the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
March 16, 2026
Ayman Ghazali, a 41-year-old immigrant from Lebanon who became a citizen 10 years ago, recently rammed his truck into the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan and exchanged gunfire with security guards there.
There are differing accounts between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI as to whether Ghazali was shot by the security team or died of a self-inflicted gunshot. His truck’s engine compartment caught fire and he may have been carrying fireworks in the truck.
Temple Israel is the largest Reform Jewish synagogue in the U.S. and contains a school with an early childhood center and kindergarten. There were 140 students there at the time of the attack. Fortunately, there were no injuries other than those suffered by Ghazali.
It turns out Ghazali’s two brothers and his niece and nephew were killed and his sister-in-law injured by an Israeli airstrike on their home in Lebanon one week before.
Clearly, the deaths of his close family members do not justify Ghazali’s antisemitic attack on a synagogue which endangered the lives of Jewish children and adults who had nothing to do with them. But it does at least explain what may have motivated him to carry out the attack.
In the meantime, both CBS and NBC News cited an anonymous Lebanese official saying Ghazali’s two brothers were affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanese group with links to Iran. Interestingly, the New York Times also cited an anonymous Lebanese official saying the brothers were not affiliated with Hezbollah. Who’s more believable? The New York Times is hardly friendly to Iran.
These attempts to justify the killings and injuries to Ghazali’s relatives by linking them to “terrorists” is not unlike how members of the Trump administration tried to justify the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by claiming they were “domestic terrorists.”
The violence and deaths connected to the wars in the Middle East will not be solved by individual terrorist attacks against people with no responsibility for those wars. That will require ending the system that produces and requires endless wars, the capitalist system.