A 41-year-old Lebanese-born jihadist sat in the parking lot of Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, for two hours on Wednesday, then rammed his Ford F-150 — packed with $2,250 worth of fireworks and jugs of gasoline — straight through the front doors of a building filled with 140 children. Ayman Mohamed Ghazali’s brothers were Hezbollah rocket operators killed in an Israeli airstrike a week earlier. He posted photos of his dead relatives on WhatsApp, drove to a Jewish preschool, and tried to burn it to the ground with the little babies inside.
The New York Times described him as a “quiet restaurant worker.” Naturally.
The only reason 140 families aren’t planning funerals right now is that Temple Israel had armed security guards who did their jobs. They engaged Ghazali the second his truck crashed through the doors, shot through his windshield while the engine caught fire, and pinned him in a hallway until he put a bullet in his own head. The security director was struck by the vehicle but will recover. Every child, every teacher, every staff member went home alive.
A good guy with a gun. Again.
Ghazali came to America in 2011 on an immigrant visa and was naturalized as a US citizen in 2016 under the Obama administration. His brothers stayed in Machghara, Lebanon, where they joined Hezbollah’s rocket unit. When an IDF drone strike killed them on March 5th, along with a nephew and niece-in-law, Ghazali decided the appropriate response was to try to massacre Jewish preschoolers in suburban Detroit.
This was the fourth jihadist attack on American soil in two weeks. A “Property of Allah” shooter in Austin. Two ISIS bombers in New York City. An ISIS ally shooting up an ROTC classroom at Old Dominion University. And now a Hezbollah sympathizer ramming a bomb truck into a synagogue full of children. Four attacks, fourteen days, and every one of them tied to radical Islamic ideology.
And on the exact same day Ghazali drove that truck through Temple Israel’s front doors, Senate Democrats voted for the fourth time to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security. The vote failed 51-46. Only Fetterman broke ranks.
Pop quiz: What’s dumber than defunding Homeland Security during a war with Iran? Defunding it four times in a row while terrorists are attacking Americans every three days.
DHS has been shut down since February 14th. That’s 32 days. The Democrats’ play was straightforward: hold DHS funding hostage until Republicans agreed to gut ICE. They figured the politics would work in their favor — paint ICE as rogue cops and use the shutdown as leverage. It was a gamble. And then four terrorist attacks happened in two weeks.
Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin (Democrat-obviously) voted to block DHS funding on Wednesday. On Thursday — less than 24 hours later — she stood at a press conference about the Temple Israel attack and announced, “We must fund the Department of Homeland Security.”
(She literally voted against funding it the day before. You cannot parody these people because they are already a parody.)
Slotkin is the crack in the dam, and she knows it. She won her Senate seat by only 5 points in a state Trump carried. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer stood next to her at that press conference looking like someone who just watched her political future drive through a synagogue wall. Every vulnerable Democrat in the Senate just watched a Democrat fold to Republicans on live television. Mark my words: by the end of next week, at least three more Senate Democrats break ranks on DHS funding. The shutdown ends before April.
The Democrats’ leverage is gone. You can’t hold DHS hostage to protect illegal immigrants from ICE when Hezbollah sympathizers are ramming trucks into synagogues full of Jewish kids. The optics are radioactive. Every campaign ad for the next four years just wrote itself: “Senator [Name] voted four times to defund Homeland Security while terrorists attacked Americans on our soil.”
But the DHS shutdown is only half the story. The FBI intercepted encrypted Iranian communications that appear to be an “operational trigger” for sleeper cells inside the United States. Khamenei was killed on February 28th. Within two weeks, four jihadist attacks. That’s not a coincidence — that’s a pattern, and the pattern is accelerating.
We killed Iran’s supreme leader and now every Hezbollah operative, every ISIS sympathizer, every radicalized immigrant with a grudge and a WhatsApp account is getting the signal that it’s go time. Ghazali wasn’t on anyone’s watchlist. He was a “quiet restaurant worker” who bought fireworks at a strip mall in Livonia and drove to a synagogue. The next one won’t announce himself on WhatsApp first.
There are roughly 100,000 DHS employees working without pay right now. TSA absences have doubled. Three hundred officers have quit. Airport security lines are hitting three hours. And this is the moment — during an active war with Iran, with sleeper cells being activated, with four attacks in two weeks — that Senate Democrats chose to defund Homeland Security because they’re mad about ICE arresting people.
Every senator who voted to keep DHS shut down owes those 140 families an explanation. But they won’t have to give one — because the politics just made the decision for them. Slotkin already caved. The rest will follow. Turns out the price of funding homeland security is four terrorist attacks and a truck full of fireworks aimed at a Jewish preschool. Good to know, Democrats. Good to know.