Abid Ahmad felt his stomach tighten last month as he watched a brief video clip on his iPhone of a middle-aged white man shouting at women in headscarves. “You need to hurry!” read the accompanying text from his older sister, who had just witnessed that scene at a meeting in their hometown of Vacaville.
For several days, Facebook announcements about a neighborhood meeting to discuss a proposed expansion of Vacaville’s only mosque had drawn hateful comments decrying the supposed dangers of Islam. Now, while weaving through traffic along Interstate 80 as he sped to the meeting from his office in Concord, Ahmad feared what he was about to face.
“It would end up being worse than I’d ever imagined,” he later said…