Syed Farook, the terrorist who committed the San Bernardino massacre along with his wife, was described by his father as being “obsessed with Israel.”

“My son said that he shared [ISIS leader Abu Bakr] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel,” Farook’s father, also named Syed, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa. Farook Sr. went on to imply that his son’s attack was tied to their shared anti-Israel beliefs.

He had to stay calm and be patient because in two years Israel will not exist anymore. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don’t want Jews there anymore. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine. What is the point of fighting? We have already done it and we lost. Israel is not to be fought with weapons, but with politics. But he did not listen to me, he was obsessed.

One of those killed by Farook and his wife was Nicholas Thalasinos, a Jewish-identified Christian who was strongly pro-Israel. He and Farook reportedly argued about religion and politics shortly before the attack, and Israel was apparently one of the subjects of dispute. Farook told Thalasinos two weeks before the attack that “Israel doesn’t belong in the Middle East,” the New York Daily News reported on Friday.

It is not the first time that an Islamic terror attack would have been influenced by parental anti-Semitism. Mohamed Merah, who killed four Jews – including three children – at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, was raised on anti-Jewish racism by his parents. “My mother always said: ‘We, the Arabs, we were born to hate Jews.’ This speech, I heard it all throughout my childhood,” his brother later stated.

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