The FBI is constructing a detailed timeline of the still-hazy years between when Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik became self-radicalized on the Internet and when they launched the deadly attack in San Bernardino.

The effort could take months, according to two federal officials, as investigators in California, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia scour for leads and witnesses — and attempt to resolve several pivotal mysteries in the case.

Who knew of the married couple's growing devotion to jihad? Did anyone know of their plot to kill Farook's co-workers?

Source LA Times

During the beginning of this century, competing theories of "radicalism" existed simultaneously, one theory proposed by the regressive left is that some ill-defined or undefined use of the internet may cause this "radicalism". A competing theory of the time, is the virus of the mind theory, the meme.  Specifically the jihadist meme.  This meme is a codified, fundamental tenent of the Sunni faith.

During the mid-1800s, there were two major theories on the cause of cholera being debated widely in medical circles throughout London.  The organism (seen here) that caused cholera, Vibrio cholerae , was not yet known and would not be until 1883, twenty five years after the death of John Snow.  In that year, Robert Koch, a German physician and bacteriologist, discovered the etiologic microbe. 

MIASMA THEORY

Many in the early to mid-nineteenth century felt that cholera was caused by bad air, arising from decayed organic matter or miasmata .  "Miasma" was believed to pass from cases to susceptibles in diseases considered contagious. Believers in the miasma theory stressed  eradication of disease through the preventive approach of cleansing and scouring, rather than through the purer scientific approach of microbiology.

Source UCLA

Progressives are looking for a cause for the killing in the same way that seventeenth century "Barbers" (doctors) looked for the reason so many people were dying in big cities, and never looked at the waterborne pathogen called Cholera as the reason.

Bacteria, virus, pathogens in general were unknown at the time, so our ancestors can be forgiven.The same does not apply to you. If you chose to ignore empirical evidence and continue to grasp at straws you are judged a fool or a hopeless ideologue .

Jihad is a septemic meme (virus of the mind), often times deadly to the carrier as well as those in close proximity to him or her.  

‘Meme’ is a term coined by English biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book  The Selfish Gene . He defined ‘memes’ as self-replicating ideas or cultural DNA – beliefs and actions that infect human consciousness, and are transmitted from mind to mind.

Dawkins sought to show that just as genes are the biological code carriers of DNA which carry our physical selves for replication, memes are the equivalent in terms of transmitting culture.

There is now an established body of science around memes, called memetics :

Meme:  an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual’s memory.

Memetics:  the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes

http://www.cruxcatalyst.com/2013/08/01/memes-mind-viruses-of-cultural-change/

After the latest atrocity in San Barnardino, Muzammil Siddiqi purposefully muddies the waters, or as a Greek philosopher might suggest he obfuscates.

By obfuscation, I infer that he is engaging in the production and peddling of misleading, ambiguous yet still plausible but confusing information as an act of concealment ( Taqiyya ) or intellectual evasion

At a press conference  on Wednesday night, just hours after the shooting, Council on American–Islamic Relations Executive Director Hussam Ayloush said,"We condemn this horrific and revolting attack and offer our heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of all those killed or injured."

Muzammil Siddiqi, the religious director of the Islamic Society of Orange County, added that the killings ran counter to the teachings of Islam. "We have condemned all violence everywhere because human life is precious," he said.  Siddiqi also voiced his support for a thorough investigation of the "people and motives" behind the shooting.

Source Huffington post

Abbassi, a Pakistani, insists he had nothing to do with the shooting at a San Bernardino County government building five miles from the mosque. While he confirms the text messages with Farook, he claims they were merely discussing food donations for his Dar-al-Uloom al-Islamiya of America mosque.

Abbassi maintained at a press conference that he didn’t know Farook any better than he knew the reporters in the room. But members of the mosque say Farook was a fixture there. He had been coming to pray and study at least three times a week for two years. In fact, he memorized the Koran there, something you cannot do without learning Arabic, a subject Abbassi teaches.

His other assertion that he never even saw Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, also strains credulity. Malik joined her husband in shooting 35 of his government co-workers at a Christmas party.

“No one knows anything about his wife,” assistant imam Mahmood Nadvi agreed. “She never came to prayer.”

But longtime mosque member Gasser Shehata, who claimed to have prayed “shoulder to shoulder” with Farook, said Dar-al-Uloom prepared a chicken-and-rice dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding last year. Reportedly, hundreds of congregants attended the walima reception, including the mosque leadership.

source NY Post

Others connected to the couple may as well be culpable to a conspiracy charge, but that will be the devil to prove. 

From the Kelly file.

The Mosque (Dar Al Uloom) of the San Berardino jihadists is from the Deobandi Islamic movement and may have been part of a larger conspiracy. or so it is alleged.

 The woman who took part in the ISIS-inspired San Bernardino massacre is linked to her native country's most notorious radical mosque, American officials believe.

 Sources have told Daily Mail Online that US officials handed over information to their Pakistani counterparts about links between Tashfeen Malik and the Red Mosque in Islamabad.

 The mosque is infamous for its links to violence and authorities in Pakistan are now considering taking action against its preacher, Maulana Abdul Aziz, after the disclosures by US officials.

 It is unclear currently how law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US have connected Malik to the mosque.

Source Daily Mail

The red mosque is often associated with the Deobandi Islamic movement and Hanafi jurisprudence or legal traditions.    

The school emphasized hadith and the Hanafi legal tradition, and encouraged spiritual transformation through “sober” Sufism. Providing an alternative to an intercessory religion focused on shrines and elaborate customary celebrations, Dar al-Ulum educated imams, preachers, writers, and publishers of religious works

    http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e522?_hi=1&_pos=2   

Members of a San Bernardino-area mosque where Syed Rizwan Farook prayed regularly said Friday, Dec. 4, that his actions in the mass shooting that killed 14 people don’t represent Islam or their community.

“We condemn this horrific act and the mosque and its members offer their condolences to the victims, their families, and those affected by this tragedy,” said Muhammad Ghaus Nadvi, president of Dar Al Uloom Al Islamiyah of America in Muscoy. “The Muslim community in San Bernardino prays for patience and unity as we stand together with our fellow Americans during this difficult time.”

http://www.pe.com/articles/bernardino-788324-san-mosque.html

 While studying in Pakistan, Tashfeen Malik attended the Al Huda school.

MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani intelligence officials say the California shooter Tashfeen Malik attended a religious school while living in Pakistan, where she studied pharmacy in the central city of Multan.

The officials identified the school on Monday as the Al-Huda International Seminary, a women-only madrassa with a chain across Pakistan and branches in the U.S. and Canada.

Source newsvine

: The story of Al Huda and Islamic Revivalism among Urban Pakistani Women (Syracuse University Press 2009) studies a women’s “dars” group called Al Huda. Al Huda ladies wear hijab and abaya and are found in the big cities. They are usually well-heeled, using the group-isolating dars activity to reinvent personal identity through ‘discovery’ of Islam. Al Huda was founded in 1994 by Farhat Hashmi and husband Idrees Zubair, both PhDs from Scotland’s famous centre of Islamic learning, the University of Glasgow. Farhat, from Sargodha, where her parents were both members of Islami Jamiat Tulaba, is steeped in the “dars” of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Maulana Maududi’s thought (p 40).

Express Tribune

See article on jamaat e Islami   Re: they are not muslims or it's got nothing to do with Islam.

Siddiqi was one of the Islamic communities spokesmen after the San Bernardino shooting. Looking up an old article leads me to suggest he was, and is still, well aware of the motivating meme.

When I asked Siddiqi to define “jihad” in its political sense, he said that it means “a struggle for peace and justice, so that you establish peace in the world, you establish justice in the world, and defend your own rights—the right of life, the right of property, the right of dignity and honor and freedom, and the right of your religion. So you defend yourself for that, and you defend other people who are suffering and oppressed. So jihad may take a military action, but it is not always a military action.”

In December, 1992, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a prominent Egyptian cleric and Islamic radical also known as the Blind Sheikh, visited the Islamic Society to lecture about jihad, and Siddiqi sat beside him to translate. Abdel Rahman dismissed nonviolent definitions of jihad as weak.

Da'if / Weak

He stressed that a number of unspecified enemies had “united themselves against Muslims” and that fighting them was obligatory. “If you are not going to the jihad, then you are neglecting the rules of Allah,” he said. The opportunities for jihad were virtually everywhere, ranging from apostate Middle Eastern regimes to “those who are taking the wealth of Muslims from petrol or from oil.” As he spoke, a red toolbox, with a slit cut into its lid for donations, was passed around the room. Videotapes of the lecture were later offered for sale at the society’s bookstore.

Several months afterward, Abdel Rahman was indicted for helping to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. One of his fatwas, issued from prison in 1998, became central to Al Qaeda’s justification of mass violence. 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/01/22/azzam-the-american

The Islamic State has released its first official statement on the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. The group’s Al Bayan “news” bulletin, released today, listed the massacre as one of the “caliphate’s” global operations. The English-language version of Al Bayan reads:

California: Two soldiers of the Khilāfah executed an attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California on the 20th of Safar. Light weapons were used, which led to the deaths of 14 disbelievers and the injuring of more than 20 others. An exchange of gunfire with American police followed, eventually ending with both attackers being killed in the path of Allah. We ask Allah to accept them both as shuhadā’ [martyrs].

This is the first time the “caliphate” (Khilāfah) has claimed that the San Bernardino terrorists were its “soldiers.”

Source long war journal

Many pundits ponder the reason why the latest atrocities happened, seeking the reasons behind what to them, is a "senseless" action. this is a long time American tradition.

It's time to consider the "participatory literalist " possibility of jihad as instructed by the codified text of Islam, in the historical context of a reconstituted caliphate. Jihad is the systemic application of violence to achieve a desired result. (Submission)

"Jefferson, together with his contemporary, John Adams, who was then serving as the Ambassador to England, met with the Ambassador from Tripoli, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, in an attempt to understand why American ships were being attacked and Americans being taken hostage. In a report to the then Secretary of State John Jay, Jefferson cites the Ambassador as saying:"

It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once . ^xv

They were made victorious with terror. Bukhari :: Book 4 :: Volume 52 :: Hadith 220

Scholars recognize the ambassador's paraphrasing of the "Sword Verse" ( Surah 9:5 ), as the Qur'anic passage sometimes used to justify jihad is popularly known.

See as well this well known hadith . ( read all at link)

We are some people from the Arabs; we led a hard, miserable, disastrous life: we used to suck the hides and the date stones from hunger; we used to wear clothes made up of fur of camels and hair of goats, and to worship trees and stones. While we were in this state, the Lord of the Heavens and the Earths, Elevated is His Remembrance and Majestic is His Highness, sent to us from among ourselves a Prophet whose father and mother are known to us. Our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, has ordered us to fight you till you worship Allah Alone or give Jizya (i.e. tribute); and our Prophet has informed us that our Lord says:-- "Whoever amongst us is killed (i.e. martyred), shall go to Paradise to lead such a luxurious life as he has never seen, and whoever amongst us remain alive, shall become your master."

"The document is an excellent summation of the pirate's motivations. It may also be read as an eerie foreshadowing of the rationale claimed by some terrorists today."

http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/Public/focus/essay1009_jefferson.html

 From John Adams.

"We ought not to fight them at all, unless We determine to fight them forever."

Your favour of the 11th, instant I have recd. There are great and weighty Considerations urged \in it/ in favour of arming against the Algerines, and I confess, if our States could be brought to agree, in the Measure, I Should be very willing to resolve upon eternal War with them. But in such a Case We ought to conduct the War with Vigour, and protect our Trade and People. The Resolution to fight them would raise the Spirits and Courage of our Countrymen immediately, and We might obtain the Glory of finally breaking up these nests of Banditts. But Congress will never, or at least not for years, take any Such Resolution, and in the meantime our Trade and Honour suffers beyond Calculation.—We ought not to fight them at all, unless We determine to fight them forever.

http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-03-01-02-0745

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The regulars did not take it seriously when Enrique Marquez mused about terrorism at Morgan’s Tavern, a dank dive bar where Mr. Marquez hauled ice, cleaned bathrooms and checked IDs at the door. After a few drinks, he would just start talking — about his money woes, trying to lose weight, wanting to join the Navy. News reports about terrorism were just fodder for more bar talk

“He would say stuff like: ‘There’s so much going on. There’s so many sleeper cells, so many people just waiting. When it happens, it’s going to be big. Watch,’  ” said Nick Rodriguez, a frequent patron who had known Mr. Marquez on and off for the past two years. “We took it as a joke. When you look at the kid and talk to him, no one would take him seriously about that.”

But nine days after a husband and wife slaughtered 14 people in a terrorist attack at a county health department meeting, Mr. Marquez, 24, a childhood friend of the husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, has become a crucial if unlikely figure in the investigation of the attack — which was just the kind he discussed when terrorism news reports flashed onto the tavern’s television.

Source NY Times