RUTHFULLY YOURS

Law enforcement officials in San Bernardino and Los Angeles may have investigated Syed Farook one week before the shooting on the community development center on December 2, 2015, that left 14 dead and 17 injured, according to a review of police communications immediately following the attacks.

Federal and local authorities have insisted that neither of the attackers had aroused suspicion before the assault earlier this month and that both Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were unknown to law enforcement and US intelligence. But conversations between law enforcement officials in the hours after the shootings leave a different impression.

Farook is first identified by name at approximately 11:40am local time, just a half hour after the shooting began. The information came from a county worker, who noted that Farook had been acting nervous and left the holiday party twenty minutes before the shooting began.

In a subsequent exchange at approximately 12:08pm the dispatcher addresses an officer nicknamed “Trav” upon hearing “Syed Farook.” She says: “Reference that name, I believe one of the [garbled] was working that name up for something last week. I’ll have to check.”

A petition addressed to Adele, President Obama, and Billboard on Change.org demands that the singer admit that she has “little talent” and is succeeding mainly because of her white privilege.

“Adele sold over 3.38 million copies of her album ‘25′ and the media is praising her as if Adele’s success has everything to do with talent,” reads the petition, written by Rhianna Jones.

“Rather, it’s her white privilege that has put her on top,” it declares.

The petitioners also “demand that Adele donates her money to African-American causes such as #Blacklivesmatter.”

It’s not clear why exactly the petition is also addressed to President Obama — perhaps Ms. Jones is outraged that the leader of the free world hasn’t pushed the less important issues like ISIS aside to deal with the more serious ones like a singer’s being white and successful at the same time. (I mean, would an executive order requiring Adele to admit she is only successful because she is white and give away her money to people who are not white in order to stay in the country really be too much to ask?)

Why would Ms. Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan but lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia, want to come to the United States?

She obviously hated the United States and its values, at least enough to help stockpile an arsenal and to kill 14 people and wound another 21 in San Bernardino.

Or for that matter, why did her husband and co-mass-murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, if he was unhappy with his native America, not return to his parents’ Pakistan, where he might, in greater peace, have practiced Sharia law, memorizing his Koranic verses without the temptations of crass and uncouth American culture?

Or why did not family members or friends notice the couple’s assembling of a veritable arsenal of assault in their townhouse? And if they did notice, why did they not help to protect their adopted country?

And why did a spokesman for the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), Hussam Ayloush, as if suffering from a politically correct tic, almost immediately tie terrorism in the U.S. with American foreign policy? “Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy, as Americans, as the West, has fueled that extremism,” he said. “ . . . We are partly responsible. Terrorism is a global problem, not a Muslim problem.” Was that pop exegesis designed to show Americans how CAIR abhors Islamic-inspired terrorism inside the U.S.?

Nicholas Teausant, the Californian who sought to join ISIS in Syria and spoke of bombing a “Zionist” daycare center, has pleaded guilty to supporting a terrorist organization. According to news reports, prosecutors had sought approval from the Justice Department for a plea deal with Teausant, but on December 1 he pleaded guilty apart from any such agreement.

The day after Teausant’s guilty plea, American-born Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani national, murdered 14 Americans and injured 21 in San Bernardino, California. The mass murder was the worst terrorist attack since September 11, 2001 but in the early going public officials hesitated to identify the killings as terrorism. The president invoked “workplace violence,” as he had in the case of Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers at Ford Hood, Texas, in 2009.

Unlike that case, San Bernardino police managed to kill Farook and Tashfeen in a shootout with no loss of innocent life. The couple’s residence, police and FBI agents discovered, was a veritable bomb factory and arsenal.