The terrorist attack in San Bernardino that left 14 people dead and another 21 injured last week marked a red-letter day for feminists the world over: Tashfeen Malik, a 29-year-old female Jihadist terrorist, is shaping up to perhaps be the braintrust behind the ghastly massacre.
Nothing says “equal opportunity” and “job sharing” more adroitly than radicalizing oneself a world away, then laying the plans for self-directed martyrdom like having Syed Rizwan Farook, your extremist Muslim Internet husband, follow your lead, all while wearing a full, face-covering niqab.
Malik’s role in this dark and historical event is so new to the world that only one news outlet has covered it with the angle that she may have indeed spearheaded the ordeal; further, there is only one known researcher — a Western woman — delving into the role of Muslim women in the training and implementation of terror attacks.
There is such scant research into women as terrorists in the Middle East because society and the academe that exists within it often neglect the study of women in these countries, except for research delving into more typical fare such as safe and clean childbirth conditions, education and maybe voting rights.
Why?
Because women are generally overlooked except for when we pop up as hot-button talking points, and lately that spot was reserved for (Rich Person’s Problems) Hollywood actresses griping about substandard pay scales compared with their male counterparts. When that was met largely with crickets and radio silence by those male counterparts, the subject went away faster than publicists thought it would.
Enter The Sandman.
By our American standards, Farook and Malik were still newlyweds, unmarried until they came to America together via Chicago after meeting on an Internet dating site where Farook stated he was looking for a devout wife.
Malik was undoubtedly that: She was born in Pakistan and raised in Saudi Arabia, a country now known to solidify the conservatism and devotion of Muslims — especially women — who live there after being born somewhere else within the Muslim world.
It has been widely reported that Muslim women who leave Saudi Arabia to return to their birth countries do so with a countenance more inward-looking, more devout.
At college, no one ever saw Malik’s face, which is why it took our media so long to find a photograph of her after the melee.
When she was a 21-year-old pharmacology student at Bahauddin Zakariya University in the city of Multan in South Punjab, radicalism stormed across the area. So much so, according to The New York Times, that by the time Malik left the school in 2012 at 26 Pakistani officials got serious about uncovering extremist activity on campus, even going so far as to plant cameras in campus dorms.
This proves that Malik, at an extremely impressionable and malleable age, had been exposed to and perhaps even participatory in radical ideals, practices and rhetoric long before she ever met her husband.
Then she found just the right man to direct and who could direct her.
Not very feminist of her.
Mainstream media — and especially women pundits — are certain to point out that the couple dropped off their 6-month-old infant girl with family before embarking on their killing spree.
Just like a mother.
Protective and controlling.
How many times has your own mother been in a mood during, say, the holidays, and she stirs up tiny dancers of drama, ensuring no one else is relaxed or has a good time?
Dropping off that baby was the ultimate form of implication of her family — babysitters during wartime.
Besides, what was Malik supposed to do with a baby and an automatic assault rifle? I have seen immigrant women of all shades and sizes carry babies, tubs of beans, rice, jugs of water, bales of fresh vegetables, dead livestock, stalks of wheat and toddlers on their hips for good measure, but never a baby and an assault weapon.
It stands to reason, then, that no one was looking for a woman who had successfully jumped through every single immigrant hoop held up in front of her by federal officials monitoring the incoming tide of Muslims into this country.
I, too, was surprised when authorities reported the terrorists were husband and wife. I sat up in bed, my interest piqued more than had the second shooter been merely another man.
Using a woman to carry off what happened in San Bernardino proves whomever is trying to get at the world and annihilate anyone unlike them is surely winning in ways and on levels that just may take us years to understand and catch up to.
Especially if it was Malik’s idea alone.
They are pulling out all the stops, all the tricks, and they have no shame or fear.
By creating anti-Muslim hysteria — with Americans publicly laughing at but secretly agreeing with Donald Trump — terrorists-at-large are “winning” because they know hatred played out with bombs, death threats, Muslim shaming and random beatings and the defiling of mosques gives them grist for their radical mill.
That is, they use our extreme responses to their terrorist strikes — whether presidential address, drone air strike or talk radio wingnuttery — as good reason to attack because, by then, the world is indeed at war against radical Muslims.
We must reconcile that they are using youngsters, women and the electronic universe we created against us.
Isn’t it ironic that people kept so long away from the evils of the world are now using the evils of the world to do more evil?
Damn.
President Obama has asked American Muslims to help us by telling us what they know of their culture; some want American Muslims to become more “Americanized” by socializing more like “regular” Americans and to stop self-segregating.
Please, in other words, snitch on your faith to help a nation which cannot figure you and yours out.
(By the way, no one has ever asked me to explain other Christians, though I have been asked by white people to account for other blacks.)
Tashfeen Malik, her breasts perhaps still engorged with milk, rode shotgun with her misguided husband, their baby safe and sound with relatives who may or may not have known what was about to go down.
Ultimately, she was no feminist leader or martyr in this or any other nightmarish story to be retold by her extremist supporters.
In the end, she died with her husband while doing a foolhardy thing and she left a baby to live down that shame, and no good mother, no smart woman, does that.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2015.