triggered bad memories for Suufi, who fled Somalia’s civil war when he was a child, he said.
As a little boy, “I didn’t know what was happening,” he recalled, but there were gunshots “everywhere around me, and everyone was running.”
The Burien center, which hosts religious services for all ages, is “a dream come true,” said Suufi, who helped raise the money to buy the building in 2020. The property was costly but made sense, because community members said they wanted a basketball court and a swimming pool.
“We decided to go big,” partly to lure young people away from trouble, he said. “Our community is really underserved. Our children are dying from gun violence. They’re dying from overdoses.”
Several non-Muslim religious and civic leaders attended Tuesday’s news conference, holding signs with the message: “We stand with our Muslim neighbors.” They hold a common aim, Suufi said.
“We’re not going to tolerate any hatred. We’re not going to tolerate anyone that’s going to divide us,” he said. “Fear has no place in our society.”
SOURCE: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/fear-has-no-place-in-our-society-muslim-center-leader-says-after-car-rams-burien-building/