Masked Mass Murder
Masked Mass Murder
Five years since Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 innocents in San Bernardino, California.
By Lloyd Billingsley
On December 2, 2015, employees at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, were gathering for a holiday party when they heard multiple popping sounds outside. Some thought it might be fireworks but the center was under fire from Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik. The black-clad pair gunned down two victims then headed inside. A National Police Foundation report provides a chilling account.
“Suddenly, a door swung open and a person clad in all black, with a mask shielding his or her face, stepped inside, wielding what appeared to be an automatic rifle. Without saying a word, the person, now believed to be Farook, opened fire.” Then Tashfeen Malik followed. “She also wore all black and entered the room shooting. Together, the shooters fired more than 100 rounds.” The shooters then “hastily departed, heading out to a black SUV they had parked just outside, leaving behind a chaotic scene of noise, fear, and pain.”
In the ensuing chase, Farook fired at least 81 rounds at the police, wounding one officer. Police took down the terrorists with little collateral damage and inside the SUV they found a trigger apparatus to detonate bombs the Muslims had planted at the Regional Center, where they had already taken 14 lives: Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel.
Isaac Amanios, 60, immigrated from Eritrea to California in 2000 to escape violence and repression. Bennetta Betbadal, 46, fled to America with her family to “escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed Iranian Revolution.”
On December 2, in his first response from the White House, President Obama said it was still an active situation and “we don’t yet know what the motives of the shooters are.” In a December 6 statement, the president failed to mention a single victim and did not name the shooters, both Muslims.
Farook was American and Pakistani-born Malik held a green card but “we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas,” or part of “a broader conspiracy here at home.” In closing, the president said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes,” as well as “our men and women in uniform.”
California attorney general Kamala Harris, in a December 17 statement, said “we must seek justice for those who lost their lives in the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.” The attorney general failed to name any of the victims and her priorities seemed to lie elsewhere.
“Ultimately,” Harris said, “not only is it immoral and contrary to our values to stoke fear and cast aspersions against an entire faith and the millions of law-abiding American Muslims, but it is also strategically unwise. This very community is a critical ally in the short and long term fight combatting terrorism and radicalization here at home and across the world.”
Harris was joined by officials from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR, whose Los Angeles director Hussam Ayloush said “Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric by certain public figures has made Muslim communities an easy target for hate crimes.” Attorney general Harris, Ayloush added, “exemplified leadership” by addressing “the spike in hate crimes against American Muslims and other minorities.”
In a statement one year later, Harris recalled “those who lost their lives and the loved ones they left behind,” but named not a single victim or any of the “brave first responders.” Those were the San Bernardino police, but the word “police” does not appear. In similar style, Farook and Malik were not named, and Harris does not mention their possible motive for “the tragedy that took place.” Like the president, Harris hailed the Muslim community as an ally against terrorism. In this case, it wasn’t.
Muslim convert Enrique Marquez procured weapons for Farook and Malik, and in February of 2017, Marquez pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges. Rafia Farook, mother of Syed, claimed she knew nothing of his deadly plans, but she shredded a map her son had made for the attack. As the U.S. Attorney announced on March 3, 2020, Rafia Farook, agreed to plead guilty to a one-count of “alteration, destruction, and mutilation of records.”
Nothing has emerged about members of the Muslim community attempting to stop the attack. Likewise, the FBI only came into play after the jihadists had murdered 14 people. The mass murder could well foreshadow what conditions would be like under a Biden-Harris administration or the reverse. The FBI would look the other way at Islamic jihadists and politicians would pass off terrorist mass murders as “tragedies” that simply “took place,” with no connection to Islam.
Conditions would be the same as under the “composite character” president David Garrow exposed in the 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. He’s the president who called Nidal Hasan’s mass murder at Fort Hood “workplace violence,” and said “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
The newly released A Promised Land hints that the composite character expects to keep leading from behind and calling the shots. What goes around comes around.