Sara Speer Selber was baking bread in her kitchen when she saw on a television news show that the Rabbi of a Colleyville synagogue had been taken hostage. However, an FBI official at the time said the incident wasn’t specifically related to the Jewish community.
“It is painful that we’re not calling it what it is when the FBI has said there’s been a 42% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in this country in the last year,” said Selber, who attends Congregation Emanu El in Houston.
It was widely reported that on Saturday, January 15, British National Malik Faisal Akram walked into Congregation Beth Israel and took Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker hostage along with three others.
“At the end of the day, those 11 hours were terror. Period,” Selber told The Dallas Express. “They were terror for anyone watching it who was sitting at home thinking this could happen in my mosque. This could happen in my black church. This could happen in my Latino church. This could happen in my white church in rural Texas. It’s happened in all of those places and it’s terror.”
While some Jewish leaders found the FBI’s assessment to be insulting, according to media reports, Selber said it was scary.
“It wasn’t just the FBI,” she said in an interview. “In Gov. Abbott’s first tweet, he never mentioned the Rabbi. He never mentions [the word] Jewish. He talks about a situation but he never says prayers so that was not very comforting.”
FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno stated, “We do believe from our engagement with this subject that he was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community. But we are continuing to work to find [the] motive.”
President of the Dallas Jewish Conservatives, Benji Gershon told The Dallas Express, “There is no question in my mind that the FBI has major problems and should face intense scrutiny and accountability for their poor judgment and decision making.”
He continued, “I do believe they owe the Jewish community an apology for their statement regarding the anti-Semitic terror attack on Beth Israel.”
Before he died at the crime scene, Akram, 44, was allegedly advocating for the release of a convicted Pakistani terrorist woman named Aafia Siddique who is serving an 86-year prison sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, which is a 25-minute drive from Colleyville, according to media reports.
CNN reported that the FBI has since begun referring to the Colleyville hostage incident as terror-related.
“What we all grew up with was this idea that we could trust the CIA and the FBI to work for the United States in a non-ideological fashion and that they were above politics but what we’ve learned over the last half dozen years is that no, that’s not true at all,” said Warren Norred, a Dallas Fort Worth attorney. “Apparently, politics has infested our national security. It’s pretty horrible but that’s the reality.”
Norred is a Republican who is campaigning to unseat District 10 State Senator Beverly Powell, a Democrat.
As previously reported, the National School Boards Association requested in a letter that the Biden administration classify parent protests at school board meetings against critical race theory curriculum as “a form of domestic terrorism” and recommended prosecution under the PATRIOT Act.
The FBI defined domestic terrorism in a statement about white supremacy to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as any act dangerous to human life that violates U.S. criminal laws and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.
“People had no problem with an actual insurgency in Portland, Oregon that went on for days where they took command of a section of the United States and said this is an independent organization, which was a real insurrection,” Norred told The Dallas Express. “No problem there. Right? Burning and causing chaos and directly attacking government buildings all summer.”
Last year, the New York Times reported that U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas told the Senate Appropriations Committee that those who advocate for the superiority of the white race pose the greatest threat to the United States.
Further in 2019, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, promoted the idea of having white supremacy classified and charged as foreign terrorism. “Is white supremacy not a global issue?” she asked of FBI Counterterrorism Assistant Director Michael McGarrity at a Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hearing. “So, why are they not charged with foreign terrorism? Could you see how this could create issues and discrepancies with how violent extremism by Muslim perpetrators could potentially, even if it’s unintentional, but that there are holes and there are gaps here, not through your fault or anyone specific person’s fault?”
Gershon told The Dallas Express, “It seems to me that the left has found a way to politicize the FBI in order to further strengthen their political agenda and ideology, and they have long forgotten what it means to call a spade, a spade.”