Source: The Washington Post

The Muslim community in Escondido, Calif., gathered a week ago for an interfaith prayer vigil, insisting that a distance of nearly 7,000 miles did not ease the pain they felt for the 50 victims of a pair of mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

They assembled again on Sunday evening, uttering prayers that echoed like a grim refrain. This time, they turned their attention to one of their own mosques, whose walls had been blackened in an apparent act of arson announcing its intentions with graffiti citing the March 15 attack in New Zealand.

With rapid velocity, the violence visited on the Pacific island nation appears to have traversed the globe, choosing as one of its first American targets an unassuming, beige-colored place of Islamic worship, flanked by palm trees.

“I never could have expected that this would happen here, two blocks from my house,” Yusef Miller, the point person for interfaith initiatives and a board member at the Islamic Society of North County, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The connection was chilling. It was a clear homage to what happened in New Zealand.”

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