The December 2, 2015, killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, is the sort of story that garners the label “only in America,” with plot twists that include arranged marriage, Facebook jihad, and irrelevant gun laws.  It also includes Enrique Marquez, Jr., an Hispanic-American.

Farook and Malik died shortly after the massacre in a shoot-out with police, leaving Marquez as the face of the crime.  A Facebook image of him with a funny grin under his widow’s peak was featured in many stories.  He allegedly wrote to someone in a Facebook chat on November 5, almost a month earlier, “Involved in terrorist plots, drugs, anti-social behavior, marriage, might go to prison for fraud, etc.”

The FBI’s December 17 criminal complaint against Marquez is chilling reading, a disturbing glimpse into what’s going on in America right under our noses.  Based mainly on Marquez’s own voluntary confession, it details how Farook, in 2005,

introduced Marquez to Islam and began educating Marquez about religion. . . . In 2007, Marquez converted to Islam.  Shortly thereafter, Farook introduced Marquez to radical Islamic ideology . . . discussing the extremist views of now-deceased imam and Islamic lecturer Anwar al-Aulaqi.

Al-Aulaqi (also rendered “Awlaki”) was born in New Mexico, attended Colorado State University, and while in Yemen in 2011 became the first U.S. citizen killed in a drone strike ordered by President Obama.  According to ABC News, two of the terrorists in the September 11, 2001, attack

had attended the Awlaki-led Rabat mosque in San Diego and the imam had numerous closed door meetings with the men, leading investigators to believe that Awlaki was their spiritual advisor and had known about the 9/11 attacks in advance.

Despite his obvious connection to terrorism, the only thing the feds could find to use against him was the fact that he falsely claimed he was a Yemeni citizen on an F-1 visa in order to attend Colorado State.  “This enabled authorities to charge Awlaki with passport fraud, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.”  Before he could be nabbed, however, he split for Yemen, where he joined up with Al Qaeda.

The Marquez complaint further charges that, in 2011, he and Farook “began planning to commit terrorist acts in the Southern California area,” including “using firearms and explosives to attack Riverside Community College and State Route 91.”  Thus, while it is true that “Marquez identified himself as the actual buyer of the two rifles” used in the December 2 killings, he claims that “the purchase was for the attacks on the college and Route 91.”  Furthermore, “Marquez also bought explosives materials.  The two men took targeting practice together.”  However, Marquez said that by 2013 “they ceased planning any attacks together.”

Marquez also “entered into a fraudulent marriage with” a Russian woman named Mariya Chernykh.  (It strains credulity to imagine that the feds could be concerned about a “fraudulent marriage” in the same year the U.S. Supreme Court mandated that all states grant licenses for same-sex marriages.)  Miss Chernykh was “the sister of the wife of Farook’s brother,” and Marquez was paid $200 per month to get and remain hitched.  He was also stupid enough to deposit the cash regularly into a joint bank account he held with her, for which the FBI obtained records.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the rather attractive Mariya and Tatiana are the “daughters of Anatolij and Valentina Chernykh” and “came separately to the U.S. from Vysokiy, a village nearly 400 miles south of Moscow.”  The parents now live in Israel.  Tatiana married “Syed Raheel Farook, a U.S. Navy veteran from a first-generation Pakistani family,” and brother of the killer Farook.

One of the themes of this story is that of an Hispanic converting to Islam.  “Though statistics aren’t tracked,” writes Deepa Bharath in the Orange County Register (December 29), “many in both communities describe Latino Muslims as one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the country, with an estimated 150,000 converts in the United States.”  Nonetheless, “only one of those converts is making national news.”

Today’s politically correct historians insist that Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in a paradise in Al-Andalus, Spain, under Muslim rule from 711 to 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella ended that benign empire while also sending Columbus to the Americas to pillage the hapless Indian tribes.  HispanicMuslims.com contends, with phrasing that eerily imitates George W. Bush’s vision of Iraq, “Muslims entered Spain not as aggressors or oppressors, but as liberators.”

Perhaps as the Marquez trial unfolds, he will confess that he was subjected to such indoctrination, not just from Farook and Al-Aulaqi, but in U.S. public schools and colleges.

Concerning this p.c. narrative, Richard Fletcher writes (in Moorish Spain), “Tolerance?  Ask the Jews of Granada who were massacred in 1066, or the Christians who were deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in 1126.”  And in The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise (forthcoming from ISI), Darío Fernández-Morera concludes,

By any objective standards, . . . and in spite of its undeniable artistic, literary, and scientific accomplishments, and of modern wishful “let-us-all-get-along” thinking that tries to gloss over evidence to the contrary, Islamic Spain was not a model of multicultural harmony.  Andalusia was beset by religious, political, and racial conflicts controlled in the best of times only by the application of tyrannical force.  Its achievements are inseparable from its turmoil.

We all know that the U.S. Supreme Court has essentially banned Christianity from America’s public schools.  But according to an October 31, 2014, report on KTLA, Islam is being taught in California schools.  A parent in Manhattan Beach displayed middle-school materials that were not about the history of Muslims, but explications of the Islamic faith.  Answers to a quiz included, “The one true God is Allah. . . . All people must submit to Allah.”  Students had to list the Five Pillars of Islam.  One parent asked, “Can you imagine the outcry in this country if children were asked to write the words to John 3:16?”

After the December 2 massacre, President Obama and other gun-control advocates predictably called for stricter gun laws.  But the rifles used were purchased legally by Marquez under California’s strictest-in-the-nation regulations.  Marquez was not a felon and had no known mental condition.  Farook also legally purchased two handguns himself at Annie’s Get Your Gun Store in San Bernardino.  Even if the guns had been banned in California, Farook, a well-paid health official in the San Bernardino County Division of Environmental Health Services, could have bought them in Arizona.  The Inland Regional Center where the killings took place was a gun-free zone—like almost all the places where mass shootings have been committed.

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is running for the state’s top spot, is leading the fight for a ballot initiative this November that would further tighten state gun laws.  It would, for example, ban high-capacity magazines—a pointless prohibition, as anyone familiar with weapons knows.

Meanwhile, at least under President Obama, nothing is being done about the real problem of Islamic radicalization.  Although Farook was a Pakistani born in Chicago, his killer spouse, Malik, was born in Pakistan, reared in Saudi Arabia, and apparently radicalized in a Saudi-financed school back in Pakistan.  And Farook and Malik both were radicalized by sites on the World-Wide Web, including pages on Facebook.

Facebook remains the top “social media” site, where users post updates on their lives or businesses, then others leave comments, leading to further comments.  Facebook’s market capitalization stands at $326 billion, depending on the vagaries of the market, more than double the combined value of the entire U.S. automobile industry.

Marquez was able to write his posts unmolested by government-mandated or -encouraged censorship, whereas, after Mark Zuckerberg’s prodding by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Facebook cracked down on online protests against the epidemic rapes of German and other European women by armies of young, male “refugees” from Muslim countries.  A “former” communist youth leader in East Germany, the “conservative” Merkel has imposed the worst censorship on her country since 1945.

“A power the Stasi—or, yes, the Gestapo—could only dream of has been handed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” wrote Breitbart’s Allum Bohari.  “At her behest, the social network has begun a Europe-wide campaign to counter so-called ‘hate speech’ on its platform.  It is also working with a German publisher to remove ‘racist’ posts in Germany.”

On January 6, Marquez was charged in a federal indictment that accused him of having conspired to commit terrorism with “Sayed Rizwan Farook and others known and unknown to the Grand Jury . . . to provide material support and resources . . . including weapons, explosives, and personnel, including themselves.”  Marquez pleaded not guilty.  If the schedule is kept, the case could go before a jury on February 23.

After the attacks and President Obama’s antigun statement, gun sales soared, with a per-month record for California of 134,000 sold in December alone.  With their government refusing to protect them or their borders, and their public schools indoctrinating children against Christianity, Americans are making sure that at least they have the firepower to protect themselves and their families.