One of the San Bernardino killers hated Israel. Israeli newspapers and foreign papers are making much more of this story than the mainstream US press. The Jerusalem Post has the story:

The father of one of the San Bernardino killers told an Italian newspaper on Sunday that his son, Sayed Rizan Farook, had an obsessive hatred of Israel that underscored his Islamic radicalism and allegiance to the ideals of Islamic State…. The senior Farook, in an interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa, … confirmed that his son spoke of Islamic State (noting, “Who doesn’t these days?”) and “prescribed to the ideals outlined by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” which included hating Israel. “‘Be patient,'” he tried to tell his son. “In two years, Israel won’t exist anymore. Geopolitics is changing in Russia, China and America too.” “Nobody wants the Jews. What use is it to fight? We have tried it and we lost. Israel does not fight with weapons, but rather with politics.'”

[The original in Italian is translated: “Nobody wants the Jews there.”]

Why isn’t this story getting more attention in the U.S.? Because it leads to the inevitable statement, “America is being attacked because of its support for Israel.” That interpretation can get a reporter fired. And so the accounting of the damage this hatred causes in the United States is never done.

That link was denied after the 9/11 attacks. Osama bin Laden himself said that Palestine was an important motivation for him. Mickey Kaus said the press was downplaying this truth because it might hurt the US-Israel relationship:

It’s obvious–that Israel is partly the issue–yet a lot of effort seems to go into appearing to deny it, or into obscuring it, or at least into not saying it plainly. More than aversion to cliché seems to motivate these contortions. And this motive seems obvious too–it is the fear that admitting the truth might lead to an attempted appeasement of radical Islamic terrorists through abandonment of our ally. Yet, as far as I can see, nobody anywhere near the political mainstream, aside from Robert Novak, is talking about abandoning or weakening the US-Israeli alliance.

Later the 911 Commission also downplayed the motivation, though it did acknowledge it. JTA, 2004:

[The report] shows that several of the hijackers, as well as Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, were motivated in part by hatred of Israel and anger over the support it receives from the United States… “In his interactions with other students,” the leader of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, “voiced virulently anti-Semitic and anti-American opinions, ranging from condemnations of what he described as a global Jewish movement centered in New York City that supposedly controlle! d the financial world and the media, to polemics against governments o f the Arab world,” the report says.

Bear in mind that Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles 47 years ago while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency also in some measure because a crazed killer did not like American support for Israel. Associated Press, 1989, based on a David Frost interview of the killer:

Sirhan Sirhan, in his first television interview, said he felt betrayed by Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s support for Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and said he killed Mr. Kennedy out of concern for the Palestinians.

Again: We never get an accounting of the damage the special relationship causes. All these killers are unhinged, but they are focused on a real issue.