Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Tashfeen Malik grew up in Saudi Arabia, where making disrespectful comments about Islam is a capital offense — and where the death penalty for offending Islam is actually administered by the state.
In other words, the notion that people should be killed for insulting Islam was, in her mind, not an “outlaw” concept, but rather a practice that is normal, legitimate, and just — it is a moral and legal imperative.
Someone who grew up under that system in a fanatically-conservative religious family would look at America’s First Amendment freedom to blaspheme Islam as evidence that she was living in a “lawless,” barbaric land ruled by infidels with no respect for God’s law.
She may have reacted much the same way many of us would if we moved to a country where the law allowed husbands to viciously beat their wives or the government allowed the wealthy to buy and sell slaves. We would look around and say “These people are barbarians,” and if it really got in our face, we might EVEN be tempted to take the law into our own hands and administer punishment to Americanstandards.
Speculating, I can just imagine the Malik having an “Are you going to let him get away with that?” conversation with her husband — goading him to defend God from the insults of this infidel (or, even worse in her eyes, this “Jew infidel.”) All of this logic would be a perfectly legitimate response in Saudi Arabia.
Lady MacBeth to MacBeth:
"Hie thee hither,
That i may pour my spirits in thine ear
And chastise thee with the valour of my tongue..."
William Shakespeare