It Has Begun

This article first appeared in Times of Israel Blogs.

(Since this article was first posted, the Michigan attacker has been identified as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon.)

Today, we have witnessed two terrorist attacks, one in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where a man tentatively identified by some sources as Lebanese, drove his car right into a synagogue and started firing before he was killed by security, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia, where a man identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, originally from Sierra Leone, stormed into a classroom and shot an instructor to death, reportedly yelling, “Allahu Akhbar” before an ROTC student stabbed him to death, thus ending the threat. Just days ago, two young men in New York City, one, Ibrahim Kayumi, 19, of  Afghan descent, the other, Emir Balat,18, of Turkish descent, threw explosive devices at a demonstration in front of Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence. The attack was aimed at those protesting against Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the perceived Islamization of the city. They reportedly were inspired by ISIS.

Meanwhile, in Europe this week, an unidentified man set off a homemade bomb in front of a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liege around 3:40 in the morning. Nobody was injured. A pro-Iranian jihadist group has claimed responsibility.

There can be little doubt that the military action taken against the Iranian regime by the US and Israel has now sparked what promises to be a wave of Islamist-inspired attacks against US/Israeli interests, against Jews, and against the West in general. 

This means that on both continents, we will lose more innocent civilian lives to the forces of Islamist terror. Of course, it has been going on for years, but now, it will undoubtedly explode.

We have known for years that Iranian sleeper cells are in our country. Many waltzed right in under the Biden administration’s open-borders policy, many crossing the Canadian border. In truth, however, it didn’t just start with Biden; it just got dramatically worse. Now our DHS has the task of tracking these people down before the next attack occurs. That means some resources are going to have to be taken away from grabbing illegal aliens from parts of the world that do not threaten us.

Then there is Europe, where, in 2015, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to asylum-seekers from Syria’s civil war while encouraging other Western European countries to do the same. The result was millions of mostly young, single, unaccompanied males from other Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Somalia. In turn, that has resulted in an explosion of violent, in many cases, deadly crime and the loss of countless innocent lives, not to mention making life more dangerous and intolerable for European Jews. The threat level for Jews has just skyrocketed. 

This is not meant to second-guess the decision by the US and Israel to attack Iran. In my view, it had to be done. For 47 years, that evil regime has not only brutalized and killed tens of thousands of its own people, but it has been the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and its two top targets are Israel and the United States. Had they been able to fully develop nuclear weapons, they would have used them against us.

How this war will end beyond crushing the ayatollahs, I have no idea. Hopefully, it will not be another Iraq or Afghanistan. But this job must be finished, and this regime destroyed.

In the meantime, we have a serious threat here in the US and Europe from Islamist terrorists determined to avenge what is happening in Iran. There will be lone-wolf attacks, and I predict something more sophisticated from these sleeper cells. Make no mistake: They are here, and they have been called to action.