A would-be mass casualty attack last week at a Michigan synagogue was narrowly averted after an assailant, Ayman Ghazali, rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the building in what authorities are treating as a targeted act of terror. No worshippers were killed, and security personnel stopped the attacker before he could carry out what could have been a massacre.
Within minutes of the attack—before the public knew anything meaningful about the suspect or his motive—pro-Israel voices predictably rushed to weaponize the incident against their preferred domestic political enemies, namely Tucker Carlson. Among the most shameless was Laura Loomer, who boasted that she had warned that Carlson’s supposed “hatred” would “lead to people shooting up Jews in synagogues.”
Yet it soon became clear that the people who bear the greatest responsibility for the synagogue attack are not Tucker Carlson or any other domestic critics of U.S. foreign policy, but Israel and its loyalists in the United States—figures like Laura Loomer—who relentlessly cheerlead the Greater Israel project. That project reportedly killed four members of the attacker Ayman Ghazaleh’s family in an IDF strike in Lebanon, likely with U.S.-made munitions, just one week before his own attack in Michigan.
As Ryan Grim of Drop Site News reported, Ghazali had on the night before posted photos of his family members, including two young children Ali and Fatima, who were all killed in a recent Israeli attack on the town of Mashgharah, Lebanon.
That doesn’t justify violence against innocent worshippers, obviously. But it’s dishonest to pretend that Israel’s killing of four of Ayman Ghazali’s family members last week, with U.S. support, had no influence on his decision to target a nearby institution associated, in his apparent reasoning, with the Jewish state.
Indeed, realists like John Mearsheimer have long predicted that the more civilians that the U.S.–Israeli “tag team” butchers abroad on behalf of the Greater Israel project, the more blowback Americans will suffer at home. A series of terror plots perpetrated against the United States—including 9/11, whose plotters were partially motivated by Israel’s civilian massacres during Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon—have long proven Mearsheimer’s case.
That ought to concern Americans, who currently pay for Israel’s wars on seven different fronts: in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, and in Lebanon,
where in the past 2 weeks, the civilian body count from Israel’s occupation and bombing has rapidly piled up and more than 800,000 people have been internally displaced, according to recent estimates. Here in the United States, those Israeli actions place Americans at increased risk of reprisals like last week’s attack in Michigan.
The victims of the mass carnage that Israel inflicts on its neighbors are increasingly aware of who is footing the bill for their suffering. Images published by AP of an October 2024 Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the neighborhood of Ghobeiry, Beirut went viral and demonstrated that U.S.-supplied, 2,000-pound SPICE bombs were being used by Israel against civilians.
Mohamad Kleit, a video journalist based in Beirut, tells The American Conservative that he witnessed similar Israeli attacks using U.S.-supplied munitions to target a residential building earlier this month. He says that since March 2, his entire family has been internally displaced.
Asked who and what Israel is targeting in Lebanon, Kleit says that “what we’ve seen” in recent weeks “is a plan to create sectarian tension, by bombing hotels and residences in Christian areas. They are deliberately targeting places that are not Hezbollah in order to create sectarian tension.” Mohamad says that this strategy is “exactly like what they did in the ’80s,” as Israel began an occupation of southern Lebanon which lasted from 1982 until 2000.
His testimony is corroborated by past reports, like those by Al Jazeera from 2024, which document an Israeli strategy to promote civil strife by selecting target locations to maximize sectarian tensions.
Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon who is currently head of the pediatric referral center at the American University of Beirut, similarly characterized the ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli campaign in Lebanon, telling The American Conservative that “the Israelis are targeting areas where the internally displaced have been given refuge to try to turn people against them.”
“In the last two weeks since the war started,” Abu-Sitta explained, “there have been over a hundred children killed. At our center, we receive critically wounded children requiring complex surgeries. We’ve seen children with head injuries, eye injuries, fractures, ranging from 4 years old to 16.”
Given what Israel is now doing to Lebanon with American weapons, money, and diplomatic cover, it should surprise no one that the increasing number of victims and their loved ones may eventually seek reprisals against targets they associate, however unfairly, with the state responsible for their suffering. And such targets may come to include non-Jewish centers of American life, as the U.S. is blamed for supporting Israeli militarism in Lebanon and elsewhere.
While Laura Loomer and other Israel loyalists have sought to exploit the synagogue attack by blaming Tucker Carlson, the overwhelming evidence now points to the exact opposite conclusion: Had Washington listened to Tucker’s warnings against this latest regional war, instead of to the Israel-first chorus, four members of Ayman Ghazali’s family might still be alive—and the Michigan attack may never have happened.
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