Two recent New York Times articles about the Michigan Senate race reported on Jewish voters’ fears, both arguing that Israel was the decisive factor for Jewish voters on whether to support Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. While Jewish Democrats were vocally upset by El-Sayed’s response to the horrific terrorist attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan in March 2026, prompting him to apologize, one article completely ignored the terror attack and the other minimized it. As a result, uninformed readers were neither provided a full picture of the terrorist nor the attack itself. Also, readers were not given enough information to fully appreciate why El-Sayed’s comment was so dangerous.
Reid Epstein and Tim Balk’s “In Michigan, El-Sayed Faces Heat From Former Primary Rival as Election Nears” (Oct. 29) omitted the terrorist attack and El-Sayed’s response. In “Michigan Senate Race Drives Anxiety Among Jewish and Muslim Voters” (Oct. 28), Jennifer Medina acknowledged El-Sayed’s “hurt people hurt people” remark, which Jewish voters saw as justifying the March 2026 terrorist attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan— but America’s “paper of record” downplayed both the details of the account and the motive behind it.
Medina’s article mentioned that Jewish voters’ fears about El-Sayed might have to do with his apparent justification of terrorism on an American synagogue and not simply about Israel. She also included El-Sayed’s recent linkage of U.S. aid to Israel to American domestic problems (which a few politicians and commentators have forcefully rejected). Apart from the very vague allegation that El-Sayed “has been accused of stoking antisemitism with his relentless criticism of Israel,” the article did not elaborate on his “relentless criticism,” nor did it acknowledge how such antisemitic sentiments have already bred a rise in violence against Jews and Israelis in places like Colorado and Washington D.C., or why this alone could be a reason for some Jewish voters to feel uneasy about El-Sayed.
The article went afoul when it understated both the synagogue terrorist attack and the assailant’s motive.
Medina wrote:
Many Jewish voters worry about a repeat of the attack on Temple Israel, in which a man drove his truck through the synagogue, narrowly missing the preschool classrooms where 140 children were playing.
She continued:
The next day [after the attack], Dr. El-Sayed released a video on social media in which he condemned the attack but also declared that “hurt people hurt people,” referring to the fact that the attacker had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon.
It was not just a man who “drove his truck through the synagogue.” The FBI’s briefings described how the terrorist, Lebanese native Ayman Ghazali, bought an AR-style rifle and hundreds of rounds, and placed more than $2,200 of fireworks and 35 gallons of gasoline into his truck. The truck ignited inside the synagogue hallway. The FBI further revealed that Hezbollah inspired Ghazali. He sent several videos to his sister in Lebanon stating that he had booby-trapped his car and planned to enter the synagogue by force, start shooting, and kill as many as possible.
Ghazali’s connections to Hezbollah go deeper. He had been in U.S. government databases for connections to “known or suspected [Hezbollah] terrorists.” According to the Israeli military, his brother—killed in an airstrike—whom Medina passingly mentioned as someone he had “lost … in an Israeli airstrike,” was a Hezbollah commander and responsible for managing weapons operations for a unit that launched hundreds of rockets at Israelis. CBS reported that a Lebanese official told the Associated Press that airstrike also killed the commander’s two children and another brother, Kassim.
The Times’ failure to mention Ghazali’s terror connections, or that the target of the Israeli strike was his Hezbollah-member brother, are serious omissions. The fact that The Times also completely ignored Ghazali’s preparations, the weapons, and explosives in his truck, as well as his intentions, describing the entire event as a man driving his truck through a synagogue, is nothing less than a whitewash of terror.