Ten Years Later, Terror Goes Unnamed

 by Lloyd Billingsley

Ten years ago, on Dec. 2, 2015, Syed Farook arrived at his workplace—the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. As fellow employees prepared for a holiday party, the American-born Muslim slipped out the door. Just before 11 a.m., Farook returned in a black SUV with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistan-born Muslim.

“Out of the blue, multiple popping sounds crackled outside,” first-hand accounts noted in a report by the Policing Institute. Inside, 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.” It was Farook and Malik who “entered the room shooting.” One round hit a sprinkler pipe, causing water to pour from the ceiling as smoke filled the room. In the ensuing chaos:

The shooters walked between tables. If someone moved or made a sound, the shooters fired one or multiple shots into their body.

Many of the conference room’s occupants made it out the door that led to the rest of the building. Some continued until they were outside; others headed for other rooms that they could lock; and still more searched for a place to hide, choosing closets, cabinets, or bathrooms to take shelter.

Bullets tore holes through the interior wall of the conference room. At least one woman was struck by a bullet that had ripped through a wall, and another was shot as she tried to escape through a glass door near where the shooters had entered. Others who ran outside came across the bodies of the first two people killed by the shooters. They had been outside when the shooters arrived, and both appeared to have been killed instantly.

Farook and Malik shot dead Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Nguyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. Just months before, in May 2015, these and other staffers had thrown a baby shower for Farook’s newborn daughter. So the killers knew their victims. When San Bernardino police arrived:

The four officers stared into the conference room. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Bodies were strewn across the floor. Many had devastating wounds. Blood was everywhere. The smell of gunpowder filled their nostrils, and the sprinklers sounded like they were hissing. . . Wounded victims pleaded with them to stop, taking hold of the officers’ legs in hopes of receiving aid.

The shooters fled in a black SUV, firing more than 100 rounds as they were pursued, wounding one officer. Police took down the terrorists and, inside their SUV, found a trigger device to detonate bombs that the Muslims had planted at the Regional Center. Had the bombs exploded, many others would have perished.

“Obviously, our hearts go out to the victims and their families,” President Obama told reporters in the aftermath, but he failed to name a single victim. The president also declined to identify or condemn the murderers or speculate about their motives. Obama alluded, vaguely, to “mass shootings in this country” but did not say if they included the 13 Americans murdered by “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood in 2009. The president called that atrocity “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even “gun violence.”

But consider the response of Kamala Harris, then California attorney general, and described by Obama as “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.”

“We must seek justice for those who lost their lives in the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” said Harris in a Dec. 17 statement, but Harris also failed to name a single victim. The dead included blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, but no word of a hate crime from California’s attorney general, who also failed to name or condemn mass murderers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik.

“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.” The people had cause to wonder.

Rafia Farook, the murderer’s mother, claimed she knew nothing of Syed’s deadly plans, but she shredded a map her son had made for the attack. Muslim convert Enrique Marquez procured weapons for Farook and Malik, and both Muslims faced criminal charges.

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 again failed to name a single victim. Michael Wetzel, a Cal State San Bernardino grad, left behind six children, ages one to 14. A full 800 people attended his memorial service, but Kamala Harris was not among them. By all indications, the attorney general attended none of the funerals and held no events to honor the victims or aid their families. A year after the mass murder, Harris again failed to name Farook and Malik, condemn and condemn their murder of innocents. If this leaves crime victims puzzled, consider the dynamic in play.

Like all good leftists, Harris and Obama divide the people into oppressor and oppressed classes. Muslims are permanent members of the oppressed class, so Muslims can murder 14 innocents and escape condemnation or exposure of their motive. That’s why, to paraphrase Matthew 10:36, a man’s enemies shall be those of his own workplace.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/ten-years-later-terror-goes-unnamed/