Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
On December 2, 2015, Syed Farook came to work at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, and after a morning meeting slipped out the door. Shortly before 11, Farook returned in a black SUV with wife Tashfeen Malik, and as a first-hand account from the Policing Institute notes, “out of the blue, multiple popping sounds crackled outside.” The black-clad Muslims barged into a room where a holiday party was in progress and began shooting.
“The shooters walked between tables,” notes the police account. “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.”
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. These were all people the killers knew, because months earlier, IRC staffers had thrown a baby shower for Farook’s newborn daughter. 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 fleeing shooters wounded one officer before police took them down. Inside their SUV police found a trigger device to detonate bombs the Muslims planted at the workplace. The explosives would have ramped up the death toll, which stood at 14, with 29 wounded.
“Obviously, our hearts go out to the victims and their families,” president Obama told reporters, but he failed to name a single victim. The composite character, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, also failed to name or condemn the murderers or speculate on their motive. The president alluded 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.” The next year, Kamala Harris was elected attorney general of California. Consider her response to the San Bernardino massacre.
“We must seek justice for those who lost their lives in the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino,” said Harris in a December 17 statement but Harris 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 but shredded a map her son Syed made for the attack. Muslim convert Enrique Marquez procured weapons for Farook and Malik. These Muslims were accessories to terrorism, and both 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 named not a single victim or explain how they “lost their lives.” 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, California’s attorney general attended none of the funerals and held no events to aid victims’ families. A year after the mass murder, Harris again failed to name Farook and Malik and failed to condemn their murder of innocents. The Democrats’ 2024 presidential candidate thus certified her membership in the Jihad Defense League (JDL).
Like fellow leftist Obama, Harris divides society into oppressor and oppressed groups.
In this vision, Muslims are always members of the oppressed group, so even if they slaughter 14 innocents, and plant bombs to kill the first responders, they can’t be openly condemned. In 2025 moving forward, the struggle against jihad is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
