Israel: Tighten social media screening of visa applicants
A senior US Democratic lawmaker has called on the government to tighten monitoring of social media accounts of people coming into the country through various visa programs.
"We have to do a much better job monitoring the social media of those people, that's what went wrong," Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
Israel made the remarks in response to the December 2 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. Tashfeen Malik, one shooter, came to the United States in July 2014 on a K-1 visa, known as a “fiancé visa.” She was engaged with Syed Rizwan Farook, an American citizen born in Chicago.
She had allegedly pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group, in a post on her Facebook.
Israel said the San Bernardino shooting shows more must be done to monitor the social media activity of foreigners traveling to the United States.
"She was actually using social media to advance really violent views, and we didn't pick that up," Israel said of Malik. "That's a mistake and it has to be corrected."
Only hours after news broke that suspects in the San Bernardino shooting had Muslim names, American Muslims strongly condemned the incident, but this did not stop the US mainstream media from spewing venom against Muslims and Islam.
Commenting to Press TV, American scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett said the US media characterizes a shooting attack as “terrorism” only when there is indication that the perpetrator might be a Muslim but refuses to use the word in other cases.
“The word terrorism apparently means when anybody who is ostensibly Muslim conducts a shooting, and if anybody else does it’s not terrorism,” the editor of Veterans Today noted.
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