Within hours after 2 jihadists shot up a San Bernardino facility killing 14 people and wounding 17, President Barack Obama was blaming America’s gun violence.
“We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” said Obama, who visited the site of a mass murder in Paris just this week.
But the president changed his tune when the killers were identified as Muslim jihadists Syed Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 27.
Instead of saying gun violence doesn’t happen in other countries (such as Syria, Iraq or Paris), he now says gun violence doesn’t happen “with the same frequency in other countries” as it does in the U.S.
Obama, who was raised Muslim, also hesitated (again) to call the latest attack an act of terrorism.
“It is possible that this is terrorist-related, but we don’t know, it’s also possible that this was workplace-related,” Obama told reporters at a press briefing in the Oval Office on Thursday.
Maybe Obama’s advisers didn’t inform him that Syed Farook was a Sunni Muslim who was radicalized in Saudi Arabia, where he met his wife in 2013.
Farook was reportedly in contact with a known terrorist over the phone and via social media.
“It appears that Farook was radicalized, which contributed to his motive, though other things—like workplace grievances—may have also played a role, other law enforcement sources said,“ CNN reports.
Obama caught heat for characterizing the 2009 Fort Hood shooting by a Muslim extremist as “workplace violence.”
