Will the Real Hostage-Situation Heroes Please Stand Up?
It's a tale of two stories, and one of them has been quite off.
"And so there was a chair that was right in front of me. I told the guys to go, I picked it up and I threw it at him with all the adrenaline," Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker of the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas recalled to Wolf Blitzer during a CNN interview. This was just days after the rabbi and three members of his congregation were taken hostage by Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old British national who demanded they assist in having a convicted female Pakistani terrorist released from a Texas prison.
"It was absolutely terrifying and I wasn't sure if I was going to be shot, and I did not hear a shot fired as I made it out the door. I was the last one out,” Rabbi Cytron-Walker added.
The rabbi and Jeffrey Cohen, one of his fellow hostages, credited training they had received for their ability to handle the situation as coolly and bravely as they did. And, lest anyone think that there were outside forces responsible for their safe return into their loved ones’ arms, Cohen posted a lengthy explanation on Facebook to set the record straight:
“First of all, we escaped. We weren't released or freed. We escaped because we had training from the Secure Community Network on what to do in the event of an active shooter. This training saved our lives — I am not speaking in hyperbole here — it saved our lives.”
It seems that the hostages had to make some noise about their heroics because the story that was being bandied about up until that point was quite different.
“An elite hostage rescue team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation then breached the synagogue at about 9 p.m. CT, after hearing the hostage-taker say he had guns and bombs and was ‘not afraid to pull the strings,’” ABC News reported on Thursday.
Indeed, the FBI rushed in, but it was after Rabbi Cytron-Walker told the other hostages to run and after he threw a chair at Akram.
Stories can expand and change as they are told from one source to another. It’s up to the media to straighten them out. Had the hostages not been given the opportunity to tell their versions, would the accurate account of how the hostage situation ended have been revealed? We can’t say for sure. Thankfully, through social media and a smart Wolf Blitzer, who allowed the hostages he interviewed on CNN to carefully explain the events without interjecting, the real story was allowed to surface.
And three cheers for Rabbi Cytron-Walker, Cohen and others in the Jewish community for calling out an even graver error: the fact that the FBI initially said the hostage situation was not related to the Jewish community. Say what? Just knowing that a man walked into a synagogue and began to rant about the release of a Pakistani woman convicted of trying to murder U.S. soldiers makes that statement seem preposterous. Then take into consideration that the man “literally thought that Jews control the world,” Rabbi Cytron-Walker, recounted. “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.”
That certainly sounds like someone targeting the Jewish community. In fact, the response from Jews and non-Jews alike was swift and severe, forcing the FBI to do an about-face days later. "This is a federal hate crime,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Matthew DeSarno eventually acknowledged. “As negotiators began to engage with Akram, he repeatedly demanded the United States release a convicted al-Qaida terrorist in exchange for the safe return of the hostages. In doing so, his actions clearly met the definition of terrorism.”
It’s important that the severity of this situation be strongly emphasized, and it’s a shame that it took so long for the truths to be fully revealed. As Brett Stephens wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times, “For American Jews, this small silence about what happened last week should be profoundly worrisome, and not just as a matter of a journalistic lapse.”
Stephens believes the initial failure to address the situation as an antisemitic hate crime had a lot to do with who the hostage-taker was — “a British Muslim of Pakistani descent” — and who he was not — “not white. Not privileged. Not right-wing. In the binary narrative of the powerful versus the powerless, his naked antisemitism just doesn’t compute: Powerless people are supposed to be victims, not murderous bigots.
“If he had ranted against Israel for oppressing Palestinians, it might have made more sense. And if he had donned a MAGA hat, we would certainly have had a much fuller exploration of his antisemitism, without time wasted exploring his other motives or state of mind,” Stephens added.
How did we get to this point where antisemitic behavior has to fit into certain parameters to be labeled exactly what it is? Who exactly are we trying to protect? Who are we willing to denounce?
In this case, the FBI was held accountable by some savvy journalists and by the people who actually lived through the hostage experience. By reading numerous news stories and scanning for truths, we can all hold people and organizations accountable so that “small silences” can be heard and erroneous information can be proven wrong..