Category World News

A man rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in the Detroit metropolitan area in Michigan on Thursday, before engaging in shooting with law enforcement. He was later found dead in his car.

On the same day, authorities also announced that one person was killed when a gunman opened fire at Old Dominion University in Virginia, in an attack being investigated as an “act of terror”.

The United States has been on high alert for domestic attacks after it launched its war on Iran alongside Israel on February 28, now in its 14th day.

Here is more about what happened.

What happened at the synagogue in Michigan?

On Thursday at 05:33 GMT, FBI director Kash Patel announced on X that FBI personnel were responding to an apparent vehicle ramming and “active shooter situation” at Temple Israel synagogue in Michigan.

Oakland Sheriff Mike Bouchard told reporters that a car had been rammed into the synagogue, which also houses an early learning centre for children. The driver then fired a gun at security personnel at the site.

“Security saw him, engaged him in gunfire,” Bouchard said.

The assailant was later found dead in the vehicle, which had caught fire, Bouchard said. It is unclear how the fire started. The cause of death was not immediately clear, but authorities later said he had been fatally shot by security officials.

Bouchard said there were no other injuries in the incident, and none of the synagogue’s staff, teachers or the 140 children present in its early childhood centre was hurt.

However, 30 law enforcement officers were taken to hospital after inhaling smoke that filled the synagogue from the fire that erupted in the assailant’s vehicle, Bouchard said. One security official was hit by the vehicle and knocked unconscious, but was otherwise uninjured.

Where did the car ramming take place?

The incident took place at the Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

West Bloomfield is a lake township and one of the suburbs surrounding Detroit. These suburbs are home to a large Jewish population.

Temple Israel was founded in 1941. It is considered to be the largest Reform synagogue in the US, serving about 12,000 members.

What do we know about the assailant and his motive?

Authorities identified the assailant as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old naturalised US citizen born in Lebanon.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Ghazali arrived in the US in 2011 on a relative visa as the spouse of a US citizen. He received his citizenship in 2016.

“I can confirm that the FBI is leading this investigation as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community,” Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan of the FBI Detroit Field Office said during a news conference in Michigan on Thursday.

What happened in Virginia?

The FBI identified the gunman who opened fire at Old Dominion University as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former member of the Army National Guard who pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support for ISIL (ISIS).

Authorities said Jalloh opened fire shortly before 10:49am local time (14:49 GMT) in Constant Hall, the centre of the university’s ⁠college of business.

In a post on X on Thursday afternoon, Patel said students had helped to subdue Jalloh, who was later found dead at the scene. How he was killed was not immediately clear.

“The shooter is now deceased thanks to a group of brave students who stepped in and subdued him – actions that undoubtedly saved lives along with the quick response of law enforcement,” Patel said.

While it is not clear what the motive of the attacker was – or who the targets were – the incident is being investigated as an “act of terror”.

Has there been a rise in the number of such incidents in recent years?

Yes. Attacks on both Jewish and Muslim communities worldwide have been on the rise since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Attacks against the Jewish community

Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League tallied 9,354 anti-Semitic incidents in the US in 2024, a 5 percent increase over 2023 and a record high since it began keeping track in 1979. The group said the figure represented a 344 percent increase over the past five years and a 893 percent increase over the last decade.

In late January, a car crashed into the entrance of the headquarters of a Jewish religious order in New York City. No injuries were reported. Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

In May 2025, two Israeli diplomats were shot and killed outside an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee in Washington, DC.

The gunman, who was charged with terrorism and hate crimes, is believed to have been motivated by the Israel-Gaza conflict.

He told police on the scene, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza,” according to the charging documents. Witnesses recounted hearing him chant “Free Palestine” after he was taken into custody.

In February 2025, authorities in Florida launched a hate crime investigation after a man opened fire on two men he thought were Palestinians but turned out to be Israeli visitors.

The victims survived. One was shot in the shoulder and the other in the forearm.

This pattern has also been observed beyond the US. Early on Friday morning, Dutch police opened an investigation into an arson attack on a synagogue in Rotterdam. No one was injured in the fire, which is now over, and no arrests have been made, the city’s police said.

In December 2025, two armed men killed 15 people at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in Australia. The shooting was the deadliest attack of its kind in 30 years in the country.

Suspect Sajid Akram, 50, an Indian national, was shot and killed by police during the attack. His son, Naveed, an Australian-born citizen who remains in prison, has been charged with terrorism and 15 murders.

Similarly, since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began, hate crimes against Muslims in the US and beyond have seen a rise.

On Tuesday, civil rights group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released an annual report saying the US has become an increasingly hostile environment for Muslims.

CAIR said its offices across the country had received 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide in 2025, a slight increase from the previous year.

It was the highest volume of complaints for CAIR since it began publishing its civil rights report in 1996.

In February this year, Manchester Central Mosque in the UK reported that a man carrying an axe had walked into the mosque during tarawih prayers attended by worshippers during Ramadan. Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said a man in his 20s had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a section 18 assault.

There were about 2,000 worshippers inside at the time, and GMP later confirmed the incident was called in by an off-duty special constable who had been present.

In October 2025, UK police said they were investigating a suspected arson attack on a mosque in southern England as a “hate crime”. Officers had been called to the mosque on Phyllis Avenue in Peacehaven, East Sussex, just before 10pm (22:00 GMT) on October 4.

In October 2023, six-year-old Palestinian American Wadea al‑Fayoume was stabbed in Illinois, and his mother was critically injured. The assailant, Joseph Czuba, died aged 73 in June 2025, in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections.

An air attack struck near thousands of Iranians marking al-Quds Day in Tehran, reportedly killing at least one person. People have gathered across the country to show support for Palestine, despite the threat of US-Israeli bombardment.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he wants his country’s attacks on Iran to help bring about regime change there. Netanyahu made the comments during his first press conference since the war began two weeks ago.

Black smoke could be seen in Dubai’s financial district where witnesses reported hearing explosions on Friday morning. Authorities there said a building was hit by debris from an intercepted missile.

Today we are once again caught in what I would like to call the “bad leader trap”, a recurring pattern in international politics in which the downfall – or at times illegal elimination – of a villainised ruler is treated as a triumph for freedom, while the deeper political realities that produced that ruler remain largely untouched.

The trap is deceptively simple. A leader somewhere in the world develops a reputation as authoritarian, corrupt or repressive. Their record becomes widely known: democratic institutions are hollowed out, critics silenced, protests suppressed and the independent press censured. When such a leader is challenged, removed, arrested or killed, the moment is framed as a victory for freedom.

The moral clarity of that narrative is seductive. A bad leader has fallen. Justice, it seems, has been served.

Yet this clarity often blinds us to far more complicated questions about international law, geopolitical consequences and the long-term futures of the societies involved.

Take the recent killing of Iran’s second Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the ongoing US–Israel strikes on Iran. Few would dispute the repressive nature of his 36-year leadership.

The brutality of the Iranian state has been on display for decades. Since late December, authorities have violently suppressed nationwide protests demanding “fundamental and structural change, including a full transition to a democratic system that respects rights and human dignity.”

Human Rights Watch reported that Iranian security forces used tear gas, batons and metal pellets fired from shotguns against unarmed protesters, as well as lethal force including military-grade weapons. Security forces even raided hospitals to arrest injured protesters and confiscate the bodies of those killed.

The world saw this repression vividly in 2022 when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating compulsory veiling laws. She was taken into custody, beaten and later died. Her death sparked the Jin, Jîyan, Azadî protests, “Women, Life, Freedom”, which were again met with lethal force and the use of the death penalty as a tool of political repression.

None of this is in dispute. Khamenei’s record fits the familiar portrait of the “bad leader.”

But the problem lies in what happens next.

In Western political discourse, bad leaders, especially those in the Global South, serve a very particular purpose. When politically convenient they can be put forward as symbols of everything that is wrong with the world beyond the West. Their repression becomes a convenient counterpoint in narratives about who “we” are: champions of democracy, freedom and human rights.

Even when bad leaders emerge from within the West itself, they are often treated as anomalies.

Take Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. His steady erosion of democratic institutions and press freedom is frequently described as inconsistent with “European values,” as though Europe’s own political history had not repeatedly produced similar illiberal turns. Or consider Donald Trump, whose xenophobic rhetoric and attacks on democratic norms are regularly framed as an aberration in American politics rather than as part of a longer tradition of exclusionary politics in the United States.

In other words, the bad leader narrative is not only about condemning authoritarianism elsewhere. It is also about preserving a comforting image of ourselves.

When the moment becomes politically opportune, this same narrative makes the bad leader an easy and justifiable target.

In March 2003, US President George W Bush launched the invasion of Iraq with the stated aim of removing Saddam Hussein from power. The Bush administration spent months building public support by claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorist groups responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Neither claim was ever substantiated.

Yet when those arguments collapsed, another justification remained readily available: Saddam Hussein was undeniably brutal. Images of his statue being toppled in Baghdad’s Firdos Square and Bush’s carefully staged “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln reinforced the idea that a great moral victory had been achieved.

But the victory was not what it seemed. What followed was not democracy in the way it had been promised, but years of instability, conflict and violence. The invasion created conditions that helped give rise to ISIS (ISIL) and contributed to civilian deaths exceeding 200,000.

The bad leader had fallen. The geopolitical consequences were only beginning.

A similar logic has surfaced more recently.

Earlier this year, after the Trump administration launched military strikes in Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from Caracas, transporting them to New York to face narcoterrorism charges in a Manhattan federal court, many observers questioned the legality of the move and the precedent it might set.

Yet many were also quick to return to Maduro’s record as a bad leader.

One commentator described him as a figure who “combined swaggering incompetence with ruthless repression.” British politician Priti Patel declared that “we are not shedding any tears whatsoever.”

Perhaps not. But the absence of sympathy does not resolve the legal or geopolitical questions raised by such an action.

Following the strike that killed Khamenei and several members of his family, a similar reaction emerged. Once again the focus quickly returned to the catalogue of abuses committed under his rule.

My point is not to question that record.

Rather, the problem lies with the euphoria that often surrounds the “taking down” of the bad leader, and the way that euphoria can make us blind to a wider context of norms, ethics, laws and geopolitical consequences.

It is easy to declare that the bad leader is indeed bad. It is far more difficult to ask what follows.

What does it mean for Venezuela’s democratic transition if the regime’s bureaucracies and security structures remain intact while external powers appear primarily concerned with securing oil interests and economic leverage?

What does it mean for Iran’s democratic future if a military campaign begins with airstrikes that reportedly strike civilian infrastructure? Can a democratic transition truly emerge from a campaign designed and executed primarily by foreign military powers? To what extent can we truly believe that such campaigns are about freedom and democracy?

And when Western leaders suddenly discover concern for human rights abroad, how seriously should we take those claims?

When Donald Trump encourages Australia to grant asylum to members of Iran’s women’s national football team, labelled “traitors” by Iranian state television for refusing to sing the national anthem, he presents himself as a defender of dissidents.

Yet the same administration has overseen immigration raids, visa bans and harsh asylum policies at home.

These contradictions are not incidental. They are central to how the bad leader trap functions.

By focusing attention on the villainy of individual rulers, the broader systems surrounding them, and the interests shaping international responses, often fade from view.

The removal of a single leader does not dismantle a security apparatus, rebuild institutions or produce democratic culture overnight. In many cases, it simply creates a power vacuum, new instability and a fresh cycle of geopolitical competition.

We have seen this pattern repeatedly across the Middle East and beyond.

Recognising the trap does not mean defending authoritarian rulers or ignoring the suffering they cause. It means refusing the comforting simplicity of the narrative.

If the international order truly claims to be governed by values, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, then those principles cannot be invoked selectively only when confronting geopolitical rivals.

Otherwise the bad leader trap will continue to repeat itself: a familiar cycle of outrage, intervention and celebration, followed sooner or later by the instability and geopolitical fallout left behind.