Eleven hours at Congregation Beth Israel

Malik Faisal Akram, 44, a British citizen from Blackburn in Lancashire, arrived in the United States in December 2021 and bought a pistol on the street in Dallas. On the morning of 15 January 2022 he came to Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, where Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker let him in and made him a cup of tea before Shabbat services began. The service was being livestreamed, and at some point the congregation watching online realised what they were hearing.

Akram took the rabbi and three congregants hostage and demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist serving an eighty-six-year federal sentence in a prison about twenty miles away. The siege ran about eleven hours. He released one hostage during it. In the evening Cytron-Walker threw a chair at him and the remaining three ran for a door; an FBI hostage rescue team entered and Akram was killed. Nobody else was hurt.

The reason a synagogue in Texas is on this map is the reasoning that put Akram there. He did not go to the prison, or to a courthouse, or to a federal building. He went to a synagogue, because he believed that Jews had the influence to get a federal prisoner freed - the oldest antisemitic premise there is, that Jews secretly control the state. The FBI's initial statement that the siege was not specifically related to the Jewish community was withdrawn within a day; the Attorney General afterwards described it as an act of terrorism targeting the Jewish community.

Rabbi Cytron-Walker has said since that the thing that got the four of them out was the active-shooter training the congregation had been through, which is a sentence that explains the condition American synagogues have been operating under since Pittsburgh.