Guards and good neighbors: mosques protect members amid attacks

(The Christian Science Monitor) When members arrived at the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Baitus-Salaam Mosque in Hawthorne, California, on Sunday, they saw that the building had been vandalized: a spray-painted "Jesus" covered the front gate along a busy six-lane road, similar to the "Jesus is the way" graffiti that had appeared on the Islamic Center of Hawthorne, a few minutes away.

Then they saw the hand grenade.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department bomb squad determined that the grenade was fake. But 24 hours after police arrested a 23-year-old man for setting fire to another Southern California mosque in Coachella Valley, the incident added to Muslim Americans' worries that a toxic combination of public fear and anti-Muslim political rhetoric is setting the scene for a record number of attacks on individuals and their houses of worship, leaving some members afraid to attend services.