Jihad in America: The Michigan Attack

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Saturday, March 14, 2026

 

Two jihadist attacks were carried out on Thursday. That makes four since the start of March — that is, since U.S. and Israeli forces commenced the aerial invasion intended to finish the jihadist war the Iranian regime has been waging, mainly through proxies it controls and inspires, since 1979. (See our editorial regarding the four recent attacks, and our editorial regarding the March 1 attack in Austin.)

 

At this early stage, we don’t know if any of these attacks was triggered by the war. Thursday’s two are intriguing in that regard.

 

In this post, I’ll address the Michigan attack. In the next one, I’ll turn to the Virginia attack.

 

In West Bloomfield, shortly after noon, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali plowed an explosive-laden car into Temple Israel, a synagogue with a preschool on the premises. He was armed with a rifle and began firing. Security personnel — which, infuriatingly, synagogues must now retain in the United States of America due to the rising tide of Jew hatred — returned fire. Ghazali perished as the car burst into flames. One temple congregant was knocked unconscious, but the 140 preschool children and other attendees were unharmed.

 

Ghazali, who was 41, resided in Dearborn Heights, a municipality bordering on and deeply interconnected with Dearborn. The latter, with over 100,000 residents, is the first city in our nation with a majority Muslim population — about 55 percent. Dearborn Heights, with over 60,000 residents, is close to 40 percent Muslim.

 

In both places, the percentage of residents of Lebanese descent is high. Lebanon, of course, is the birthplace and stronghold of Hezbollah (the “Party of Allah”), Iran’s most ruthless jihadist militia, whose first acts included the murders of several U.S. officials, culminating in the 1983 bombings in Beirut of the U.S. embassy (killing 17 Americans and at least 43 others) and a U.S. Marine barracks (killing 241 American servicemen; a separate, nearly simultaneous bombing killed 58 French paratroopers in their barracks). Dearborn and its outskirts, perhaps not surprisingly, have long been notorious hotbeds of sharia supremacism.

 

Dearborn is in the district that sent the Palestinian radical, Rashida Tlaib, to Congress. It is where a rally was held after the death of Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime emir of Hezbollah. At the rally, the locals chanted such ditties as “Oh beloved Nasrallah, strike and blow up Tel Aviv,” and “We heed your call, oh Nasrallah, Death to Israel.” Also proclaimed was the ever-popular chant, “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” It’s an allusion to the prophet of Islam’s conquest of Jewish tribes of Khaybar in 628 A.D., after which he had the male tribe leaders killed (a seminal event in Muslim scripture).

 

Dearborn has figured in numerous terrorism investigations and prosecutions in the last quarter century. (To get the picture, I recommend searching “Dearborn” on the website of the Investigative Project on Terrorism.) Just four months ago, the Justice Department charged several Dearborn men with conspiring to help ISIS try to execute a terrorist attack in the United States.

 

Ghazali — surprise, surprise! — was a Lebanese national whose brothers were reportedly members of Hezbollah. After President Obama took office in 2009, an alien relative and a woman who appears to have been Ghazali’s wife (or fiancée at the time) petitioned immigration authorities to have him admitted. He was granted entry in 2011 on an immigrant visa as the spouse of an American citizen, then naturalized five years later. It has been reported that four of his relatives, including the two brothers just mentioned, were killed last weekend in Israeli strikes in Machghara, a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley (where the organization has historically provided training to members of al-Qaeda and other jihadists). Hezbollah has joined Iran in coordinated bombings of Israel.

 

The Islamist/leftist alliance in the United States (the subject of my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad) is forever assuring us that its confederates are merely anti-Zionists politically opposed to the state of Israel, not antisemites who hate Jews — any and all Jews, wherever they can be found.

 

I have repeatedly countered (see, e.g., here, here, and here) that Jew hatred is doctrinal in sharia supremacist ideology. The lore of Khaybar detailed above is just a part of it. In accordance with the hadiths (authoritative collections of the prophet’s words and actions that have scriptural standing in Islam), young Muslims are taught that, following the conquest, Muhammad was poisoned by a Jewish woman from a Khaybar tribe, eventually resulting in his death. (See Sahih Bukhari, Vol. 3, Book 47, Hadith No. 786, and Sahih Muslim, Book 26, Hadith No. 5430.)

 

Who you gonna believe, your honey or your lyin’ eyes? You can go with the Islamist/leftist storyline, but I’ll stick with the impression that if you try to ram a car through a synagogue full of Jewish children in Michigan, your problem is deeper than political opposition to a tiny country 6,000 miles away.