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San Bernardino’s Jihadi Bonnie and Clyde in Historical Perspective.

[additional-authors]
December 6, 2015

One moral from the San Bernardino massacre: the Jihadi family that slays together stays together to the end.

We now know for pretty sure that Pakistani-born, Tashfeen Malik, probably wore the pants as well as the burqa in the family of her Illinois-born husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, indoctrinating him in holy war against the infidel world.

She grew up in Saudi Arabia, but returned to Pakistan about four years ago, two or so years before her “Internet picture pride” marriage to Farook, to study for a pharmacy degree, which she never achieved but perhaps used to advance her future career as a bomb maker. In Pakistan, she attended the so-called Lal Masjid “Red Mosque,” headed by notorious imam, Maulana Aziz, in Islamabad, one the most extremist and violent mosques in that country. Yet she passed the check for a K-1 “fiancée visa” with flying colors, despite the fact she gave a false address for her recent years in Pakistan on the application. ABC News easily uncovered this fact, but not the Obama Administration’s immigration enforcement bureaucracy which we are asked to trust to vet Syrian refugees.

Why did the couple turn to terrorism, choosing for their murder spree a Christmas party at a county center for the developmentally disabled for Farook’s coworkers with San Bernardino County, for which he was an environmental inspector? The lawyers for the deceased terrorist are still propounding the preposterous workplace violence excuse, citing unsubstantiated reports that somebody—was it the Gentile “Messianic Jewish” coworker, Nicholas Thalasinos, who debated religion with him?—had made fun of his beard. Why did his wife, the mother of a six month-old daughter, also participate? Was it a case of post-partum depression? Or was the couple allergic to Christmas trees or murderously contemptuous of the developmentally disabled and those who worked on their behalf?

And why was the garage of Farook's house a veritable bombing making factory? Were they stocking up on fireworks to celebrate the Chinese New Year before the “beard insult” set him off? Farook's’s family, initially put on display by the apologists for radical Islam at the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), professed to be “shocked, just shocked,” sort of like the similar attitude toward the discovery of gambling at Rick’s joint by the French captain Renault in the film Casablanca.

More broadly, we are asked to believe that nobody had an inkling of trouble in the growing San Bernardino Muslim community, or at the Islamic Center of Riverside, whose imam, Mustafa Kuko, claims to be a leader in instructing Muslim youth against extremism, and which Farook attended daily until three weeks before the attack.

I’m willing to suspend my disbelief, but only if the leadership of the local Muslim community commits to better future monitoring its own flock for signs of “self-radicalization.” The FBI says that many jihadi plots on American soil have been foiled thanks to tips from law abiding American Muslims. We should do everything to encourage—not discourage—American Muslims to continue to come forward to combat extremists in their community. Castigating them, Donald Trump fashion, would be counterproductive.

My fear is that the current media and political firestorm over two score deaths and injuries in San Bernardino will be a tea party compared to the reaction against Muslim Americans—akin to the post-Pearl Harbor backlash against Japanese Americans—that will come if there are future mass casualty jihadi attacks against the Rose Bowl parade or game, the California Aqueduct, the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, or the intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways.

What to do about it? Take the offense by giving the population of Raqqa, Isis’ Syrian capital, 24 hours notice to get out, and then reducing it to rubble in an air campaign modeled on Nixon-Kissinger’s 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi. Nixon escalated then to force the North Vietnamese to sign a peace settlement. Today, extreme dangers from future attacks on the American homeland demand equally ruthless preemption.

Obliterating Raqqa would administer a body blow to ISIS, but without immediately ending our “cold war” with radical Islam. We ultimately won the Cold War with the USSR, yet had to pay a high price at home—measured in the damage done to American values by Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, Hollywood Blacklists, and the conflict over the avoidable Vietnam War—during this long struggle. American Jews, it is now largely forgotten but should not be, were in the crosshairs of Cold War anxieties as the “radical right” of John Birchers and other anti-Jewish true believers targeted them as “comsymps,” dual loyalists, and traitors to the American cause. Of course, the overwhelming majority of American Jews were patriotic through and through, yet they were an easy target for scapegoating because of the prominence of some Jews both in the above ground membership of the Communist party and in its subversive underground, personified by the Rosenberg’s atomic spy network.

Today, French and Belgian Muslims—who are nowhere near as integrated into their societies in the way that American Jews have been—are now in the crosshairs of the new European Right. I think that current fears that American Muslims are already in a similar position are overblown, but the future danger for them is very real.

We should not want to see them scapegoated like American Jews during the Cold War or—infinitely worse—treated like Japanese Americans during World War II.

I fear that the Obama Administration is still substituting ineffectual half measures on Mideast battlefields and equally ineffectual “feel good” rhetoric about American unity and tolerance for decisive action to win our cold war against radical Islam while protecting American Muslims from a backlash orchestrated by the likes of Donald Trump.

We need more than gun control initiatives—whatever their merits—to meet the current threats to our Republic and way of life.

 

UPDATE: In an interview on an Italian news outlet, Sayed Farook's father has admitted that his son was “negatively obsessed with Israel.” This comports with the claims of the family and coreligionists of Nicholas Thalisonos that Farook had threatened to “kill Jews” while warning that Thalisonos “would never see Israel.”

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