Why do we need these people in the West? Why do we invite in people who hate us?
Amid all the furor over Islamic terrorism in the United States, a few themes are ignored: the role of friends and family of terrorists, and how well the U.S had treated many of those who went on to kill Americans.
Take, for example, the family members of Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, who recently murdered 14 people and wounded 21 in San Bernardino before being killed by police. The New York Times recently contacted Malik’s sister in Pakistan, Fehda Malik, who insisted that her sister was not an extremist, “She knew what was right and wrong,” Fehda Malik said.
The Times then noted of Fehda herself: “In 2011, on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, she posted a remark on Facebook beside a photo of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center that could be interpreted as anti-American.”
Farook’s father gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Stampa shortly after his son’s murderous rampage. He matter-of-factly remarked, “My son said that he shared [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”
If true, the elder Farook, who was welcomed into the United States as an immigrant from Pakistan, knew before the killings that his son was an advocate of the Islamic State. He apparently kept quiet about it.
For that matter, what are we to make of Farook’s mother, who lived in the same rented townhouse with the two killers? She claimed that she knew nothing of her family’s bomb-making and stockpiling of weapons inside the small home. Farook, it should be noted, enjoyed a comfortable job with the state of California.
The parents of the Boston Marathon bombers are Dagestan natives and former Chechnya residents who applied for asylum to the United States after spending time here on a tourist visa. They claimed the family was in danger back in Chechnya.
The Tsarnaev family was welcomed in Boston and at times enjoyed liberal public assistance — at least until the two sons, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, one a recipient of a college scholarship, murdered three and wounded more than 260 during the 2013 Boston Marathon.
