Was Syed Farook's Mother The Linchpin In the #SanBernardinoShooting

San bernardino shooter ICNA membership

Earlier today I posted on San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik and her family connection to terrorism. In just a couple of days an independent journalist has uncovered more about her than apparently the FBI. One of the most intriguing things he had to say was this:

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Although indoctrination must have started much earlier, we see a radical change in her a few years ago, particularly after she moved to the United States. It seems the couple was actually indoctrinated by American Islamic organizations.

How could this be? Attention is being directed toward Malik as the radical Islamist influence that converted her happy-go-lucky husband into a terrorist, or, if the family lawyers are to be believed, a man who snapped under the pressure of Islamophobia in his workplace.

There were three people living in the Farook residence: the two shooters and the male shooter’s mother. There was about 6,000 of ammunition, pipe bombs, and a workshop for manufacturing the pipe bombs also in the residence. The lawyers claim the mother lived upstairs and never ventured into the garage.

But the Daily Caller noticed this:

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.

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What do we know about ICNA?

According to Wikipedia, the headliners at ICNA’s 2007 convention were Anwar al-Awlaki (since deceased by a Predator) and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the guy who tried to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day, 2009, with explosives in his drawers. Two members of the New York chapter were found guilty of war crimes in Bangladesh and sentenced to death in absentia. The Pakistani Islamist group, Jamaat-e-Islami, has claimed that ICNA is its North American face.

Was the mother involved? Did she know about the pipe bombs? Was she the contact that facilitated the conversion of a young Pakistani woman from a modern, Westernized student in Pakistan to a burqa-wearing terrorist in the United States? There seems like there was much more afoot with the mother than the harmless older lady living upstairs, oblivious to what was taking place in the home she occupied.

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