Analysis of Violence and Retaliation

Violence begets violence. On Tuesday,

forty-one-year-old Ayman Ghazawi sat for two hours in a car

full of explosives in the parking lot of a Michigan synagogue before

driving through the front doors, dying in a shootout with security guards,

and going up in smoke. Ten days prior, an Israeli airstrike on

Lebanon killed Ayman's two brothers and his baby niece and nephew,

who he posted to his Facebook Story the night before carrying out his

attack. Ayman had no prior criminal record,

and someone who knew him

for a decade said that he was, quote, "An extremely kind and gentle

person." In the days after his family was killed, colleagues said he stopped

showing up to the restaurant that he worked at.

The US-backed state of Israel inflicted unimaginable

grief on this man, wounds that would never heal, and incapable

of dealing with that, he set out to inflict the same

unimaginable

grief on other people, wounds that would never heal.

Thankfully, he failed. No one else was killed.

I can already smell the comments telling me that I'm making excuses for a

terrorist. I'm not. But I refuse to be dishonest

about how these things happen. This guy's life was destroyed by

a US-backed nation state that falsely claims to act

on behalf of all Jews, so he retaliated

against Jews. This, by the way, is why

Zionism makes all of us less safe. It

definitionally makes all Jews responsible for the actions of

a rogue state, giving those who hate us permission to do

the same.

So what Ayman Ghazawi did was wrong and evil,

and only one chapter in a cycle of brutality

that, unless we address it as a whole, will not stop.

It just won't. Violence begets violence, in the Middle East,

in the US, against Jews, against Arabs.

And the best way to make any of us safer is to stand

steadfast against all of it.