Great news: Syed Farook’s mom is part of a pro-caliphate group

posted at 2:01 pm on December 7, 2015 by Jazz Shaw

        

This is another one of those days when you have to wonder why people keep going after Donald Trump every time he opens his mouth. I recall just last week when Talking Points Memo drew a bead on The Donald, seemingly aghast that he would suggest that officials take a look at the rest of the family of the San Bernardino terrorists. Oh the horror!

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in an interview aired Sunday that he would “go after” family members of terrorists because they “know what’s happening” when their loved ones commit acts of terrorism.

Trump said on CBS’ “Face The Nation” that he would’ve gone after the wives of the terrorists in the World Trade Center attacks because they knew it was going to happen.

“At least I would certainly go after the wives who absolutely knew it was happening, and I guess your definition of what I’d do, I’m going to leave that to your imagination,” Trump said.

As usual, it’s laid out in a fairly “newsy” sort of straight reporting, but the scare quotes around phrases such as, “know what’s happening” demonstrate the skepticism on display. The cable news spokesmodels were worse, pretty much accusing Trump of Islamophobia and stirring dissent and hatred towards the innocent, moderate Muslims in Farook’s family who couldn’t possibly have been involved in any dirty business.

As usual, a few days go by, and then there’s this. (Daily Caller)

Rafia Farook, the mother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, is an active member of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Muslim organization that promotes the establishment of a caliphate and has ties to a radical Pakistani political group called Jamaat-e-Islami.

Farook’s affiliation with ICNA was revealed on Friday when MSNBC and other new outlets scoured the Farooks’ apartment in Redlands, Cal. An MSNBC reporter found a certificate of appreciation presented to Safia Farook last summer by ICNA’s sisters’ wing.

ICNA may not be an official target of the investigation at this point but they are hardly the poster child for moderation in the Muslim community. They’ve welcomed terrorist recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki to their events and another of their members was indicted on federal terrorism charges in April after having been discovered plotting a different terrorist attack in the United States.

None of this means that Farook’s mother is immediately guilty, but particularly in the current climate isn’t this precisely the sort of person we should be looking at? (Excuse me… “going after” as Mr. Trump would say.) The idea that his entire family was pure as the driven snow and had no clue what the man was up to simply seems laughable on the surface. And if his mother was tied in with ICNA then it’s at least worth asking whether she was doing more in her spare time than baking apple pies and volunteering at the local VA hospital.

On the plus side, our Attorney General has announced that the FBI is looking into her now.

But let’s not “go after” the family. That would be wrong and make us a bunch of haters.