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, American scholar Dr. Kevin Barrett says.

On Wednesday, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, stormed a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, killing at least 14 people and injuring 21 in the deadliest mass shooting in the US in three years. Hours later, the couple died in a fire exchange with police.

Only hours after news broke that suspects had Muslim names, American Muslims strongly condemned the incident, but this did not stop the US mainstream media from spewing hate and venom against Muslims and Islam.

Commenting to Press TV on Sunday, Dr. Barrett said, “We had another ‘mass shooting’ in the United States. This is nothing new; we had probably hundreds already in 2015.”

“But this one is getting worldwide headlines because the alleged perpetrators are supposedly ‘radical Muslims’, and that’s led to endless speculation among the media and politicians whether this is a case of ‘terrorism,’” he added.

“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.

“Well, the problem though is that as with so many other similar cases, it appears that the link between the allegedly Muslim perpetrators and terrorism may have been fabricated."

San Bernardino shooting story full of holes

Dr. Barrett said, “We have some huge questions being raised about what really happened in San Bernardino, and one of the people raising the questions is the lawyer of the family of the two alleged perpetrators."

“This lawyer has questioned why the suspects were in handcuffs – they were dead in handcuffs. His name is David Chesley. And he should be commended. For once we have a lawyer for people who are being accused for this kind of crime who is actually standing up for his clients," he added.

“And he has pointed out that the handcuffed bodies could be interpreted as evidence that the people were executed, which is what we have seen in many other similar cases where alleged terrorist suspects – who one would think would be captured and interrogated, you would think that they would stop at nothing to capture these people alive so that they can take down their alleged terror networks – and yet case after case, bin Laden’s supposed execution and throwing him in the ocean with no witnesses to all sorts of other cases where these terror suspects have just been hunted down and executed point-blank, the authorities really don’t act as if they are really trying to stop terrorism; instead they act like they are trying to silence patsies who know too much.

“And we have other indications that that’s what happened. The couple blamed for the San Bernardino shooting was apparently gunned down in cold blood in their car. The police claim that there was a gun battle initiated by the suspects, but the car windows were rolled up and then blown out. Nobody starts a gun battle by shooting through rolled-up car windows from inside of a car. It’s pretty much physically impossible, it wouldn’t work.

“So it appears once again that these people may have just been gunned down and silenced.

“There are all sorts of other questions being raised about the shooting. The fact that the facility where the shooting happened, which is a handicapped facility – a very strange place for Muslims to attack! Why would radical Muslims be angry at handicapped people? I don’t know.”

By Press TV