As much as we would like to argue that the American shooting problems and American, and that people of Pakistan are not terrorists and do not encourage terror, our Muslim brethren in the US make sure that we are implicated somehow. Another daughter of the soil, has brought us more troubling laurels in the form of dead bodies. The female shooter, Tashfeen Malik, involved in the killing of 14 people and wounding of 21 others in the southern California attack had apparently sworn allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghadi in a Facebook post. She held a Pakistani passport and her family moved from Layyah to Saudi Arabia 25 years ago. Pakistan is again, the eye of the storm.
We were all very quick to argue that the attack was criminal and not terrorist, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to defend the position. Moreover, it may even be irrelevant whether the attackers were actually motivated by a “terrorist” agenda or not. The fact is that a woman, with a Pakistani passport, helped an American man of Pakistani kill people. It does not put Pakistan is any better standing, had the motive clearly been a terrorist one. If she was a terrorist, she already has established links with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. If she wasn’t, she was still a Pakistani shooting Americans.
This puts the Obama Administration in a tight spot as well. The president’s initial response to the shooting in San Bernardino was that it was gun violence and not terrorism. Now he is under fire from Republicans that his unwillingness to label the threat from radical extremists as “Islamic” has created a dangerous blind spot. He is being pushed to tougher action against ISIS, and this will be seen as a terrorist attack on US soil, whether it is or is not. Republicans are itching to make national security the defining feature of the 2016 presidential election, and this will be a case for them to exploit to the detriment of Muslims, and Pakistanis, already in the US. Not only do the democrats lose the narrative on gun control, they will also be seen as unwilling to protect Americans for fear of appearing Islamophobic.
We can disown the shooter and the wife, say that real Islam is peaceful, argue that the shooters did it because of job and social issues not religion, and the perpetrator’s the ISIS comments on Facebook non-seriously, all we want. But for the Americans majority, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. It’s open season.