San Bernardino, CA — A tragic mass shooting in San Bernardino, California unfolded Wednesday and ended when the two suspects were killed by police.
In total 14 innocent people were murdered at the hands of two shooters, with 21 more left injured.
New information has just been released tying these two shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, to the terrorist group ISIS.
According to law enforcement officials, Farook had been in contact with radicalized individuals who were under investigation by the FBI. On Thursday, officials said that it was apparent Farook had been radicalized.
“Farook’s apparent radicalization contributed to his role in the mass shooting, with his wife Tashfeen Malik, of 14 people Wednesday during a holiday party for the San Bernardino County health department, where Farook worked, sources said.
Still, it wasn’t necessarily the only driver behind the carnage, as workplace grievances may have also played a role. President Barack Obama hinted as much Thursday when he said that the attackers may have had “mixed motives.”
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.”
Farook had allegedly been communicating, via social media, with multiple suspects on the FBI’s terror watch list, however, he managed to escape being added to any such list.
Farook’s visit to Saudi Arabia is also important to note. In spite of being the United State’s most supported ally in the region, a recent study published by the Brookings Institution found that Saudi Arabia actually has the most online pro-ISIS supporters, by a large margin.
In fact, multiple US allies in the Middle East have ties to ISIS. Bahrain, for example, where the US maintains a large Naval Base, is known for aiding the Islamic State, and members of their government have been documented as ISIS members.
Despite the recent revelations and visible ties to ISIS, officials continue to push the narrative that Farook was merely a disgruntled employee who was able to find guns too easily.
Judging from the thousands of rounds of ammunition, pipe bombs, and IED manufacturing material found at the couple’s home, it is clear that this man didn’t just ‘snap’ at work.
“Right now, it’s too easy,” said Barack Obama on Thursday. “We’re going to have to search ourselves as a society … to take basic steps that would make it harder — not impossible, but harder — to let individuals get access to weapons.”
If Obama is serious about keeping guns out of the hands of these individuals, perhaps his administration should stop arming them.
While multiple groups will all attempt to use this shooting to push their agenda, it is important to point out that the mainstream media, many in the alternative media, and the government alike, all initially refused to call this act what it is, terrorism. Even if these two psychopaths did not have ties to ISIS, what they did was terror.
It seems that America has a problem with calling psychopathic murderers who go on shooting sprees, ‘terrorists,’ as this definition is only beneficial to a certain narrative and the label has come in quite handy in the U.S. propaganda campaign.
Regardless of the nationality, the religion, or the race of the shooters, their actions were indeed terrorism and that fact will not change.
As the military industrial complex addressed the recent Paris attacks, the topic of most conversations in that community is that ‘we need more security.’ The current CIA director blamed the 4th Amendment for the attacks and the former CIA director blamed Edward Snowden. As they address the Planned Parenthood shooting and the San Bernardino shooting, they called for gun control. But these ‘experts’ are missing the point entirely.
For decades, the U.S. and its Western allies have been violently and frequently meddling in the Middle East. Beginning with the clandestine overthrow of democratically elected leaders, moving on to financing violent extremist groups, and morphing into full-blown invasions of entire countries, the Middle East has been the target of destruction since at least 1953.
Ignoring all of the treachery, corruption, and death exported from the U.S. in the last 70 years, the troglodytes in D.C. continue to assert that ‘the terrorists hate our freedom.’ Sadly, the propaganda being shoved down the throats of Americans by these ill-informed political puppets, preserves this idiotic assertion.
Millions have died in the West’s relentless pursuit of nation building and controlling oil, all of it is written off as “collateral damage,” and the clueless politicians march on.
If the U.S. government would bring to a halt all of its nation building, drone strike programs, militarized occupations, and 700+ bases around the world, you could rest assured that the “massive terror threat” would diminish to almost nothing.
Unfortunately, the U.S. in their relentless pursuit of empire, show no signs of stopping. What’s more, their decades of meddling and funding strategic terrorist organizations who supported their temporary interests have manifested into an actual threat.
Do you think that the children of those slain by a decade of bombing and constant threats of drone strikes will simply forget about the atrocities inflicted upon them? Do you think that the parents who watched their babies blown apart by predator drones, or the hospital workers who watched as U.S. bombs rained down from the sky — will just turn the other cheek?
The reality is that since 9/11, the U.S. and their NATO allies have fostered a breeding ground for extremist and fundamentalist groups. As Americans sat back on their couches and watched the “Shock and Awe” on CNN, the U.S. was sowing the seeds for perpetual war.
They were planting a garden in which a million Bin Ladens would later bloom.
Now, after this recent shooting, the terrorists and the warmongers in the West are getting closer to their goal of divide and conquer than ever before.
We are witnessing attacks on women and children, who are American citizens, by other American citizens, simply because they are Muslim. In the days since the Paris attacks, Mosques have been set on fire and defaced with human feces. It will only get worse now.
Americans are at each other’s throats about whether or not to allow Syrian refugees into the country, ignoring the fact that a refugee hasn’t been involved in any of the attacks. Hate-filled, xenophobic rhetoric dominates the internet as closed-mindedness and fear spread like cancer — and the only ones winning in this turmoil are the terrorists and the military industrial complex.
ISIS needs you to hate Muslims.
“This is precisely what ISIS was aiming for — to provoke communities to commit actions against Muslims,” Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland who studies how people become terrorists, told the Washington Post. “Then ISIS will be able to say, ‘I told you so. These are your enemies, and the enemies of Islam.’”
ISIS is trying to create a world war, and the West is helping to foster it. A group of murderous sociopaths have their finger on the hair-trigger that is a nuclear holocaust. It is sheer insanity!
We must not give in to the warmongering propaganda that is shoved down our throats by ALL major media outlets. We must regain our humanity and empathy for other humans. We must be courageous in the face of popular ignorance, and seek to lessen this ignorance by becoming informed and active.
We must cease this paradigm of self-destructive behavior. The power to change the world is in all of our hands, those in power are nothing without your consent and funding. Will we finance our own demise or wake up to the fact that criminally insane psychopaths are leading the proverbial lemming nation off of a cliff? The choice is yours.
