To see how the new Jew hatred grows, look no further than Dearborn, Michigan. To see how the Israelophobia of the mob fuses with the cowardice of the elites to unleash new waves of anti-Semitism, behold this city that borders Detroit. For the violent ramming of the Temple Israel synagogue in Michigan yesterday was more than racist violence – it was a case study in the new Jew hatred and who are its aiders and abetters.
It was a horrific event. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, drove his car at speed into Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan. There’s a pre-school there, too. Ghazali was armed and it is reported there was a large amount of explosives in his car. It seems clear his intention was to massacre Jews. Mercifully, his atrocity was intercepted by Temple Israel’s security guards. They opened fire and Ghazali’s body was later recovered from his burning vehicle.
Ghazali was born in Lebanon and became a US citizen in 2016. It’s reported that members of his family were killed in an Israeli airstrike last month. No doubt some on the left will call his ramming of the synagogue ‘blowback’. They’ll pin it on Israel. The Zionist entity is endangering Jews around the world, they’ll say. It will be victim-blaming on steroids, that old Nazi canard that the Jews invite animus upon themselves through their wily, wicked behaviour.
A more pertinent fact is that Ghazali lived in the Dearborn area, near Detroit. He was reportedly based in Dearborn Heights, near Dearborn city. Dearborn has the highest concentration of Arab Americans of anywhere in the United States. It’s a city that has been rocked not only by orgies of Israelophobia – as have so many cities around the West – but also by open support for the armies of anti-Semites who dream of Israel’s annihilation. Mobs in Dearborn celebrated Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. ‘Michigan rally cheers Hamas attack’, as a local headline said.
Dearborn has become a hotbed of the neo-jihadist imagination. The Hezbollah flag has flown there. There have been rallies for the theocratic regime in Iran. There have been street hollers of ‘Intifada, intifada’ and ‘America is a terrorist state’. Local radical imams pump out anti-Semitic invective. One told a mob of anti-Israel protesters that the ‘fire in our hearts… will burn that state until its demise’. Others have spoken of the need to ‘eradicate from existence’ that ‘sick, disgusting Zionist regime’.
Ahmad Musa Jibril, described by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ‘most influential English-speaking jihadi sheikhs’, is based in Dearborn. He giddily promotes ‘holy war’. An X account in his name called on Allah to ‘purify the [Holy Land] from the aggression of the apes, swines and hypocrites’ – ie, Jews. Suicidally, Dearborn ‘progressives’ have marched shoulder to shoulder with the radical religionists. Forswearing brunch to hit the streets in their mandatory keffiyehs, they’ve called for the very ‘intifada’ that would likely swallow up them and their gender-bending friends at some point.
And yet, you call out Dearborn’s poisonous Islamist culture at your peril. When, in 2024, the Wall Street Journal described Dearborn as ‘America’s jihad capital’, it was roundly damned as ‘Islamophobic’. ‘Reckless. Bigoted. Islamophobic’, said Dearborn mayor Abdullah Hammoud. The then US president, Joe Biden, wrung his hands over ‘anti-Arab hate’. Thousands signed an online petition calling on the WSJ to retract its ‘Islamophobic’ hitjob.
It was the clearest proof you could ask for that the role of the ‘Islamophobia’ slur is to strangle public discussion about Islamism. This is the ruthless suffocation of debate dolled up as ‘anti-racism’. Here we had a serious newspaper raising concerns about the anti-Jewish venom that can flow from the Islamist ideology, yet it was drowned out by wails of ‘Islamophobia!’. Behold the identitarian trump card – Islamist sensitivity, which smothers, every single time, your petty concerns about Jewish security.
Dearborn is like a microcosm of the supine culture that has reigned in the post-7 October West. In the US, the UK and Europe, we’ve witnessed an explosion of the twin forces of Islamism and Islamo-censorship. We’ve seen mobs cheer anti-Semitic terrorism and wallow in the violent dream of Israel’s fiery demise. And yet you’re called ‘Islamophobic’ if you fret about it. Islamism is treated as a reasonable reaction to the behaviour of ‘the Zionist entity’ while concern about Islamism is damned as bigotry. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral deceit, where those of us worried about the rebirth of an ancient hatred are ourselves called ‘hateful’.
It remains to be seen what Ghazali thought he would achieve with his butchery at Temple Israel. Whether he fantasised that he was avenging Lebanon or whether his anti-Jewish animus flowed from the Islamist pox in Dearborn. Yet it is reasonable to ask if Dearborn’s virulent Israelophobia pushed this man deeper into the cesspit of anti-Jewish hate. A striking feature of our time is that leftists and liberals will always go looking for the ‘architecture of hatred’ that inspires racist attacks on blacks, Muslims or Latinos – but they never do that when there are attacks on Jews. In fact, they warn against it. Don’t ‘weaponise’ this attack by raising concerns about the broader public culture, they say. It’s only ever Jews who are accused of ‘weaponisation’ for wondering if their persecution might spring from social trends.
Does the cultural elite really expect us to believe there’s no link between its own frothing hysteria over the Jewish State and the march of hostility against Jewish people? It’s a childish delusion, and a dangerous one, to think you can spend your every waking hour lamenting the supposedly unique cruelty of the world’s only Jewish nation and that there will be no consequences for Jews. The ceaseless libels against the Jewish homeland, the cries for more ‘intifada’ – these have consequences. You would think an activist class that says it’s vile bigotry to call ‘transwomen’ men would understand that the bourgeois clamour for the violent dismantling of the Jewish homeland is likely to entail blowback for Jewish people.
This is why it’s sickening to hear the likes of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani mourn the events in Michigan. This is a man who refused to condemn the cry ‘Globalise the intifada’. This is a man whose wife liked Instagram posts celebrating an orgy of anti-Jewish violence far worse than Michigan’s – 7 October. Then there’s Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, wringing his hands over the ‘horrific news’ from Michigan. Mate, your deputy leader is a man who celebrated the pogrom of 7 October. A party that cheers the murder of Jews in Israel has no business lamenting the attempted murder of Jews in Michigan.
Things are getting serious. Over the past week there have been violent incidents at synagogues in Liege in Belgium, in Toronto, and now Michigan. Violent Jew hate is spreading. And the first step to tackling it is to dismantle every snivelling effort to censor public concern. The Orwellian forces who call us bigots for speaking about bigotry need to be put back in their box. The stakes are too high for such slippery, tyrannical games.
