Authorities are continuing to probe Saturday’s 11-hour standoff at a synagogue outside Fort Worth, Texas, when an armed British man took a rabbi and three congregants hostage. The standoff began when the armed man, who’s been identified as Malik Faisal Akram, entered the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, Saturday morning. The first hostage was released at 5 p.m. The other three escaped after Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker threw a chair at the gunman, who was later shot dead.
know that a lot has been made of the training that he received to be able to deal with a terrorist situation like this, and that clearly came into play and was extremely important in the moment. At the same time, Rabbi Cytron-Walker has spent many, many, many more hours training himself to understand other people, to be compassionate with people that he doesn’t know very well and who may be foreign to him. And that’s what I think led him to invite this man in, in the beginning, and to give him tea and to be concerned about him.
And, you know, I think that — I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I do a lot of work with Rabbi Cytron-Walker on a lot of issues here in Texas. And we face a lot of sources of trauma in this state. We have children — one in five children is food insecure. We have the highest rate of the uninsured for medical insurance in this state. We had a
— source democracynow.org | Jan 18, 2022