Embed from Getty ImagesI have always stood against hate. I am, at heart, a classical liberal: live and let live. People should be free to worship, to love, to work and to raise their families without fear. That should not be a controversial idea. And yet here we are, watching politics poison the most basic human decency, watching frightened populations be told again and again that their problems are caused by their neighbours rather than by the governments and broken systems that have failed them.

On Monday, two teenage gunmen walked up to the Islamic Centre of San Diego, the largest mosque in the county, and opened fire. Three men were killed. One of them was the mosque’s security guard, who police say acted heroically and saved lives. There is a school next to the mosque. There were children inside. He stood between them and the bullets. He died on the side of good. A true martyr. May Allah grant him the highest ranks in Jannah.

The attack happened on the first day of Dhul Hijjah, one of the most sacred months in the Islamic calendar. Police are investigating it as a hate crime, and anti-Islamic writings were reportedly found in the suspects’ car. None of this is a coincidence. None of it came out of nowhere. It came from a climate.

Let me say this clearly, because I think it needs saying: Muslims will not be bullied, intimidated or pushed out of society. Not in Britain. Not in America. Not anywhere in Europe. We have every right to live in peace and safety, to worship freely, to raise our children, to be part of public life. We are part of these nations whether the fascists like it or not. Our doctors staff your hospitals. Our teachers teach your children. Our shopkeepers serve your high streets. Our soldiers have fought for this country. We are not going anywhere. The sooner that fact is accepted, the sooner the country can move on to its actual problems.

But this is not only about Muslims, and I refuse to let it become only about Muslims. Jewish communities are facing a level of hate that should shame any society that claims to have learned the lessons of the last century. Synagogues need security guards too. So do gurdwaras and Hindu temples. LGBTQ people are being demonised in tabloids and on television by politicians who know exactly what they are doing. Trans people, a tiny minority of our fellow citizens, have been turned into a national obsession to distract from collapsing public services. Disabled people, migrants, asylum seekers pick a vulnerable group and somebody is profiting from the hatred of them.

This is the trick. Frightened and angry people are easier to control than confident and hopeful ones. If the public can be persuaded that the source of their misery is the family down the road rather than the policy decisions taken in Westminster or Washington, those policy decisions can continue undisturbed. Division is not a side-effect of failing politics. It is the product. Increasingly, it is the strategy.

As liberals, we have to refuse it. Not with hand-wringing, not with vague appeals to “tolerance” that collapse the moment a tabloid front page lands, but with a clear, confident, public commitment that ordinary people from every background belong here equally, fully and without conditions. That means showing up. It means turning out at the vigil. It means correcting the lie at the dinner table. It means voting, campaigning, organising, and refusing to let the politics of grievance pass unchallenged simply because it is easier to stay quiet.

I will mourn the dead in San Diego. I will pray for them, and for their families, and for the children they shielded. But I will not let their deaths be filed away as another sad headline from across the Atlantic. They died because a climate of hate has been built, deliberately, over years and that climate is being built here too.

It must be dismantled. By all of us. Together. Before it costs anyone else their life.

* Mo Waqas is a vice chair of the Liberal Democrats' Racial Diversity Campaign and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.