I woke up Saturday morning to drive down Pleasant Run where I live to my favorite coffee house, Starbucks. As I drove, I passed Congregation Beth Israel as I do every morning. It was around 11 a.m. I am very familiar with the congregation and have participated in a lot of their services online through Facebook, but suddenly I saw please police cars rushing in every direction on Pleasant Run.
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I asked someone nearby what was happening and was told there was a terrorist on Pleasant Run at the Beth Israel synagogue who was threatening to blow it up. The man, later identified as a 44-year-old UK citizen named Malik Faisal Arkram, reportedly had a bomb and held four Jews as hostages.
Biden's FBI said the Islamist terrorist, who held Jews hostage at a Texas synagogue
on Sabbath, was "singularly focused on one issue" that was not "specifically related to the Jewish community." He then adds, "We are continuing to work to find the motive."
As a Christian, I am outraged that this is the stance of the FBI! I personally listened to the terrorist rant about "Jews and Zionists" on the Congregation Beth Israel live stream. To not identify this attack as antisemitic isn't just a failure; it's dishonest.
You're telling me that a man who takes Jewish hostages in a synagogue to demand the release of a woman, who demanded her jurors be DNA tested to prove they
weren't Jews, isn't motivated by antisemitism?
The moment I heard the news, it caused a flashback. In Colleyville, Texas, we almost never hear of such things. Jews make up only 0.6% of the population of Texas. But on my birthday the 30th of June many years before, the ATF contacted me to inform me that a terrorist was coming to my home to kill me.
My mother was an Orthodox Jew, and I was actively involved with the State of Israel in combating antisemitism. They said he had my unlisted phone number and my home address on the front seat of his car with pistols and silencers and many more weapons. He had killed two people on the way to my home, including a state trooper. Law enforcement apprehended him and it never made the news because they captured him within a very short time.
On Sunday, 200 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers converged on the Beth Israel synagogue. The terrorist had been making statements that were going out live on Facebook from the synagogue that he would be going to Jannah, the Muslim belief of heaven. He was shouting about dying and not liking police officers or Jews.
As this crisis was going on, I received several WhatsApp messages from Rabbi Goldstein from California who was also a victim of terrorism in his Poway synagogue. I provided the security for the first year for his synagogue after the attack and he and I have become great friends.
Why would such a thing happen? The answer is simple: Antisemitism. It's being fueled and fed, and it gets Jews killed. Facebook took down the live stream from the sanctuary after being asked to do so by the federal authorities, but there's also another group that Facebook took down.
I spent $5.5 million dollars and five years recruiting young Muslims to my Facebook page the Jerusalem Prayer Team, attempting to win their hearts and minds before they were poisoned with Jew-hatred. All of my of the hundreds of ads we purchased were approved by Facebook before Facebook took our money and ran the ads. We were able to grow our Facebook site from over 30 million to 77 million likes and became one of the largest Facebook pages in the world
The goal was only to combat antisemitism, but when antisemites began waging a war against the State of Israel during the Gaza conflict in May 2021, telling unspeakable lies, I organized a Facebook event with the Rev. Franklin Graham, former presidential candidate and Gov. Mike Huckabee, actors Jon Voight and Pat Boone, pastors Jack Graham and Robert Jeffress and Christian Broadcasting Network President Gordon Robertson, but Facebook shut our page down.
In 72 hours, more than 2.1 million antisemitic, Jew-hating threats were posted on our page. Some of them included death threats. An individual in Jordan claimed that he did it, bragging about it on Islamic social media and even in Islamic newspapers. But instead of Facebook punishing the perpetrator, they punished the victim.
After several months of appeals, Facebook put our page back up, but told us they were removing all of our followers in certain Muslim countries. They said all of those people that we recruited were inauthentic, even though they approved every ad. I was informed that the Pakistani government was complaining to Facebook.
By the way, it was a man originally from Pakistan who was the terrorist who attacked the Colleyville synagogue. Antisemitism doesn't begin with a gun in the hands of a terrorist. It begins with young children being brainwashed to hate Jews. Some of them are not Muslims, like the ones who attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California, but the vast majority are in fact Muslims.
We have to acknowledge the root of the problem and stop the media terror. The media fuels and feeds antisemitism by doing what Facebook did to us. We also need to stop media terror.
Terrorism is the only group in the world that gets free media. Everyone else has to pay for it. This one demon-possessed individual has now been lionized by the media.
The founder of Israeli intelligence, Isser Harel described it this way. "You kill a fly and rejoice. We kill one and 100 come to the funeral." You can be sure there'll be many more recruited who want to become martyrs and be famous. We must stop media terror by cutting it off at its roots.
The sad and inexplicable truth is this: Antisemitism is alive and well on planet Earth, and the United States is not immune. On Oct. 27, 2018, those who love the Jewish people mourned a massive assault by an antisemite. No, it was not on the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or another Israeli city. It was in a quiet neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a cool Shabbat morning. Over the centuries, nothing has assuaged that which erupted the moment God declared a covenant with Abraham and his offspring.
The modern-day perpetrator was Robert Bowers. According to police reports, he armed himself with an AR-15 rifle and three handguns, walked into Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue and opened fire on its unsuspecting congregants. Included among the 11 dead were a 97-year old woman, a husband and wife, and two brothers. Among the wounded were four police officers who had responded to the call of "shots fired" in the neighborhood that housed the synagogue. Bowers has reportedly told police interviewers that he just wanted "to kill Jews."
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Did that incident shock the American public into shunning antisemitism and its horrendous effects? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Just days ago, on Saturday, April 27, 19-year-old John Earnest opened fire inside a Poway, California, synagogue. He killed one person and wounded three others before his weapon jammed and he fled the scene.
Shortly before opening fire inside the Chabad of Poway synagogue, Earnest had posted an online declaration spewing animosity for Jews. He also praised Robert Bowers for his attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue.
For me, this is very personal. My mother named me after her grandfather, Rabbi Mikel Katznelson. In the early 1900s, a rabid and bigoted mob burned him to death inside his synagogue in Belarus along with 2,000 Jewish men, women, and children.
One of my first published books was titled Israel: America's Key to Survival. Along with the book, I produced a television special, the premise of which was that if Israel were weakened, radical Islamists would have no deterrent to prevent them from attacking the West. I went even further and said that the first attack would be in New York City and on its tallest building. (At the time, that was the Empire State Building.)
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A professing Christian, Richard Snell, who was to have been involved in the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, decided he had been given a mission from God: to kill me on my birthday, June 30, 1983. He murdered two people on his way to Dallas, Texas; one he incorrectly thought was a Jewish pawn shop owner, and the other Arkansas State Trooper Louis Bryant.
I have been asked by a multitude of people why I built the Friends of Zion Heritage Center and Museum in Jerusalem. The answer is quite simple: to combat Jew-hatred. My work began when I was 11-years old. My father, an antisemite, beat my Jewish mother declaring her to be a whore, and my father a Jewish man; he insisted I was not his son.
My greatest shame was that I could not protect my mother, and when I tried, my father picked me up by the neck and nearly strangled me. At that early age, I knew that my life's work would be to defend the Jewish people. With the founding of Friends of Zion and the Jerusalem Prayer Team, we have reached tens of millions of people on Facebook alone, each one focused on defending the Jewish people.
