A naturalized U.S. citizen who rammed an explosives-laden truck into a Michigan synagogue in March was the brother of a Hezbollah commander, Israeli officials said.
The attacker, Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, 41, of Dearborn Heights, drove a pickup into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township on March 12.
About 150 children and staff were inside. A security officer was struck, and Ghazali died after a gunfight with synagogue security.
The truck carried commercial-grade fireworks and about 35 gallons of gasoline.
Days earlier, an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon killed two of Ghazali’s brothers and two of his brothers’ children.
The Israel Defense Forces later identified one of those brothers, Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali, as a Hezbollah commander who managed weapons operations in a branch of the Badr Unit, Just the News reported.
The IDF said that unit had launched hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians.
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Ghazali was born in Lebanon and became a U.S. citizen in 2016.
The FBI later called the assault a “Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism” aimed at Michigan’s largest Jewish temple, according to the Associated Press.
FBI Detroit Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan said Ghazali wanted to “kill as many of them as I possibly can.”
Investigators said he had consumed Hezbollah and Iranian propaganda for months. Direct planning began in earnest on March 9, after the strike that killed his relatives.
He was not on a federal terrorist watchlist and had not been the subject of a prior FBI investigation, officials said.
That is the sleeper problem in two forms.
One is the traditional deep-cover agent: a person with other loyalties waiting for activation.
The other is a person who may not have planned a massacre until an event abroad flipped a switch. Family members die in a war America supports, and the impulse to hit Americans at home becomes real.
This case looks more like the second. It may not be. That uncertainty is the point.
The United States cannot treat citizenship as a finish line if a man’s loyalties still run through Hezbollah’s chain of command.
When America or its allies strike a terrorist group, some people here will treat innocent lives such as children as the available target.
That is not a mystery of mental health. It is a loyalty problem.
Ghazali sat in the parking lot for hours, sent farewell videos to a sister overseas, then drove into a building full of children.
Security stopped a massacre. Policy did not stop the man from getting there.
Remigration is growing as a movement for a reason. A country that cannot tell the difference between a neighbor and a latent enemy will keep learning the difference the hard way.
The first duty of government is to protect the people already here. Importing, then naturalizing, people whose rage tracks a foreign terror army works against that duty.
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