The FBI’s Telling Statement on the Texas Synagogue Attack

CLAY: Buck, a big story that took place over the weekend was in Texas where a — I think it’s fair to say — Muslim fundamentalist, a Muslim terrorist, however you want to classify this guy — went into a Texas synagogue, took four Jewish people hostage. You can correct me if I’m wrong on any of these details; I think I’ve got them all wrong — demanded the release of a prisoner who is in prison because of terror-related issues.

And thankfully, thankfully this story ended with the four would-be hostages escaping and the FBI was able to… This guy said he had a bomb, said he was gonna blow things up. It was an hours and hours long hostage standoff that ended with this individual being shot and killed by authorities who had responded to try and free the four hostages. Again, the hostages got away; there was no loss of life of innocent people.

But almost immediately, Buck — and I want to get your expertise here on an issue such as this from an FBI perspective. Almost immediately there was the story that was put out — and I think this story is going to disappear quite quickly — that there was no… They tried to argue that there was no hate involved in this story, and for most people out there when you hear a Muslim terrorist takes four Jewish people inside of a synagogue — I should mention, in a synagogue — hostage, and demands the release of another Muslim terrorist, it’s not a big leap to suggest that these four Jewish people inside of the synagogue were targeted because of their religious faith directly.

BUCK: Right.

CLAY: So the attempt to try and turn this into something that was not related to the religious aspect involved here struck many people as totally disingenuous and dishonest.

BUCK: So the FBI came out and said that the Texas synagogue hostage taker’s demands were, quote, “specifically focused on issues not connected to the Jewish community.” That was the statement that got people understandably upset. Now, just to put this in context, let’s all remember that the Pulse nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, if memory serves was yelling about how he was doing this for ISIS and for Allah and for the Islamic State and because he’s like a mujahideen, a holy warrior.

And in the initial transcript the FBI released, they blacked out those words because they thought it would be “inflammatory.” This is the real explanation they give. Now, this was under the Obama administration. But what everyone has to understand here is that wokeness has infiltrated not just the military at the very top level, but also the entire security state of this country.

The security apparatus has a whole lot of people in it who now have to take into account wokeness and social justice and all these other concepts that are being taught in these places. I can’t tell you how many times, Clay… So I was in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and I spent a year at the NYPD intelligence division while I was a CIA… Anyway, I was on rotation. And you have these trainings sometimes, and the training was always about a guy named “Bob Smith” or a guy named “Bob Davis,” some guy who didn’t like the government. “He’s an anti-government terrorist.”

CLAY: It’s a white guy doesn’t like the government.

BUCK: In all the terrorism modules, it’s always an anti-government terrorist. This at a time — remember, this was over ten years ago — we were having attack after attack after attack by jihadist terrorism. Now, I know that’s gone down dramatically, but it hasn’t gone away entirely. So here’s what happens in a situation like this. If a senior FBI officer or senior FBI whatever, the special agent in charge (I was never FBI; so I don’t know all their terminology) you don’t want to be the guy who is seen to have said something here that is “Islamophobic.”

That will destroy your career. I know up on Fox News, for example, they have a lot of Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations who are saying that what this agent in charge said is anti-Semitic, and I actually don’t think that’s really the exact analysis of this. The attack was anti-Semitic hatred, clearly. That’s why why this terrorist went and grabbed a synagogue. But the reason the FBI tries to play the game with this is the same reason that the media and the Democrat apparatus are playing games with the Waukesha mass murder.

Which is that when the perpetrator is a person of color — and when the perpetrator is also a person of what’s considered a religious faith that is always under assault by the majority in America — they think it is their goal to push people away from thinking that that’s actually who committed this or that that’s involved in some way. So what they’re really talking about — you mentioned this — was Aafia Siddiqui, who, for people who come from the counterterrorism world, she was sentenced to decades and decades in prison over a decade ago.

I think this was in 2010. She was shot in the abdomen while trying… She’s a neuroscientist from Pakistan. It’s a whole saga. I mean, I actually would have to spend a lot of time going into the details on this person. But people consider her to be a Al-Qaeda-linked, straight up jihadist. “Lady Al-Qaeda” is how people have referred to her in the past. She made it onto terrorism watch lists that no other female ever made it onto, the FBI Seeking-Information Terrorism List.

So, I mean, all this stuff, if you Google it, it will come up, and there’s just all this information that comes out at you. But the knee-jerk reaction, Clay, of the FBI to make it seem like, “Oh, don’t worry! This wasn’t Islamic terrorism. This was something else,” just goes to show you that this is the absurd thinking now of people all over the security apparatus in this country.

CLAY: Buck, think about this. This is my legal training because we all, as lawyers, subtly alter fact patterns to try to determine what the reaction would be. If a white evangelical — let’s just say a white Oath Keeper, right, a member of the Oath Keepers — had taken four members of a Jewish synagogue hostage and had been demanding the release of a January 6th inmate, somebody who is being held (I think 83 people who were arrested on January 6th are still being held), how would the media have covered this story compared to the way they did with it being a theoretically Muslim terrorist? Instead of a Muslim terrorist, it’s a white Oath Keeper and someone who supports January 6th prisoners being released holds four Jewish people hostage all throughout the weekend, how would the media have covered it?

BUCK: It would not only be the fault of everybody who is right wing in America, they would be specifically writing think pieces right away — quote, “think pieces” — about how Donald Trump was actually responsible for this anti-Semitism. Right away, without any question. They would use a club against their political enemies right away.

CLAY: Number one story today on Martin Luther King Day would be the hate that still exists in America that is driven by right-wing fundamentalist extremists, and they are the biggest threat that exists in the country today even still. That would be the number one story that would be spread all throughout the media.

BUCK: Just look at the difference in the coverage between this and, say, Jussie Smollett’s hate incident, right? Remember, someone died here. It was the bad guy. He’s the only one who died, fortunately, under the circumstances. But this is a much more serious incident than even what Jussie Smollett said, which, as we know, didn’t actually happen. And that was a national media firestorm.

Jussie Smollett, where you had the top Democrats in the country weighing in and using this as a teachable — whenever they say “teachable moment,” they actually mean a “Shut up, right wingers, and do what we tell you or else you’re racist” moment, but that was how that was treated. You look at this now, and you also look at Waukesha, and it’s very frustrating because they did exactly what I said they were going to, what we talked about here on the show, Clay.

Which is right after the Waukesha mass murder, which is a guy who, out of anti-white hatred, killed a whole bunch of people at a Christmas parade. It seems to be the only plausible rationale or plausible motivation for that attack, they just made it go away by not talking about it for a few days and moving on to something else.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: And the FBI version of that now at the top level is, “Well, it wasn’t really terrorism.” The Muslim terrorist who seized a synagogue threatening to kill Jews outside of Fort Worth, Texas, so that he could get the release of Aafia Siddiqui a Muslim terrorist who had been in prison for over a decade for trying to kill a lot of Americans has no good with Islam basically and Islamic terrorism.” This is the mind-set. This is the immediate rationale that they use, and we see this time and again, and it’s just people have gotta understand this. They try to control the narrative, and they don’t care how stupid they look in their refusal to state the obvious.