By GARRICK FELDMAN
Leader executive editor
It didn’t take long for another ISIS sympathizer to infiltrate the U.S. by way of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and an online engagement arranged in terrorist heaven.
You can get a bride’s visa at U.S. consulates in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, almost at any time or anyplace where the Islamic Caliphate rules.
Tashfeen Malik, 29, left Pakistan in July 2014 to start a new life in California with Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, a U.S. citizen whose parents immigrated from Pakistan in the 1970s.
The two ISIS sympathizers had a baby last summer but found time for target practice whenever the grandparents took care of the baby. People ignored them, like the Saudis who took flying lessons around the U.S. before 9/11.
No one noticed the couple’s arsenal of weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition stored in their small apartment near San Bernardino until last Wednesday, when they shot up an employee party in a building where Farook was employed as a county health inspector.
Jobs may be scarce, but an ambitious ISIS sympathizer can find government work if he tries hard enough. Farook must have hated working with Christians and Jews, especially those who expressed sympathy for Israel.
Nicholas Thalasinos, who was one of the 14 people killed by the terrorists, was a Christian who identified so strongly with Israel that he wore Jewish religious garments, such as prayer shawls and skull caps. He and his wife repeated their marriage vows under a canopy used at Jewish weddings.
Thalisanos and Farook may have argued at work. Farook left the party and returned with his wife and their weapons, leaving a blood bath at the Inland Regional Center.
The FBI is looking for accomplices and people who may have inspired them to kill. From 9/11 to Ft. Hood, Islamic terror threatens Americans across the land.
Often overlooked is the shooting at the Army recruiting station in Little Rock in 2009. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, 24, aka Carlos Leon Bledsoe, wasn’t tried as a terrorist, but the result was deadly: He killed Pvt. William Long, 23, of Conway and injured Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18, of Jacksonville.
They were eventually awarded the Purple Heart, Long posthumously.
Pulaski County prosecutors didn’t want to try Muhammad as a terrorist — they said he was just a copycat — but the results were just as deadly. He shot several rounds from the back of his vehicle and took off.
Muhammad said he would have shot more soldiers if they’d gone outside with the others. Muhammad didn’t dare leave his truck and storm the recruiting office, where he could have killed many other soldiers and he, too, would have died in a hail of gunfire.
Instead, Muhammad fled, but he was soon arrested at the I-630 and I-30 interchange near downtown Little Rock.
He pleaded not guilty to capital murder. He said he was a devout Muslim who hated the military for what it was doing to Muslims overseas.
He remained defiant until his trial, and then he pleaded guilty. Little Rock should place a marker at the recruiting station honoring the victims.
President Obama told the nation Sunday night there will be no ceasefire in the war on terror. But there’s still no new strategy against the Islamic Caliphate, which will require a worldwide effort on the scale of the Manhattan Project.
The caliphate is no superpower like Germany and Japanese and is much more backward but just as fanatical.
Gun-control advocates won a victory this week when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of an Illinois law banning assault weapons and large magazines like the ones used in the terrorist attack in San Bernadino.
But that will not stop other Muhammads, Farooks and Maliks. We could then wind up with security measures similar to those recommended by Donald Trump this week.
