It’s beginning to seem like — contra CAIR and the Washington Post — Donald Trump had nothing to do with the visa revocation that stopped a British family as it sat on the tarmac at Gatwick Airport waiting to fly to the U.S.
There were clearly red flags in the histories of some members of the Mahmood family. A Facebook page with the name of the 18-year-old — one of the nine “children” traveling with the two adult brothers — contained endorsements of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And Mohammed Tariq Mahmood’s brother had some kind of red flag, given that he was denied entry by Israel eight years ago.
But now Breitbart London’s Raheem Kassam and Liam Deacon report that the 11-person group was coming to the U.S. to visit an extended family member, Muhammad Mahmood, who owns an auto repair shop in San Bernardino, California, and attends the same mosque as Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the terrorists who killed 14 people at a Christmas party on 2 December.
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The Mahmoods could quite easily have visited their relative and gone to Disneyland, down the road in Anaheim. So that aspect of the drama isn’t odd. But visiting anyone connected with the Deobandi-linked mosque, especially in the group configuration of the Mahmoods (with no adult women in the party), would be likely to set off alarm bells.
Added to the other red flags associated with the Mahmoods, the visa revocation for them looks less and less like a dark-magical attack from Donald Trump and the Republicans, and more like what America’s DHS authorities ought to be doing.
Breitbart elaborates (and we reported here):
It has now been revealed that his relative in California, Muhammad Mahmood, prayed at the same mosque as U.S.-born terrorist Syed Farook and his Pakistani born wife Tashfeen – believed to be the Tablighi Jamaat-run Dar Al Uloom Islamiyah mosque.
The mosque – linked to the “Army of Darkness” group Tablighi Jamaat which itself has historical, indirect links to multiple terrorism cases – became the centre of the investigation surrounding the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, with Breitbart News reported from the scene early in December, revealing an extraordinary refusal of the mosque’s elders to co-operate with journalists.
Mr. Muhammad Mahmood of San Bernardino says he didn’t know Syed Farook personally:
Mr. Mahmood (the relative) is a U.S. citizen who runs an auto repair shop in San Bernardino. He told the BBC that he “did not know him [Syed Farook] personally” and would not have recognised the terrorist and could not recall ever speaking to him.
But keep in mind: that’s not the point. The point is the connection to a mosque run by the Deobandi fundamentalist group Tablighi Jamaat. If we had been paying attention to Deobandi-linked mosques in the last five years, instead of literally shutting down the counterterrorism program designed to track them (see my last LU link, above), it’s very probable Tashfeen Malik would never have been able to enter the U.S. And Syed Farook could well have been intercepted before bringing off a terror plot that ended the lives of 14 people, and inflicted life-altering injures on another 21.
