On March 12, 2026, a man rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel, a Reform synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, and opened fire before dying by suicide. A security guard was struck and injured by the vehicle. Sixty-three law enforcement officers were treated for smoke inhalation. No children or staff at the synagogue were hurt.
The attacker was identified by the Department of Homeland Security as Ayman Mohamed Ghazali, 41, of Dearborn Heights. The FBI initially investigated the attack as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community. On March 30, the FBI said it had determined the attack was a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism.
In the week before the attack, members of Ghazali's family in Lebanon, including two brothers, were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
What the mayor of Dearborn Heights actually said
Because the attacker lived in Dearborn Heights, the city's mayor was asked to respond. That mayor is Mohamad "Mo" Baydoun, who has held the office since October 2025.
Speaking to CBS Detroit, Baydoun said:
"Our Jewish brothers and sisters deserve to worship without fear."
"Children in any school, whether in West Bloomfield or in Dearborn Heights or anywhere around the world, deserve to attend school without fear of any type of attack."
Asked about the killing of the attacker's relatives in Lebanon, Baydoun said:
"That grief is real, and it's heartbreaking. But let me be clear, that is not an excuse. These actions do not reflect our values as a city. This is not who we are."
Baydoun's handling of the response drew criticism from some Jewish organizations and commentators, including JNS, who argued that raising the attacker's family circumstances at all risked supplying a rationale for the attack. That criticism is a matter of public record and readers can weigh it.
What is not in dispute is that Baydoun explicitly rejected the idea that the attacker's grief excused what he did.
Our Take
We published a piece on March 13 that got this badly wrong, and we are not going to bury that.
There is a real argument to be had about how officials in any community respond when an attacker comes from that community, and about whether context can shade into justification. That argument is worth having on the facts.
It is not worth having on invented ones. When we put a fabricated quotation in a man's mouth and accused the wrong person entirely, we did not strengthen that argument. We handed everyone a reason to dismiss it.
Correction and Retraction Notice
Published March 13, 2026. Corrected and retracted September 21, 2026.
The original version of this article, headlined "EXPOSED: Dearborn Heights Mayor COVERS UP for Synagogue Attacker, Hides Muslim Identity," was wrong in several material respects. It has been retracted in full and replaced with the corrected report above.
What was wrong:
- It named the wrong person. The article identified Bill Bazzi as the mayor of Dearborn Heights. Mr. Bazzi resigned that office on October 8, 2025, and has served since November 2025 as the United States Ambassador to Tunisia. He held no role in these events and made no statement about them. We should never have printed his name.
- It contained a quotation that was never spoken. The sentence attributed to him — "We need to focus on bringing people together" — was not said by Ambassador Bazzi or by anyone else. It was fabricated.
- Its central accusation was false. The article asserted that the mayor downplayed the attack and made excuses for the attacker. Mayor Mo Baydoun said the opposite, stating plainly that the attacker's grief "is not an excuse."
- It misdescribed the attack. The article described a rifle attack and an attempted massacre. The attacker rammed a vehicle into the building and opened fire before dying by suicide; a security guard was injured and 63 officers were treated for smoke inhalation.
The error was ours and the responsibility for it is ours alone.
We apologize unreservedly to Ambassador Bill Bazzi for publishing serious allegations against him that were untrue and that concerned an office he had already left. We also apologize to Mayor Mo Baydoun for mischaracterizing what he said.
We have tightened our verification process so that no quotation or named individual is published unless it can be checked against the source material.
