THE Islamic Society of North America’s headquarters sit atop a grassy hill overlooking Plainfield, Ind. The complex includes a prayer hall, a space for community events and a field house with a basketball court and playground. It is surrounded by cornfields. As the largest mosque in the Indianapolis area, it draws hundreds of families, especially during Ramadan and on holidays.

My own family was one of those. When I was growing up in the Indianapolis suburbs, we’d visit the mosque for Eid holiday prayers. After services, we’d say awkward hellos to my parents’ friends, stand in line for stale doughnuts and tea and I’d try to find people my age to shoot a basketball around. In short, it is a fairly typical American house of worship. And last weekend, it became a target of vandalism. Slurs spray-painted on its brick exterior — most of them too crude to quote — suggested all Muslims are suicide bombers or members of the Islamic State.

Anti-Muslim hatred in the United States has grown in recent years. The “Ground Zero Mosque” episode in 2010 and successive anti-mosque protests across the country signaled a simmering Islamophobia. In 2015, the simmer came to a boil. That January, after a pair of terrorist attacks in Paris, pundits and conservative officials propagated a discredited myth about Shariah-run zones in European cities off limits to non-Muslims. Hashtags like #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. A month later, three Muslim youths were shot dead in their North Carolina apartment in what many people said was a hate crime.

An examination of anti-Muslim hatred in the last few years can easily devolve into a laundry list: armed demonstrators picketing at a mosque in Phoenix, arson at a mosque in the Coachella Valley in Southern California, a severed pig’s head placed in front of a mosque in Philadelphia. But the most alarming signs accompanied the Republican presidential race, as each candidate seemed gleefully willing to one-up the others in vilifying Muslims.