Tag Archives: Terrorism

CNN: San Bernadino shooter in contact with suspected Islamic terrorists

This article is from the radically leftist CNN, of all places.

I heard CNN trying to blame the shooting on violent video games (“maybe he played too much Call of Duty”) yesterday. But today they decided to do some journalism for a change:

Syed Rizwan Farook — one-half of the couple behind the San Bernardino shooting massacre — was apparently radicalized and in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Farook’s apparent radicalization contributed to his role in the mass shooting, with his wife Tashfeen Malik, of 14 people on Wednesday during a holiday party for the San Bernardino County health department, where Farook worked, sources said.

[…]Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia for several weeks in 2013 on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are required to take at least once in their lifetime, which didn’t raise red flags, said two government officials. It was during this trip that he met Malik, a native of Pakistan who came to the United States on a “fiancée visa” and later became a lawful permanent resident.

Officials had previously said that neither Farook and Malik were known to the FBI or on a list of potentially radicalized people. Nor had they had any known interactions with police until Wednesday’s deadly shootout that culminated in their deaths.

Yet Farook himself had communicated by phone and via social media with more than one person being investigated for terrorism, law enforcement officials said. A separate U.S. government official said the 28-year-old has “overseas communications and associations.”

Breitbart News reports on Obama’s reaction to these facts:

President Barack Obama says that it’s possible yesterday’s attack in California, where two people killed 14 and injured 17 others, was terrorist related. But he’s also holding out the possibility it was workplace violence.

“It is possible that this is terrorist-related, but we don’t know; it is also possible this was workplace-related,” Obama said, adding, “we don’t know why they did it.”

Obama added that it was important to understand the “nature of the workplace relationship” between the individuals to fully understand the attacks, raising the possibility that it could be “mixed motives” for the attacks.

[…]The president’s remarks show he still hasn’t changed his tone since he first reacted to the event as a another mass shooting in the United States.

Obama thinks it might be “workplace violence” again? That’s what he said about Major Nidal Hasan, who was also in touch with radical Islamic terrorists before his terrorist attack at Fort Hood.

Workplace violence?

Time magazine reports that their house was full of bullets and explosives:

The married couple whose shooting rampage left 14 dead and 21 wounded at a social work centerin San Bernardino, Calif. had filled their home with thousands of bullets and hundreds of tools to make bombs, authorities said Thursday.

Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik had enough ammunition to pose a further threat had they not been killed, according to San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan.

“Clearly they were equipped and they could have done another attack,” Burguan said.

The couple had than 1,400 rifle rounds and 200 9-mm handgun bullets with them as police hunted them down. Authorities found 12 pipe bombs and “hundreds of tools” to make more explosives at their home at Redlands.

Investigators also found nearly 5,000 more bullets and several hundred long-rifle rounds at the home, according to police.

[…]The FBI said it’s investigating whether the suspects’ IED designs came from Al-Qaeda’s “Inspire” magazine.

Workplace violence? What planet is Obama living on? And this isn’t the first time that he’s pulled this stupidity, either.

Remember, the Obama administration describes Islamic terrorism as “senseless violence“. Democrats describe shootings my Muslims at army bases as “workplace violence“. Democrats describe attacks on Israeli civilians as “random violence“. Democrats called shooting at Jews in France “random“. Democrats describe investigations about the Benghazi terrorist attack a “sideshow“, after they lied and tried to say the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a video. And this is the party that more than half of our country votes for at election time. The State Departmentsays that radical Islam’s root cause is that we don’t give them “job opportunities“.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are hard at work protecting us from… global warming?

Barack Obama says that fighting global warming is a rebuke to Islamic terrorism
Barack Obama says that fighting global warming is a rebuke to Islamic terrorism

CNS News explains the Democrat response to Islamic terrorism:

Not radical Muslim terrorism, not an unsecured border, not an ever-growing federal debt that now exceeds $18 trillion, not the fact that 109 million live in households on federal welfare programs. These are not the greatest threats facing us today.

“No challenge–no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

[…]President Obama then said that the U.S. military is saying that “climate change” is causing immediate risks to our national security–although he did not explain exactly what this meant or how the “Pentagon” had arrived at this conclusion.

“The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” said Obama. “We should act like it.”

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion a year of American taxpayer money to help other countries combat global warming. That’s the real priority, you understand.

The cost of political correctness

And lest you think that it is harmless when Democrats call people “racist” for pointing out the links between Islam and terrorism, read this article from CBS News: (H/T Sooper Mexican)

Neighbors in Redlands were shocked that the suspects had ties to their area.

“I was in awe that it was happening four houses down from my property,” one neighbor said.

A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.

“We sat around lunch thinking, ‘What were they doing around the neighborhood?’” he said.  “We’d see them leave where they’re raiding the apartment.”

Should we really be trusting Democrats to keep us safe? Are they really capable of calling evil “evil”, or does their ideology force them to call Americans evil, and America’s enemies good?

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San Bernardino shooter indentified: Syed R. Farook

The Blaze says this is Syed Farook
The Blaze says this is Syed Farook

(Photo credit: The Blaze, H/T Breitbart)

The Washington Times reports:

Syed R. Farook has been identified by multiple news outlets as one of the suspects in the San Bernardino mass shooting that ended in the death of one male and one female suspect in a gunfight with police.

A source told NBC News that Mr. Farook’s brother also is believed to be a suspect.

The Los Angeles Times, citing two law enforcement sources, reported that Syed Farook was the deceased male suspect, though the identity of the dead woman remained unknown.

The paper, citing public records, wrote that a Syed R. Farook was an environmental health specialist for the San Bernardino County government, though the paper cautioned that it might not be the same person as the suspect.

According to the New York Daily News, Mr. Farook’s father, whom the paper did not name, confirmed in an interview that his son inspected restaurants and hotels for health violations, and was married with a child.

He also identified his son as “very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”

Gunmen killed 14 people and wounded another 17 at an office party for the county’s public health department. According to San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan, there was an altercation that prompted someone to leave in anger.

Some news outlets reported that the angry person came back with one or more armed friends to carry out the attack.

“Someone did leave, there was some type of dispute at the party but we have no idea if those are the people who came back,” Chief Burguan said.

It was unclear Wednesday night how many gunmen committed the attack — witness and victim accounts varied from one to three.

The leftist Daily Beast has more on the suspect:

Farook, who also went by his middle name, Raheel, was a business taxes representative for the California State Board of Equalization, according to his LinkedIn profile. He is a 2003 graduate La Sierra High School, and most recently studied finance at California State University Fullerton until 2013.

Records show Farook bought a two bedroom Corona home in March 2014. Farouk’s social media profile shows he is married and has at least one young child. His wife did not return messages left on Wednesday.

Farook lived at a home with his wife and children in Corona, California. The Daily Beast knocked on the home’s door and was met by a man who said, “My name is Farook.” When asked if he knew Sayed, the man said, “Of course I know him but I have nothing to say.” When asked about Syed being named as a suspect, he said, “I have nothing to say.”

Behind Farook, was a brightly lit home with low-slung sectional couches and boxes for appliances. The smell of basmati rice cooking came wafting through the door. A set of womens sandals sat outside of the security door.

Five minutes after he answered the door, Farook got into a white car and drove away, answering questions again with, “I have nothing to say.”

The Daily Beast contacted Farooq’s sister, Saira Khan, by phone on Wednesday shortly after the shooting. She said the media was jumping to conclusions on identifying the suspect and said that her brother was at work. Khan said she would try to get in touch with her brother and pass along his contact information.

So, he has a degree, so he isn’t uneducated. He has a job, so he isn’t poor. He works for the government, so he’s not some sort of anti-government person. It’s possible that this could be an instance of workplace violence, but two factors seem to weigh against that. First, there were three people involved, and workplace violence almost always involves a lone bad actor. Second, workplace violence people don’t have pipe bombs, AK-74 rifles and military clothing ready to go. It seems to me more likely that Syed was part of something bigger than mere workplace violence. How did he get his hands on AK-74 rifles and pipe bombs? Where did he learn to make these explosives?

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats try to spin this one. Will they say that the violence was caused by global warming, as Democrat Bernie Sanders often argues? Or will they say that it was caused by unemployment, as the State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said? Maybe they will say that government needs to disarm law-abiding citizens, in order to protect them from criminals? Who knows, we’ll have to see what they say tomorrow.

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Why Democrat talk of taking in Syrian refugees infuriates me

Women for bigger government, higher taxes
Women for bigger government, higher taxes

Obama wants to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, then another 100,000 in 2016 and another 100,000 in 2017.

In previous posts, I have laid out several reasons for why we should not take in Syrian refugees. First and foremost is the cost of taking in Syrian refugees – pegged at $6.5 billion total for just the first 10,000 refugees. Canada is taking in twice that number, and their government costed their plan out at $1.2 billion for only six years. Obama himself doesn’t earn any money, has never worked in the private sector. So he isn’t going to pay for this with his own $6.5 billion with his own hard work. He’s going to pass that bill onto young people to pay, but today he’ll preen for the cameras and show how “generous” he is for spending other people’s money. He already added $10 trillion onto the national debt, doubling it.

Second, we don’t have the national security in place to vet the Syrian refugees. The news lately has been full of cases of people traveling with Syrian documents, and some of them trying to come into the USA through our porous Southern border. In general, we should assume from the many national security failures of the Democrats that they cannot be trusted on anything they say about things being safe. We have the Bradley Manning leak, the Snowden leak, the Hillary Clinton private unsecure e-mail server hack, the Benghazi cover-up, the gun-running to Mexican drug cartels, the leak of the planned Israeli strike on Iran, the leaking of the name of the British spy who foiled the airline bombing attack, and on and on and on. Although none of these are remembered by Democrat supporters of the President, they paint a picture of the administration’s incompetence at protecting Americans. In fact, senior officials in Obama’s own administration confirm that the vetting process is unreliable. They can’t even ask them questions that would help to identify them as terrorist risks.

Third, although many of the refugees are women and children, we have to make two points about that. The first point is that women and children are frequently used in Islamic terrorist attacks. Here’s an article tracing some of the recent Islamic terror attacks involving women and children. We need look no further than the Boston bombers to see how letting in Muslim children can turn into a terrorist risk. They were carefully vetted by the Democrats, and yet they murdered anyway. Second point, there is something to be said about letting in a lot of Muslim immigrants in any case, since a critical mass of Muslim immigrants can create the environment that allows terrorist attacks to be planned. Just read this article on how the Islamic “no go” zones in Paris played a part in the recent terrorist attacks there.

Fourth point is about stewardship. What should we do in order to help the refugees. I’m running short of space, so I’ll just point you to this article that argues that it is a much better use of our money to help the refugees where they are. We can help many more refugees if we leave them over there than we can help if we only bring a few here, for the same cost. Although Democrats who are spending other people’s money don’t care to think of who is paying, it’s always a good idea to spend taxpayer money wisely.

The fifth and final point is something I could not articulate, but that was behind my anger at the well-meaning but naive Christians who were calling for us to take on Syrian refugees on Biblical grounds. I think the real reason I was so angry is as follows:

  • Naive Christians do not understand anything that is happening in the Middle East. They just don’t follow it, they don’t know the players, the previous attacks, the risks and threats, nothing.
  • Naive Christians take their cues from a pacificist culture, the left-wing media, and their own fact-free emotions. So, they think that war is NEVER the answer to aggression from evildoers, e.g. – Assad and his controllers in Iran. They just don’t have the understanding of good wars like World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, etc. that were clearly wars that America undertook in order to help others from terror, torture, murder and rape. They don’t understand that setting up Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, Kuwait, etc. with long-term protection and guidance is what allowed them to recover and become peaceful and democratic.
  • Naive Christians had nothing to say about staying the course in Afghanistan and Iraq, invading Syria (which we should have done, instead of attacking Egypt and Libya, which was stupid and pointless) and NOT making a deal with Iran. In short, they have nothing to say about preventing the situations where wars and refugees result in the first place. They just want to ride in sanctimoniously after their benign neglect has failed to work, and then appear to be concerned about peace. But only by spending trillions of taxpayer dollars to clean up around the edges, while leaving the core problem intact.

So with all that said, here is the article that cured my anger once about this. It appears in The Weekly Standard, and it involves the indomitable Bill Kristol, quoting a journalist named Walter Mussell Mead, who voted for Obama in 2008, who now writes about Obama’s lack of seriousness about opposing evil with force, the disaster that resulted, and his attempt to paper over his stupidity with sanctimonious statements about taking in refugees from the mess he himself created.

Here it is:

“To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?

“Obama’s own policy decisions​—​allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—​were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time. .  .  .

“To think that conspicuous moral posturing and holy posing over a symbolic refugee quota could turn President Obama from the goat to the hero of the Syrian crisis is absurd. Wringing your hands while Syria turns into a hell on earth, and then taking a token number of refugees, can be called many things, but decent and wise are not among them. You don’t have to be a xenophobe or a racist or even a Republican to reject this President’s leadership on Syria policy. All you need for that is common sense and a moral compass. .  .  .

“For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today​—​a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.”

Read the whole thing. Really. And remember than people on the Christian left are basically the same in terms of foolishness as people on the secular left. They are not guided by evidence, but by feelings. And they need to be told early and often how their feelings fail to work in real life. Otherwise, we will continue taking their compassionate naivete seriously, and go bankrupt paying for it, or maybe just get ourselves killed by the evil we allowed to fester. I know a lot of naive leftist Christians are trusting Think Progress and Huffington Post to tell us what the Bible says about refugees, but surprise! Think Progress is not that good at Biblical exegesis.

Another good article about how our retreating from a war that was won caused a humanitarian disaster: “What Happens When America Retreats From The Middle East“.