Berkeley rallies after Muslim-owned clinic targeted by anti-Islam graffiti

Negeene Mosaed, owner of Berkeley Community Physical Therapy, addresses attendees at a community vigil Monday evening after her business was targeted by Islamophobic vandalism. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

About 100 Berkeleyans gathered in South Berkeley for a vigil Monday after Islamophobic graffiti reading “fuck Islam” was spray-painted on the window of a Muslim-owned University Avenue business over the weekend. 

Negeene Mosaed, a Muslim Berkeleyan of Iranian heritage, said her Berkeley Community Physical Therapy clinic has been vandalized time and again after displaying posters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Mosaed said she suspected the clinic was targeted on Saturday specifically because it was the first full day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Berkeleyans of many faiths came out Monday to support Mosaed and other victims of hate crimes.

“As I have learned from Muslim friends, the Quran, if I may, with your permission, teaches that we have been created in our diversity so that we can strive together — not in hate and fear, but in righteousness,” Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, a Rabbinic Council member with Jewish Voices for Peace, said Monday. 

Rev. Pamela Kurtz, pastor at the Berkeley Methodist United Church, which has displayed signs calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, said her church’s own signs calling for peace had also been defaced. “We keep putting them up, because love overcomes hate, peace overcomes violence whether it is with words or physicality or emotion, and hope overcomes despair,” Kurtz said Monday.

Majdi Gaith, a co-owner of Jaffa Coffee Roasters, which is just two blocks east of the clinic and which Islamophobic vandals have also targeted multiple times, spoke about how exhausting it was to watch “my people slaughtered” — he is a Bay Area native but also has citizenship in the West Bank — while facing hatred in Berkeley as well.

“I’m running a business with my brothers, and we get defaced and vandalized,” a dehydrated Gaith, who was fasting for Ramadan, said Monday. “We’re fighting inflation, we’re fighting division, we’re fighting a two-party system that’s broken, and we still have to fight this hatred.”

Berkeley hate crimes on the rise

Majdi Gaith outside his family-run coffee shop on the corner of University and McGee avenues. The “Free Palestine” sign in the window, gifted by a customer after their opening in June, has been vandalized repeatedly. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

Reported hate crimes spiked in Berkeley beginning in 2021, according to police data. From 2016, when the Berkeley Police Department began publishing data, through 2020, there were between seven and 24 hate crimes reported each year. There were 41 in 2021, 35 in 2022, 46 in 2023 and 45 in 2024. The demographics most frequently targeted in those years were Pacific Islanders in 2021, Black victims in 2022 and 2023 and the LGBTQ community in 2024. Data for 2025 are not yet available.

Police did not specify whether it was investigating this case as a hate crime but a spokesperson did say that “acts of hate and vandalism have no place in our community, and we stand together in condemning this behavior.”

“Since October of 2023, there has been an increase overall in the number of anti-Jewish hate incidents, and a slight uptick in anti-Arab or anti-Muslim hate incidents,” Berkeley police spokesperson Officer Jessica Perry said in an email. “In 2024, Anti-Jewish hate crimes made up 18.6% of overall hate crimes. Anti-Muslim made up 4.65% and Anti-Arab was 6.98% of the 2024 total.” There was “no suspect information available,” she said.

Councilmember Igor Tregub, whose district includes Mosaed’s clinic and who attended the vigil Monday, said that he and his colleagues Cecilia Lunaparra and Terry Taplin were working on an emergency resolution they hoped to bring to the council’s March 11 meeting noting an uptick in hate crimes in recent years and said he “condemns this act and all other acts of Islamophobia.” 

Mayor Adena Ishii wrote in a statement she was “deeply disturbed and saddened.” “Hate has no place in our city and must not be tolerated,” she wrote. 

Organizers chose the South Berkeley Senior Center as their location because the Peace and Justice Commission meets there, and was scheduled Monday to discuss a resolution “opposing an American occupation and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza.” But that item was pulled from the commission’s agenda without explanation, and it is unclear whether the commission will take it up again in the future. The commission previously passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Clinic received voicemail applauding the graffiti

Inside the Berkeley Community Physical Therapy clinic. Credit: Ximena Natera, Berkeleyside/CatchLight Local

Mosaed’s clinic is closed on weekends but office manager Donise Adair nevertheless spotted the graffiti Saturday evening, when she popped into Trader Joe’s across University to pick up some lemonade. She snapped a picture to send to Mosaed. Adair said both women have worked there in one capacity or another for 14 years. Mosaed took over the clinic as owner in 2019.

Some of the staff at Berkeley Community Physical Therapy have become inured to graffiti, and even to insults. The clinic has displayed pro-Palestinian posters and flyers since well before the conflict between Israel and Palestine escalated sharply in October 2023, Adair said.

Passersby would stop and gawk at the posters several times a day, occasionally banging on or kicking windows, Adair said. Then there are the voicemails. 

“We had a horrible one this morning,” Adair said Monday. The caller “went off the rails about, ‘you guys are finally getting what you deserve,’” she said.

“You may think that with hate and anger and aggression, and trying to erase people, you can get somewhere,” Mosaed said when asked what she might say if she could confront the vandal. But “there will always be a movement, a mass movement of people against injustice,” she said.