Shredded Plans Show San Bernardino Jihadis Made Elaborate Plans for Their Massacre
Shredded Plans Show San Bernardino Jihadis Made Elaborate Plans for Their Massacre
But the Southern California News Group still finds their motive ‘unclear’.
By Robert Spencer
It was revealed last Saturday, according to the Southern California News Group (SCNG), that a paper that had been fed into a shredder after the December 2, 2015 jihad massacre in San Bernardino, California has been “reassembled like a puzzle by federal investigators,” and reveals “the shooters’ planning for the siege that killed 14 people and wounded 22 others at the Inland Regional Center.” It reveals careful, detailed, cold-blooded planning for murder, but why Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik carried out this massacre is unknown, at least according to the SCNG, which insists that “the couple’s motive remains unclear.”
No one could possibly think the motive of this couple was unclear unless one was absolutely drowning in a tidal wave of willful ignorance. The paper detailing the couple’s plans was shredded by Syed Rizwan Farook’s mother Rafia, which is in itself an indication that the family of the murderers was not entirely inclined to be forthcoming with investigators.
Initially, one of the Farook family lawyers, David Chesley, declared: “None of the family members had any idea that this was going to take place. They were totally shocked.” Even in stories that reported this, however, the story started to unravel. No sooner had the Associated Press quoted Chesley that it noted that he and another Farook family lawyer, Mohammad Abuershaid, said that “Farook’s mother lived with the couple but she stayed upstairs and didn’t notice they had stockpiled 12 pipe bombs and well over 4,500 rounds of ammunition.”
Farook’s mother didn’t notice the twelve pipe bombs and well over 4,500 rounds of ammunition because she “stayed upstairs”? Was she an invalid, then, who never ventured downstairs at all? If so, why did the couple leave their six-month-old daughter in her care when they went off to shoot Infidels for Allah?
Syed Rizwan Farook’s father was more credible when he characterized Rafia, who is his ex-wife, as “very religious,” like the killer, to whom he referred as Rizwan. “Rizwan was the mama’s boy,” he recounted, “and she is very religious like him. Once we had a dispute about the historical figure of Jesus, my son yelled that I was an unbeliever and decided that marriage with my wife had to end.” The son insisted on the divorce because he considered the father an “unbeliever.”
What’s more, old man Farook said that his son was an open supporter of the Islamic State, and, of course, hated Israel: “He said he shared the ideology of al-Baghdadi to create an Islamic state, and he was obsessed with Israel.” The couple paused during their massacre to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. The “unbeliever” Papa Farook then told his son to bide his time since, in the immortal words of Tom Lehrer, everybody hated the Jews: “I kept telling him always: stay calm, be patient, in two years Israel will no longer exist. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China, America too, nobody wants the Jews there.”
So right in the heart of sunny Redlands, California, where Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik lived with their baby and Rafia (however safely ensconced upstairs, away from the pipe bombs, Grandma may have been), there was an open supporter of the Islamic State and an open supporter of the concept of the caliphate. Then we must not forget the winsome Tashfeen, who was linked to a jihadi mosque in Pakistan, and who had become, in one of her teacher’s words, “a religious person” who often told people “to live according to the teachings of Islam.”
But their motive remains unclear!
Interestingly enough, Rafia was also an active member of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) openly supports Sharia and the caliphate, and has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as to the Pakistani jihad group Jamaat-e-Islami.
The motive of the San Bernardino jihad massacre is anything but unclear, except to those who wish to deny that there is a global jihad being waged against the United States, and to ignore the fact that the Islamic State has repeatedly called upon individual Muslims in the U.S. to carry out “lone wolf” jihad attacks. Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife and mother, and the fourteen dead left in their wake, stand as an object lesson regarding how urgently our law enforcement and intelligence operations need to adopt a realistic approach to the jihad threat, and to discard today’s prevailing politically correct fantasies. But the dead bodies are going to have to be piled up much higher for that reform even to become a possibility.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 21 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster.