RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even with many details about the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre still unknown, law-enforcement officials see a chilling terror danger from extremist sympathizers who, unnoticed by authorities, are able to amass deadly arsenals to attack vulnerable gatherings anywhere in the U.S.

Much about the case has crystallized trends that officials have feared for years: The attackers, a young married couple with a baby, had never surfaced as subjects of any terror investigation and lived apparently ordinary suburban lives while secretly stockpiling guns, ammunition and homemade bombs.

The attacks Wednesday believed carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook, a religious Muslim and U.S. citizen, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a native of Pakistan, targeted a gathering of county workers far from any high-profile metropolis. The couple entered the room armed to kill a lot of people, quickly.

“Terrorists have adapted and evolved in order to carry out heinous plots since 9/11, and this tragedy reinforces the need for law enforcement to evolve its intelligence-gathering and investigative techniques,’’ said U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

As the shooting rampage was about to begin, authorities said, Ms. Malik posted a message on Facebook pledging her allegiance to the leader of Islamic State. Pipe bombs later found at the couple’s Redlands, Calif., home echoed designs posted online by the al Qaeda publication, Inspire. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had evidence the couple showed signs of radicalization.

The day after the San Bernardino jihadist attack that left fourteen dead and even more wounded, my old boss, Rudy Giuliani, came out and said what most sane people are thinking. After hours of pained, halting, incoherent babbling by public officials from President Obama on down about whether the mass-killing by two heavily armed, obviously well-trained Muslims constituted a terrorist attack, Rudy exploded:

You can come to one clear conclusion with the information they have right now. This is an act of terror. The question was motivation. . . . The question here is not, is it an act of terror. We’re beyond that. When you got two assault weapons, two handguns, you’re in body armor, you got a home that’s booby-trapped. You’ve [ACM: meaning “they’ve”] been practicing to do this. . . . If you can’t come to a conclusion at this point that this was an act of terror, you should find something else to do for a living besides law enforcement. I mean, you’re a moron.

Hard to argue with that.

John Esposito’s cohorts at Georgetown University presented a new online film showing Muslims in America as merely good neighbors wanting to commit random acts of senseless charity, but closer scrutiny reveals problems with the evidence.

“Muslims “are not the problem they are the solution,” leftist writer Eli Clifton simplistically states in American Muslims: Facts vs. Fiction, a short video that premiered November 19 at Georgetown University. While presenting Muslims as charitable good neighbors, the film and subsequent panel discussion before an auditorium audience of about 200 obscured various troubling facts about this faith community.

The film narration cites statistics to argue that “American Muslims are an integral part of our society” and parallel wider trends concerning matters such as religious observance and recycling. Tarek El-Messidi, the founder of the Muslim apologetics organization Celebrate Mercy, states that mercy “is really the cornerstone of what Islam teaches.” Yet the film’s profiled Muslim leaders, such as Congressman Keith Ellison and law professor Azizah al-Hibri (whose acolyte Qasim Rashid has bizarre ideas on free speech), are not necessarily all-American. A document that Mohamad Magid,president of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), discusses as a counter to Islamic State (IS) doctrinal credentials is also rather disingenuous.

In the wake of the San Bernadino Islamic terrorist attack, President Barack Obama on Friday continued to defend his ridiculed claim that climate change will lead to more violent extremism around the world. During his interview by CBS This Morning, Obama doubled down on what many called an absurd statement saying that global warming leads to severe flooding and disturbing shifts in weather patterns, people in vulnerable parts of the world could begin to embrace extremist ideologies or radical religious movements.

“As human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen,” Obama asserted. “And, you know, if you look at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families, that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.”

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?