At a campaign rally for his wife in South Carolina Tuesday, Bill Clinton claimed that the San Bernardino terrorists had “never been to the Middle East.”
“Keep in mind, the people that perpetrated that travesty in San Bernardino had never been to the Middle East,” Clinton told a rally in Greenville Tuesday. “They were converted over the social media.”
Not only did Syed Rizwan Farook travel to the Middle East at least twice, the second time to bring back his “jihadi bride” Tashfeen Malik, Malik was from the Middle East, having been born in Pakistan and lived in Saudi Arabia until she moved with Farook to the U.S. in 2014.
The only thing close to true in the statement is that Farook and Malik corresponded online before meeting in person in Saudi Arabia. In July 2014, Farook returned with Malik (who had likely already at least begun to be radicalized) on a fiancée visa.
The Clinton camp is dismissing the error as a mere slip of the tongue rather than either a lack of knowledge or a deliberate attempt to downplay that Malik was a Middle Eastern immigrant.
“President Clinton simply misspoke,” a Clinton spokesman told TheBlaze. “His point, though, was that they were converted over the social media. So we have a world where we’ve got to make more partners and fewer enemies. That we’ve got to win the argument for what a civilized world looks like.”
Despite claiming the “mistake” was not politically motivated, Clinton repeated to the audience one of his wife’s talking points on Republican calls for clamping down on our immigration and visa policies in light of national security threats like that highlighted by Malik’s fiancée visa.
“We need to be kept safe at home and around the world in a way that advances, not undermines our values,” said Clinton.