“She didn’t think that a Muslim should have to participate in a non-Muslim holiday or event,” San Bernardino police chief Jarrod Burguan, in a statement with implications that are simply staggering. The message is clear: Muslims must always and in every case be accommodated. Nothing whatsoever that could possibly offend the poor dears must ever be displayed. If you hang Christmas decorations, why, you may provoke them to a massacre! So…don’t hang Christmas decorations. Don’t do anything they don’t like. That way you may escape with your life, but be attentive to their changing moods, and ready to accommodate any new demands pronto. Or else.
“San Bernardino terrorists may have been motivated by Christmas decoration-studded holiday party,” by Meg Wagner, New York Daily News, December 1, 2016:
One of the terrorists who slaughtered 14 people at a California office’s holiday party was furious that her Muslim husband had to attend the festive luncheon, which was studded with Christmas decorations, police said.
Days before San Bernardino health inspector Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, launched their grisly terror attack on the county health department’s holiday celebration, Malik wrote online that she didn’t feel it was appropriate to mix work and holidays.
“She didn’t think that a Muslim should have to participate in a non-Muslim holiday or event,” San Bernardino police chief Jarrod Burguan told ABC News of Malik’s online terror prelude.
Friday marks the first anniversary of the shooting rampage, which left another 22 people injured. The San Bernardino County Department of Public Health scheduled a training session for its health inspectors on Dec. 1, 2015, and followed up the work meeting with a holiday luncheon.
Farook attended the training session, and even posed with coworkers in front of the conference room Christmas tree before he abruptly left the office.He came back as the holiday party was kicking off — and he brought Malik and weapons with him, police said. The pair opened fire on the merry coworkers, killing 14 of them. The couple fled, but they were shot dead four hours later in a gun battle with police.
In the year since the shooting, police have struggled to determine an exact motive for the shooting, although officials quickly labeled it an act of terrorism. Malik’s online rant griping about the holiday party has helped investigators determine what sparked the violence.
“That really is one over the very, very few pieces of potential evidence that we have that we can truly point to and say, ‘That probably is a motive in this case,’” Burguan told ABC News.
Federal investigators are still trying to determine if anyone knew about the pair’s well-planned shooting plot. In the months before the attack, Malik and Farook gathered a supply of guns and made bombs inside their home, police said.
“There are unanswered questions in this case,” FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller told the Los Angeles Times. “There is an ongoing investigation into did they get financial or material support from anyone else.”