According to the father of the San Bernardino terrorist, Syed Rizwan Farook, his son was “obsessed with Israel.”
In an interview in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, the senior Syed Farook said, “My son said that he shared [Islamic State leader] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that “As the investigation unfolded, friends and family of the shooters came forward to offer snapshots that may point to what motivated last Wednesday’s attack, including Farook’s apparent fixation on Israel and Malik’s devotion to a fundamentalist strain of Islam.”
There is no greater predictor of violence than Jew-hatred. But while it is universally acknowledged that childhood torture of animals predicts violence, relatively few people understand that the same holds true of Jew-hatred.
Given that I have found no exception to this rule, one would think that non-Jews would learn from it and immediately oppose Jew-haters. But, incredibly, that is not the case. Most non-Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as the Jews’ problem or, as in the case of Israel-hatred, the Jews’ fault.
In the 1930s, when Western democracies had a chance to crush the Nazis, they did nothing despite the fact that Hitler and Nazism were as obsessed with the Jews as Syed Farook was with the Jewish state.
The West regarded Hitler’s anti-Semitism as essentially the Jews’ problem. Eventually, about 50 million people were killed — 44 million of them non-Jews!
So, too, when Israelis were being murdered by Palestinian Muslim suicide bombers in the so-called Intifada. The murders were largely ignored, or worse, “explained” by Western liberals as the understandable Palestinian reaction to Israeli occupation. Then came 9/11, and America and the world began to appreciate that Palestinian terror was about the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel, not about “asymmetrical warfare” or use of the “poor man’s atom bomb” or “a reaction to occupation.”
Some will object that it is neither fair nor accurate to lump Israel-hatred with Jew-hatred. Let me briefly explain why Israel-hatred is just another form of Jew-hatred, or anti-Semitism.
First, we are talking about Israel-hatred, not Israel-criticism. No prominent defender of Israel — not one — has ever equated criticism of Israel with Israel-hatred or with anti-Semitism. It is a common charge made by anti-Zionists that defenders of Israel equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but it has no truth.
What is equatable with anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, the belief that the Jewish state has no right to exist. Why is that the same anti-Semitism? Because when one argues that the only country of the world’s more than 200 countries that has no right to exist is the one Jewish country, there is no other possible explanation.
Israel is probably the oldest country in the world with an indigenous language and culture going back 3,000 years. Yet, much of the world denies these roots and favors the claim to the land made by Palestinians, a group which had no distinct identity before the mid-20th century.
Those obsessed with the Jews in a negative way have a moral compass that points South. That’s why Farook murdered innocent Americans.
Farook and all the Islamist terrorists are ultimately the legacy of Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians to mankind — and especially to fellow Muslims, the greatest victims of the suicide terror.
To put it in a positive way, show me Muslims who accept the right of the Jewish state to exist, and I will guarantee you that they will never support ISIS or engage in terror.
When will the world learn this simple lesson?
