RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.