It wasn’t so long ago that an official at London’s Heathrow airport, warned by the scanner through which my luggage was passing, uttered an Archimedean Eureka! (or words to that effect), pounced on my suitcase and abstracted an incriminating bottle of shampoo, which he confiscated. “Over the limit, Sir,” he exclaimed, as a colleague asked me to step aside and extend my hands to be tested for evidence of contact with explosive materials.
It’s not only in England, of course, that functionaries subject the populace to their petty tyranny. It’s the same drill in the US. “Oh, but it’s to keep you safe, you know, that’s why we spend billions on our intelligence services and elite crime fighting units, equipping like armies so they can protect us from the bad guys.”
Right. It’s just business as usual to stop a passenger and ransack his luggage because he has in his possession a twenty-ounce bottle of hair wash. But what if you are Malik Faisal Akram, the Pakistani Brit, Muslim fanatic and Jew hater? MI5 had this chap on its radar for years. They knew that his dearest ambition was to “kill” and “bomb” Jews. But when he applied for a tourist visa to visit the US of A, the answer was, “Sure, here you go, have a nice trip.”
As a friend quipped, “Britain isn’t sending us their best people.”
MFA’s first stop — also, as it happens, his last — was the Beth Israel Synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. Although he arrived on the Sabbath, he did not go to worship. No, brandishing a gun, he took Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and three congregants hostage for some ten hours. He demanded the release from prison of Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani terrorist fondly known as “Lady al-Qaeda” who has been cooling her heels in the slammer since 2010 for plotting to kill US military officers in Afghanistan.
What happened in Colleyville provides an object lesson in intelligence failure and the toxic effect of wokeness on the FBI.
As soon as the hostage situation was announced, the G-Men climbed into their SWAT gear and shades, revved up their scary armored vehicles, flipped off the safeties on their guns, grenades and tear gas canisters. They also checked to be sure that their megaphones had fresh batteries.
I don’t actually know anything about the details of all this, but it would certainly be in keeping with their Standard Operating Procedure for dealing with “domestic extremists.” Remember that dangerous chap Roger Stone? He was treated to the full weapons-drawn-in-a-pre-dawn-raid routine. Something similar happened to that very dangerous chap, the journalist James O’Keefe, whose tort was possibly having an embarrassing diary kept by the daughter of the president of the United States. That earned him a dawn visit from the Men in Black. They showed up at his door with a battering ram, cuffed O’Keefe and tossed him out in the hallway in his underwear as they proceeded to ransack his home.
Then of course there are the numerous parents who have demonstrated that they are “domestic extremists” by daring to question the efforts of various lunatic schools boards attempting to shove the entire woke agenda down the throats of their children. For that the attorney general of the United States issued a memo to the entire police power of the state, from the FBI right down to local assets, warning them to keep an eye on such parents whose objections “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” Then of course there are the nearly 700 people the FBI has arrested and kept in a Washington Gulag in appalling conditions because they had the temerity to be in or around the Capitol last year on January 6.
“Oh, but what happened at Colleyville shows how effective our Geheime Staastpolizei are in dealing with real terrorists threats.”
No it doesn’t. At first, The Narrative was that the FBI neutralized the baddie and freed the hostages. Maybe they did indeed shoot Akram — I haven’t been able to confirm exactly how he died — but it turns out that the hostages freed themselves. The FBI lied about that part of the story.
They also fudged the truth about why Akram was there in the first place. Yes, he wanted the release of Aafia Siddiqui. But as he said in his last telephone conversation, recorded as the hostage crisis unfolded, he wanted to bring war to America, he wanted to kill Jews and he wanted to die as a martyr. How did the FBI spin this? According to Matthew DeSarno, the agent charge in Dallas, Akram “singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community.”
Really? He just happened to pick a synagogue to stage his last stand. It was just a tick that he kept talking about “f***ing Jews.” Right. One Twitter user summarized the truth of the situation with admirable crispness: “So to sum it up, FBI let this guy in, let him get a weapon and let him get so far as taking hostages. Then, though they put on a show, the men saved themselves, no thanks to said FBI.”
That’s about it, with an assist, of course from MI5, doing their best to burnish the “special relationship” with the US.
