Fiend ripped Israel days before slays

TWO WEEKS before he slaughtered more than a dozen people at a California holiday party, Syed Farook told a Jewish colleague that he thinks “Israel doesn’t belong in the Middle East.”

The 28-year-old Farook was also overheard telling Nicholas Thalasinos (photo) that “Americans don’t understand Muslims,” according to a friend of the pro-Israel supporter who was listening to the conversation.

It wasn’t an unusual exchange for Thalasinos, a Messianic Jew who relished engaging Muslims in pointed religious debates.

“It didn’t set off any alarm bells,” his friend Kuuleme Stephens, 41, told the Daily News on Friday. “He didn’t say anything about feeling like he was being threatened by this Syed person or anything like that.”

But roughly 14 days later, Thalasinos was among 14 people killed in the San Bernardino rampage carried out by Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 27.

Thalasinos and Farook were colleagues at the San Bernardino County Health Department.

Stephens, who said she spoke to Thalasinos by phone almost every day, had never heard of Farook until she called her pal during his lunch break in late November.

It just so happened that Thalasinos was in the middle of a spirited debate with the man who would become his killer.

“It was a passionate conversation,” said Stephens, who met Thalasinos online and bonded with him over their support for Israel and the Second Amendment.

“I could hear Syed in the background,” she said. “Both of them were just trying to explain their views. Neither of them seemed angry.

“When Nicholas picked up the phone, he said, ‘Hey sis, how you doing?’ We’re just sitting here talking about politics,” Stephens added.

The conversation carried on for a few minutes. Stephens listened in, receiving periodic commentary from her pal.

At one point, Thalasinos mentioned that Farook was rejecting his belief that Islam is not a peaceful religion.

“He was one that always believed you have to talk to people in order to make a difference,” Stephens said.

But Thalasinos’ conversation with Farook yielded no such breakthroughs.

“At the end, Nicholas said to me, ‘I don’t know how to get through to him,’ ” Stephens recalled. “And then we just had a normal conversation.”