How a Muslim attack in a Texas synagogue become the litmus test of the crisis of international security
The Muslim-Jewish conflict evidently seems to keep on going all over the world. Last episode has recently occurred at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, by the 44 years old Malik Faisal Akram, the hostage-taker who as police stormed the building. The synagogue was the first Jewish congregation in Northeast Tarrant County. The CBI community officially opened the doors to its own new building in 2005.
CBI holds Sabbath morning services every Saturday, and members and
non-members alike use to watch from home on the livestream, a practice many
synagogues have adopted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Akram reportedly demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, who is currently serving an 86-year prison sentence
for the attempted murder of American troops and FBI agents who arrested her. It
is unclear if he has any direct connection or relation to her.
There
is no indication that other individuals are involved in the case. However, on Monday morning, two British teens were
arrested and detained in custody for questioning in relation to the synagogue
attack by Greater Manchester Police officers from Counter Terrorism Policing
North West. The UK, apparently distracted by the party-goer stance of the PM Boris Johnson that seems even likely to blow
up the government in these days behind the accusation of not being a good example
in time of pandemic, isn’t undressing the garments of austere intransigence and
the strong attachment to the rules that have always demarked it and the police
forces keep on operating regardless for the security of the country.
In facts, Akram was from Blackburn, north of
Manchester. The devastated Akram’s family’ apologized to all the
victims involved in the incident, underlying that the offender was suffering
from mental health problems, that it would be blamed any arbitrary attack on
the safety of any human being, independently from the racial or ethnicity belonging
and that it is unlikely it could represent what Biden has defined as an “act of
terrorism” . However, FBI investigations are still ongoing.
Akram arrived in the US
approximately five weeks ago, landing at New York's JFK Airport. He arrived
legally in December, cleared vetting prior to his arrival, he was not in the US
government watchlist and a review conducted far of U.S. intelligence community
databases containing terror-related threat information shows no prior
derogatory information on Akram. He spent three
nights at Union Gospel Mission Dallas, a homeless shelter, in the week prior to
the incident. He initially checked in to the shelter on January 6 and he left
the facility for the final time on January 13, a little more than 48 hours
before taking four people hostage inside the synagogue approximately 22 miles
away.
Akram told hostage negotiators that he was not going to leave the synagogue
alive and during the conversation with the negotiators, he demanded that
Siddiqui be brought to the synagogue so they could both die together.
Officials said it's believed Akram wanted Siddiqui released. The attorney
who represents Siddiqui said Saturday "she has absolutely no involvement
with" the taking of hostages at the synagogue and said the perpetrator is
not Siddiqui's brother.
At the request of the hostage taker, the rabbi of the largest Jewish congregation
of the area who was being held hostage called a well known rabbi in New York
City. Congregation Beth Israel is affiliated with the Union for Reform Judaism,
whose website indicates the congregation serves 157 membership families.
In
2010, Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years in prison by a New York federal judge
following a 14-day trial. After Siddiqui was arrested in Afghanistan for her
part in plotting al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in the US, UK and Pakistan,
shooting at US Army troops as they detained her, she said the case against her
was a Jewish conspiracy. Siddiqui dismissed her legal defense team because she
said the lawyers were Jewish, and she demanded that jurors in the trial take
DNA tests to make sure they were not Israeli or Zionists, in order “to be
fair.”
She
also wrote a letter to then-president Barack Obama telling him that Jews “have
always back-stabbed everyone who has taken pity on them and made the ‘fatal’
error of giving them shelter.”
“It
is this cruel, ungrateful back-stabbing of the Jews that has caused them to be
mercilessly expelled from wherever they gain strength. This is why ‘holocausts’
keep happening to them repeatedly! If they would only learn to be grateful and
change their behavior!!” Siddiqui
wrote.
Siddiqui, a Pakistani scientist who graduated from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and obtained a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis
University, was taken into custody for questioning by the Afghan National
Police in 2008, who said they found handwritten notes referring to potential
targets of a "mass casualty attack". When a group of Americans
attempted to speak to her, prosecutors said she was able to grab a US soldier's
rifle and open fire on the interrogation team, although no one was hit by the
gunfire.
At sentencing, the judge found that a terrorism enhancement applied to her
crimes, citing statements she had made that the judge concluded demonstrated
her actions and intent to retaliate against the US government, including
"I hate Americans" and "Death to America."
Her family keeps on declaring she’s not a terrorist.
During a deadly hostage crisis in Algeria in 2013, a spokesperson for a
militant group offered to release hostages if Siddiqui was released from US
prison, along with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World
Trade Center attack, who has since died in prison.
Siddiqui is being held in a medical facility that's part of a federal
prison in Fort Worth, with a release date set for 60 years from now.
In the Saturday incident it was clear that Jewish community was the main
target, being Siddiqui, also name “Lady Al- Qaeda” a raving anti-semite.
One time more in Texas are taking place human rights restrictions
and violations. Noteworthy to be remembered how since September 1, 2021, abortion has been declared illegal in Texas once a
fetal heartbeat can be detected. The Texas
Heartbeat Act prohibits abortion when there is a
detectable heartbeat, which may be as early as 6 weeks into a woman's pregnancy. Before
this, elective abortions were allowed up to 20 weeks post-fertilization. The
Texas Heartbeat Act is the strictest abortion law in the US that is currently
in force, though it follows a trend also seen in other States. These last episodes remarkably characterize and smear
of blood and infamy minority groups in American civil society.
This sensational case has waken up the public opinion
because once again when are affected the american institutions and its
intelligence services it’s yelled terrorism and a torea to new attacks. After
the episodes of 9/11 it’s felt as much more alarming any incidents, especially involving
Muslims, and it’s reconsidered the drumbeat of war triggered by al Qaeda which still
represents a sore spot in the panorama of International security, today put
particularly in crisis also on the other side of the Atlantic in the cases of
the Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine and the engagement of Nato and EU that
continue to pursuit an open door, even if not inclusive, policy with this last
that risks to be subject to a russian invasion and the consequent American sanctions
that aim to hit the exports and the production of Russian petroleum and gas
pipelines. Undermined in their foundation and in a
chaotic transitional jumble, the USA try again to take the lion’s share, not
saving an eventual iron fist in a country that is still divided and sidelined
behind the populistic Trump motto “America First” .
Therefore, in this episode find a junction the topic of
the interior american security with the International one in a counter-terror
key and results connected with the Israeli-Arab atavic skirmishes that keep on
making their fuses explode even by small, sometimes as in this case, strategic events,
the make us fear a wider-ranging escalations of violence even in a country as
the USA in which the cases of racial discrimination are by now become a cliché
and ordinary routine (enough to mention George Floyd and other contemporary anti-semite
and anti-asiatic discrimination).
The rampant Trumpism, in facts, doesn’t appear to
desist. Enough thinking about the clashes of Capital Hill that started exactly
one year ago, the infinite judiciary odyssey that has involved even the judges
of the US Supreme Court, whose “big lie” matter keeps on quarrelling the
legitimacy of Biden administration and the suitability of the election law,
nowadays vetted in the Senate. All events, these ones, that reveal how much the
USA democratic institutions are passing through a phase of severe crisis and
delegitimation that has even more lowered the american security minimum
threshold. The USA has been hit in its national-populistic heart and pride, not
only for the exacerbated inner divisions in which more than a multiracial melting
pot, aims to enshrine its own patriotic hegemony in and outside Home.
A
democracy in jeopardy. Every
ignited fuse risks to make the keg powder blow up.
The threat is to find again Al Qaeda behind the corner.
Today, the USA find themselves again to be a papier mâché giant that embodied in
the old and weary face of Biden, can’t any more detain the leadership of world
super power because undermined at the basic foundations: the high inflation inherited
by Biden has more and more weakened the purchase capability of the US dollar in
the International monetary system, especially in comparison with Euro, the delicate
passage towards a green and digital economy due to the pandemic and the climate
emergency, the fight against terrorism, especially the Islamic one. It seems to
fall out victim of its authoritarianism itself, a “Gendarme State” that very
often arbitrary abuses its own powers, implementing the law of retaliation not
only against criminals but also when happen incidents provoked by the reckless
and easy use of weapons, in which we start wondering where are finished the so
loudly proclaimed freedoms of the people whereas it’s occurring a tightening-up
of the inner repressive measures - “
police state” – and the more and more frequent imposition of international
sanctions in every corners of the world in which democracy and international
stability at put at risk. In this strange equilibrium games EU e UN keep on
representing the tip of the balance, going further in their role of neutral
mediator and peace-makers in the negotiations of the peace processes.
Biden has opened up a crack in the sign of a more egalitarian
world and towards a pacific coexistence among people but we can see him still
moving groping in the mare magnum of
tangles and divisions caused by the Trump omnipotence delirium that has led the
USA astray, both under the credibility profile and under the economic-financial
one and for the maintaining of peace and domestic and International security,
making clear how the ancestral conflicts between the Arab and Jewish
communities, historic enemies, can topple down a Pandora box hardly protected
in the web of the noble and subtle diplomatic threads and international alliances.
Footnotes:
FBI identifies
hostage-taker at Texas synagogue - CNN
British national
ID’d as hostage-taker at Texas synagogue - POLITICO
Texas synagogue siege: Rabbi
describes being held hostage - BBC News
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