Investigators have uncovered a pledge of allegiance to ISIS on Tashfeen Malik’s Facebook account, made (and then apparently deleted) just before she and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, killed 14 people in that shooting in San Bernardino on Wednesday. There as yet appears to be no evidence that either Malik or Farook had any contact with anybody within ISIS, so the attack is now being called “ISIS-inspired.” And it may still not even be that; there’s still a workplace angle to consider, in that Farook did reportedly get into an argument with one of his co-workers at their holiday party before the attack. As I wrote yesterday, Malik and Farook were clearly planning to do something, but attacking this particular target may still have been a spur of the moment decision made in anger.
Already cable news is blurring the line between an “ISIS attack” and an “ISIS-inspired attack,” but there is a distinction and it does matter. Attacks that are directed by ISIS can be stopped, by eliminating ISIS. That’s obviously a lot easier said than done, but it can be done at least in theory. Attacks that are inspired by ISIS probably can’t be stopped, because if you take ISIS out of the equation you’re still, in many/most cases, dealing with people who want to carry out an attack, who want to kill people, who want to make some kind of statement, and are just looking for a nudge or a little guidance in how to do it. You could magically blink ISIS out of existence, but plenty of lone wolves like Farook and Malik would simply find something else to replace it, and it would still be impossible for law enforcement to discover and stop them all. One price of living in a free society is that there will always be soft targets available to people who want to commit acts of violence, and there will always be other people out there offering justification and/or tips for doing so.
There is a scenario, by the way, where this isn’t an “ISIS-inspired” attack but is just a plain old ISIS attack. This is the scenario wherein Malik, a Pakistani who reportedly met Farook while they were on Hajj in 2013, has been an ISIS operative all along, and effectively used Farook (who may have been happy to be used) to get into the United States. The fact that they had a 6 month old child suggests that this isn’t the case, and that both of them were radicalized more recently while here in the US, but then again, a person who would murder 14 people (with what looks like plans to murder many more than that) may not have the same mindset about parenthood as most of the rest of us.
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