RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is the worst of times. It is the worst of times.

While America certainly suffered light years more during the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Jim Crow era, that hardly comforts a nation in which nothing seems to go right, on a planet where everything seems to go wrong.

Wednesday offered fresh grimness. Newlyweds Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, left their six-month-old daughter with her grandmother. They then went to Farook’s workplace in San Bernardino, Calif., and stormed into a Christmas luncheon. The young couple looked at the very same people who recently threw them a baby shower. And then they opened fire, murdering 14 of them, and wounding 21 others.

After some of the 300 intrepid police officers who responded to this emergency cornered and liquidated these killers, they discovered that they had converted their home into a pipe-bomb factory. Further investigation may prove that these two crusaded against poor working conditions. However, Farook’s devout Muslim faith and the couple’s recent sojourn in Saudi Arabia suggest that this may be a blood-soaked example of militant-Islamic terrorism on American soil.

San Bernardino exploded six days after Robert Dear’s one-man atrocity in Colorado Springs. He allegedly burst into a Planned Parenthood clinic, pulled his rifle’s trigger, and continued until three people were dead and nine wounded.

The killings in San Bernardino have once again led to predictable criticism of U.S. culture. “Just another day in the United States of America, another day of gunfire, panic, and fear,” a BBC reporter tut-tutted. ​Obama incorrectly opined: “This just doesn’t happen in other countries. . . . [We need to] take basic steps that would make it harder — not impossible, but harder — for individuals to get access to weapons.”

Many foreigners and President Obama don’t understand that our Bill of Rights and the existence of 350 million weapons in this country make gun control a non-solution for most aspects of the problem. Dealing seriously with terrorist threats and mental-health-system failures would bear more fruit.

So before we launch into another cul-de-sac debate on gun control, let’s note that, when it comes to acts of real terrorism, the U.S. has had an enviable response record since 9/11. No major attack against the homeland has been mounted, and in cases such as that in San Bernardino our law-enforcement forces have responded magnificently to kill the suspect and prevent further violence.

European countries have not had as enviable a record. Take the terrorist attacks that have swept the continent in the last few years, from London buses, to a Spanish train station, to two deadly attacks in Paris in just the last year. Despite all the carnage, Europe has a whole has not yet woken up to the terrorist threat.

In a dusty hovel somewhere in Iraq, ISIS press officer Mohommet shuffled nervously as Imam Muhammad cast an angry eye over the shame-faced young man he had summoned to his presence.

“By the beard of the Prophet, you’re an incompetent dill,” snarled Muhammad. “Here we have yet another surprise attack on the kufr in their lair, and do we get any credit? No!”

Mohommet went to say something in his defence but was silenced by Muhammad’s escalating fury.

“I mean, seriously, why don’t we just put your head on a pike and be done with it? Clearly, there is no brain between those ears!”

Again Mohommet went to speak. Again he was cut off.

“Allah’s latest martyrs shoot up a Christmas party, kill 14 infidels and plunge another Crusader city into chaos, and what do I see everywhere in the infidel press? No credit where credit is due, that’s what I see!”

As analysts hand-wring over why Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik chose colleagues as a target — thus stoking assumptions of a “mixed” terrorism motive that included being sparked by some disagreement or grudge with Farook’s co-workers — the reason for the location of Wednesday’s massacre could simply be linked to terrorists’ focus on the holiday.

Al-Qaeda and ISIS have encouraged attacks on Christmas Day and at Christmas-themed events to take advantage of vulnerable crowds and to strike at the heart of a Christian holiday.

Farook’s division at the San Bernardino County health department rented out the auditorium at the Inland Regional Center, a complex that provided aid to the developmentally disabled, for their annual Christmas party. It was part meeting, part banquet for the environmental health office, an event that police said Farook had attended the previous year. Police said there was a Christmas tree in the room and all of the tables were decked out in decorations; some of the deceased and injured were guests of county employees.

These are confusing times, as a generation unfamiliar with the nature of evil senses a gathering storm. It’s easy to blame guns when you don’t understand that the West is engaged in a multi-front struggle for existence with evil.

What is happening in San Bernardino, in Paris, in small Coptic churches, and on the streets of London isn’t about guns, knives, and high-capacity magazines. It’s about an experience familiar across the ages: when evil starts to march.

These horrors are the experiences of individuals across history, when the very existence of domestic tranquility is jeopardized. Instead of fleeing our village for the safety of the next, we simply don’t go shopping or out to dinner — at least for now.

Shooting suspect Tashfeen Malik passed a DHS counterterrorism screening as part of her vetting for a K-1 fiancee visa last year, but barring any criminal or terrorist background there was little chance DHS would have been able to detect whether she had become radicalized.

Syed Farook, the other half of the terror duo, reportedly got engaged to 27-year-old Pakistani national Malik during a trip overseas in 2014.

Via the Los Angeles Times:

Co-workers recalled Farook telling them that he met his wife online and was making a trip to Saudi Arabia to marry her.

He spent nine days in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2014, according to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C.

When Farook returned to the U.S. in July 2014, he brought Malik on a so-called fiancee visa, law enforcement officials said. They subsequently married and she was granted a conditional green card last summer.

In order to obtain the green card, the couple “had to prove that their marriage was legitimate, and Ms. Malik had to provide her fingerprints and pass criminal and national security background checks using F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security databases.”

Rham Emanuel was very close to the Clintons and in 1993, he was appointed as Assistant to the President for Political Affairs and as the Senior Advisor to the President for Policy and Strategy where he served until 1988…..rsk
There is a reason Chicago mayor and former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel earned the nickname “Rahmbo”. He is ruthless and relentless in acquiring and preserving power, and has no reservations about throwing people under the political bus to protect himself or his clients. He was a master at protecting President Obama’s political backside and is now busily protecting himself.

Chicago police chief Garry McCarthy, appointed by Emanuel, resigned Tuesday under pressure from Emanuel who claimed McCarthy had lost the trust of those he had pledged to serves, with Mayor Emanuel making the announcement with typical political double-speak:

“This morning I formally asked Supt. McCarthy for his resignation,” Emanuel said at a news conference announcing a newly-formed task force on police accountability. He said while he was grateful for McCarthy’s service, it is an “undeniable fact that the public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded.”

But that public trust in a crime-fighting policy that focused on controlling guns and not gangs at Emanuel’s direction had long ago eroded long before the video was released that showed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014. Chicago, under the leadership — if that’s the right word — had watched its children being slaughtered by gang bangers, from Demario Bailey, murdered for his Chicago Bull’s jacket, to Hadiya Pendleton, shot blocks from President Obama’s Chicago residence, to the latest horror, the murder by gang member of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee in a Chicago alley as he begged for his life.

The killers in San Bernardino hadn’t even been identified Wednesday before President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of Progressive America had blamed the murders on the lack of “common-sense gun safety laws.” The motives of the shooters apparently didn’t matter. But now that more details about the two killers are dribbling out, motive may turn out to be relevant in a way that Mr. Obama and the left won’t find so politically congenial.

Law enforcement officials haven’t made judgments about the motives of Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, for opening fire with semiautomatic weapons on a meeting of county employees. This restraint is more admirable than Mr. Obama’s rush to political judgment. Perhaps Farook had long seethed with animosity toward his work colleagues, or he had some personal feud or mental illness.

But the couple had certainly prepared for more than a single act of revenge. They came armed with pipe bombs with a remote trigger, which didn’t detonate, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Police say they found 12 more “pipe bomb type devices” and material to produce IEDs at the couple’s home. These are the tools of the modern jihadist.

Republicans talk often about using the “power of the purse” to rein in a lawless Obama administration. If they mean it, they ought to use their year-end spending bill to stop a textbook case of outrageous executive overreach.

This scandal comes courtesy of the Justice Department, which for 16 months has engaged in a scheme to undermine Congress’s spending authority by independently transferring dollars to President Obama’s political allies. The department is in the process of funneling more than half-a-billion dollars to liberal activist groups, at least some of which will actively support Democrats in the coming election.

It works likes this: The Justice Department prosecutes cases against supposed corporate bad actors. Those companies agree to settlements that include financial penalties. Then Justice mandates that at least some of that penalty money be paid in the form of “donations” to nonprofits that supposedly aid consumers and bolster neighborhoods.

The Justice Department maintains a list of government-approved nonprofit beneficiaries. And surprise, surprise: Many of them are liberal activist groups. The National Council of La Raza. The National Urban League. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition. NeighborWorks America (which awards grants to left-leaning community organization groups, and has been compared with Acorn).

Wednesday’s mass-murderer had recently argued with one of the victims, a pro-Israel conservative, insisting that Islam is a peaceful religion.

Well here’s a possible motive: a strongly pro-Israel, anti-Islamic, politically conservative Evangelical Christian was one of the victims of the mass murder in San Bernardino. Not only that, but the man posted on social media the day before the attack that he had recently received threats, including a death threat.

How do we know this?

Information about the victims is finally being released.

By 3:30 p.m. local time on Thursday, Dec. 3, the families of all fourteen of the deceased victims of Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California had been notified. Once that was completed, the San Bernardino County Coroner then released the names, ages, last residence and date of birth for each victim.