RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”