VIDEO: Abdul El-Sayed Reflects on Temple Israel Attack

MICHIGAN –  Following yesterday’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed released a video statement. Abdul first issued a statement yesterday in solidarity with Michigan’s Jewish community, and today’s video expands on that message, urging Americans to respond with a renewed commitment to breaking the cycle of violence.

Full video transcript below: 

“Yesterday, our state was rocked by news of a heinous attack on Temple Israel, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan. An armed assailant drove his truck into the building where there are 140 children. Because of the heroism of Temple security and law enforcement, the assailant was disarmed and ultimately killed. No teachers, children or congregants were physically harmed. I’m so relieved.

I grew up not 15 minutes away from Temple Israel. Many of my childhood friends and classmates worshiped there. I shuddered to think through the emotions of the parents whose children were in the synagogue. This attack will leave scars on the inside. That’ll stay with the community for decades. These scars, they’ll echo centuries of trauma on the part of the Jewish people, calling back the memories of atrocities, including the Holocaust against Jewish people, that are torn afresh every time something like this happens.

To my Jewish sisters and brothers, I want to reaffirm my commitment to your rights to worship, to learn, to practice and to celebrate your faith. Antisemitism has no place in our communities. Ever. Full stop. 

Yesterday, we also learned that the attacker was Ayman Ghazali. He was Arab American and Muslim. I condemn what he did. There is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship. Never. 

As an epidemiologist, I’ve spent my career studying the worst things that happen to people to understand how to stop them from happening, and I’ll never forget one of the simplest lessons I learned while on my psychiatry rotation in medical school: hurt people hurt people. 

Violence is a cycle. Ayman Ghazali lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people. And then, in an evil act of displaced rage, he tried to take it out on innocent children, who had nothing to do with the loss of the innocent children he lost, except that they share a faith.

Temple Israel is not the state of Israel. Jewish people are not the state of Israel, and the people of Israel are not the political actors who make direct choices for the State of Israel. We cannot and must not conflate these –  an act rooted in anti semitism. One can have righteous anger at the actions of the State of Israel while expressing solidarity with the Jewish people, including Jewish people in Israel. The conflation of these – whether in the dastardly way Ayman Ghazali did or in an effort to use the specter of antisemitism to defend the indefensible –  it sits at the root of our failure to stop this violence.

Ayman Ghazali  hurt people. There is no justification for what he did. It was and he should have done it. Hurt people. Hurt people. A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died. Imagine there was never an attack on Temple Israel. That’s the world that we want to live in. That’s the world we need to build for. 

Violence always begets violence. Only peace can extinguish that. Because hurt people hurt people.

In the coming weeks, a narrative is going to take hold. It’ll be shaped in part, by the very people who launched that war that led to those airstrikes that killed those children, that drove this crazed attacker to violence against innocent people at a synagogue in Michigan. They’ll tell us that some people are inherently evil. They’ll tell us that the system of immigration that allowed him to come here should be dismantled, and they’ll use it all to justify the war that created this in the first place. When the powerful pit us against each other, we all lose. When the powerful start wars, we can’t know what the consequences will be. When we fail to ask why, we miss the opportunity to address the cycle of violence in the first place. 

So, what now? We ought to grieve for the internal scars that the children of Temple Israel and their parents and families will carry with them for decades. We ought to grieve for the children who are dying at the hands of airstrikes. We ought to grieve for the communities being told that we are powerless to show up for one another’s pain. And we ought to grieve for a world that so quickly forgets to grieve. And then, in our grief, we ought to do the thing that Ayman Ghazali was too small to do: rather than allow ourselves to be plunged deeper into the cycle of violence, we ought to commit ourselves to work to ending it. We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6000 miles away. And we can and must condemn the broken politics that allows leaders to make war that they pretend has no consequences. 

Violence never ends violence, it only perpetuates it. May we have the foresight, the courage and the strength to stand in the breach.”

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