RUTHFULLY YOURS

As details began to emerge from the mass murder in California on Wednesday, it became perfectly clear that the perpetrators had set out to emulate the behavior of their Islamist brethren throughout the world.

Whether the Muslim Bonnie and Clyde — hiding in plain sight by “living the American dream” in San Bernardino — belonged to a particular terrorist organization has not yet been established.

But the method to the madness of their political-religious ideology was unmistakable. Leaving a 6-month-old baby behind to commit the kind of slaughter that was likely to result in their own deaths is not something that most parents outside of a mental institution, a radical mosque or the Palestinian Authority could understand.

Nor is it fathomable to Western couples recently blessed with a child to endanger that baby every single day of its short life during the period leading up to the massacre by concocting explosives and booby traps in its vicinity. They are too busy worrying about getting some sleep in between feedings and keeping the new member of their family safe, sound, healthy and happy, while trying to adjust their marriage to accommodate it all.

But Syed Farook, a Pakistani-American, and his Saudi wife, Tashfeen Malik, had more than a mere infant on their minds. After all, what is the value of one little baby compared to the greater good of global jihad in the name of Allah?

How much lower will America sink before it regains its senses? Wednesday, two Muslims walked into a Christmas party at a community service center in San Bernardino, California where one worked. They were wearing body armor and video cameras and carrying automatic rifles, pipe bombs and pistols. They opened fire, killed 14, and wounded 17.

The murderers, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik were killed by police.

Speaking to the Daily News, Farook’s father said his son, “was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”

Farook’s neighbor told the paper that over the past two years, Farook exchanged his Western dress for Islamic gowns and grew a beard.

These data points lead naturally to the conclusion that Farook and his wife were jihadists who killed in order to kill in the name of Islam.

But in America of December 2015, natural conclusions are considered irresponsible, at best.

In an interview with CNN following the shooting, US President Barack Obama said the massacre demonstrates that the US needs stricter gun laws. As for the motives of the shooters, Obama shrugged. “We don’t yet know the motives of the shooters,” he insisted.

Politicians understand that in order to get elected they need to create the illusion that they are addressing their constituents’ concerns. This is not unlike the parents who are awakened in the night by their young child who, startled by a nightmare in the middle of the night, starts crying and screaming.

The drowsy parents want desperately to be able to go back to sleep, but know that must calm their upset child. The dutiful parents stumble into their child’s room, administer a back-rub to the crying child, speaking soothingly, telling the child whatever they think they need to say to calm him/her and perhaps even serving up a glass of warm milk, hoping that the now-placated child will go back to sleep.

Years ago during a conversation with a journalist about immigration and crime, I told him that the Bush administration’s strategy was to create the illusion of aggressively seeking to arrest criminal aliens to placate concerned Americans. I told him that the President would periodically conduct news conferences at which he would highlight some law enforcement operation conducted by the Border Patrol or by ICE agents that had been given tough-sounding names such as “Operation Gatekeeper” and “Operation Return to Sender.”

The San Bernardino jihad massacre is the latest jihad atrocity, but it’s just like the last one, and just like the next one: it has played out in exactly the same way that the last jihad atrocity did, and in just the same way that the next one will play out as well. Mass killings by “radicalized” Muslims are followed by earnest statements from the President and the mainstream media that we must not rush to judgment, that the motive of the shooters was unclear, that we need gun control, that we need to address the real threat of climate change, that Muslims fear “Islamophobia,” and so on. It’s always a new massacre, but it’s always the same story.

Surely by now mainstream media reporters don’t even need to roll out of bed to file their stories. How much legwork does it take to write, “Syed Farook and Tashfeen Melik murdered 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino; yes, Farook was a devout Muslim, but authorities are searching for a motive; moderate Muslims condemned the attack and said they feared anti-Muslim backlash”? Change the names and date, change the number of victims and the place, and they’ve filed that story dozens of times. They can just take out their last New York Times or CNN piece on the Paris jihad attack, change the details, hit send, and pour a cold one.

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.