Texas synagogue jihadi ‘literally thought that Jews control the world’

FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno claimed that the Texas synagogue hostage-taking was “not specifically related to the Jewish community.” Back in the real world, however, Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas said of jihadi Malik Faisal Akram: “This was somebody who literally thought that Jews control the world.” This statement will be universally ignored by investigators who are trying to figure out why this happened, and yet it’s the key to the whole incident. If FBI agents pondered it, they might actually get a clue.

“Akram’s first demand,” according to the Forward, “was to speak to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the leader of Central Synagogue in New York City, who he believed could free Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist imprisoned on terrorism charges at a facility near Beth Israel.”

Why would Akram think that going into one synagogue, taking a rabbi hostage, and demanding to speak to another rabbi, would get a convicted jihad terrorist freed? Cytron-Walker explained: “This was somebody who literally thought that Jews control the world. He thought he could come into a synagogue, and we could get on the phone with the ‘Chief Rabbi of America’ and he would get what he needed.”

Akram has been and will be dismissed as suffering from “mental illness,” but it is actually a disturbingly commonplace belief all over the Islamic world that the Jews control the world through various surreptitious means, as Jordanian professor Ahmad Nofal articulated last April. Railing against “Zionist notions” and “Jewish notions,” Nofal said, “It is forbidden to say ‘Jewish’ nowadays … Forbidden! Fine. Whatever. We’ll say ‘Zionist.’ It is the same thing. See how they rule the world? They even monitor what words you use. What kind of power is this? If you curse 1.7 million [sic] Muslims — there’s nothing to it, but if you dare to say one word [against the Jews], they cancel you.”

Nofal was not singular. In a Friday sermon in 2016 at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Sheikh Muhammad Ma’moun Rahma declared: “Are you aware, oh Muslims and Arabs, that global Jewry holds the political reins in the world’s superpowers? The entire world knows that the Jews control the sources of knowledge and fortune, in order to take hold of the reins of culture and economy. In America and in Europe, they are now the kings of finance, the leaders of the media, and the owners of the publishing houses. They are behind many of the ideological and political movements in the East and West. Oh Muslims and Arabs, listen to what The Protocols of the Elders of Zion tells us. They said: ‘We must get our hands on the global news agencies, because the press and the media are the means to control global ideology. That way, people will only see the news from the point of view we choose.’ Their goal is to uproot Islam and bring ruin upon its followers.”

If the “global news agencies” are really in the hands of Zionists, they’re doing a remarkably poor job in telling Israel’s side of the story, but never mind. The hostage-taker chose the synagogue because he clearly believed that the Jews, and perhaps only the Jews, held the power to secure Aafia Siddiqui’s release. The synagogue in Colleyville, as Cytron-Walker noted, would be directly connected to the Jewish power brokers who could be compelled by his hostage-taking to do his bidding.

During the hostage crisis, according to The JC, Akram “can be heard ranting about ‘f***ing Jews’ and martyrdom.” Nor was this a newly-minted hatred: “The Texas gunman was reported to police a year ago by a local councillor after issuing a chilling threat that he wanted to kill and bomb Jews.”

Akram’s desire was founded in Islamic texts: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim 6985)

The FBI should know all this, but it doesn’t. Early in the Obama administration, it scrubbed all counterterror training materials that made any mention of Islamic texts and teachings, and severed ties with all the independent contractors (including me) who were teaching agents about the beliefs and goals of jihad terrorists. Islamic anti-Semitism is yet another forbidden area for today’s FBI; they can’t investigate anything that might appear to be “Islamophobic.”

Matt DeSarno was operating out of the willful ignorance the FBI chose as policy years ago. This time, the agency’s woke idiocy has actively misled the American people about what happened in Colleyville.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.

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