This is what the democratic party has become......
Nazi's...........
What to Do Before the Next West Bloomfield
I have spent more hours than I can count inside Temple Israel. In seventh grade, there were hardly any weekends when I wasn’t there for a friend’s bar or bat mitzvah. My family usually attended a different synagogue, but Temple Israel—the nation’s largest Reform synagogue—was a community pillar so prominent as to be unavoidable. Even if you don’t prefer Shabbat services with female rabbis who strum guitar, you would inevitably end up there for some sort of concert, carnival, lecture, class, meeting, or even to vote (shout out
Precinct 11!).
Yesterday, a heavily armed terrorist, Ayman Ghazaleh—a Lebanese immigrant from Dearborn Heights—drove an explosive-laden truck into the West Bloomfield synagogue’s preschool. Nearly 140 children and staff were inside. By some miracle, they are all alive. A security guard shot and killed Ghazaleh before he could carry out the mass murder he intended.
Finally, a reason to check
Growing up in Metro Detroit, I understood early on that my community occupied a peculiar geography. West Bloomfield sits roughly 20 miles from “
America’s jihad capital”—Dearborn.
Sometimes that distance felt much shorter. Whenever tensions flared in the Middle East, anti-Israel and America-hostile protesters would make the trip up Telegraph Road to demonstrate outside the Jewish Community Center, Jewish day schools, and synagogues throughout our suburb. It became a familiar ritual of intimidation, and the Jewish community’s response was just as familiar: we absorbed it, tried to ignore it, and moved on.
I once asked a teacher at my Jewish school why no Jewish groups ever organized counterdemonstrations outside a mosque or Muslim community center in Dearborn. The teacher looked offended by the question. Such a response, I was told, would be both absurd and dangerous. It was simply not something “we” would ever do. That asymmetry stuck with me for decades. It still irks me. Many of the more progressive Jews in my community—many of whom attended Temple Israel—were less bothered by it.
I vividly remember one summer Shabbat evening service held outdoors at Temple Israel. The rabbi was soon to lead a group of Detroit Jewish teens on a trip to Israel, mostly public school students with limited Jewish education or knowledge about the country and its conflicts with Arab neighbors. The rabbi promised the congregation that he planned to “teach these kids both sides of the story.”
The comment carried a note of pride that I did not share. Why, I wondered, was it the responsibility of Jewish community leaders to travel halfway across the world to explain the grievances of people who openly celebrate violence against Jews—especially to young Jews who had yet even to study their own history and tradition?
That instinct—to empathize endlessly with those who hate you—runs deep in parts of progressive American Jewry. It has been cultivated over decades, and it has made us less safe—a variation of the disease Gad Saad calls
suicidal empathy.
The man who tried to murder scores of American children at Temple Israel was a Third World immigrant who
became a citizen during the Obama administration. But he could just as easily have been radicalized here. After all, he lived in a community
where, within days of October 7, 2023, thousands marched through the streets celebrating Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,200 innocent men, women, and children in Israel, including 46 Americans; where local imams called that day “one of the days of God” and a “miracle come true,” described the attackers as “honorable,” and urged congregants to pray for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
The hatred that brought Ghazaleh to Temple Israel’s parking lot has been incubated, preached, and normalized in Dearborn for years, in full view. And it has shown up in attempted acts of Islamic terror in
Virginia,
Texas, and
New York, in just the last two weeks. That’s to say nothing of the
numerous attacks on
Jewish and
American sites throughout Europe in recent days.