During the Senate Select Committee's annual worldwide threat assessment hearing on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard described how tactics of foreign Islamist terrorist groups have shifted since the peak of ISIS and al-Qaida activity a decade ago.
"Increasingly we are seeing less indicators of large-scale organized, complex threats or attacks," Gabbard said, "and instead [have seen] efforts focused on individuals either who have been radicalized by Islamist propaganda and may not have ever had contact with ISIS or al-Qaida, for example; and others who have had contact, of which we are able to have more indications of."
But Gabbard's remarks largely skirted a question that has arisen in the wake of several violent incidents on American soil this month: Has U.S. involvement in fighting in Iran increased potential threat from those very entities?
Two of the incidents, an attempted attack on anti-Muslim protesters outside the New York City mayor's mansion, and an attack that killed one student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., are being investigated by the FBI as acts of terrorism. A third, at a synagogue in a Detroit suburb, has been labeled an act of targeted violence.
"We have seen the calls for violence coming from Iran, coming from its proxies. We have seen the calls for violence coming from other designated terrorist organizations, from the so-called Islamic State to al-Qaida and others," said Michael Masters, national director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, which monitors threats and provides security training to the Jewish community across North America. "We know that people are working to answer that call and that they are answering it at a quicker pace."
While the U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran may not directly tie to motives behind each of the recent instances, Masters said it has clearly provided a narrative opening that foreign terrorist entities are exploiting. He and other experts say that this, combined with tech companies' retreat from content moderation over the last year, have created dangerous conditions for violent extremists to amplify their message and increase their reach.
"The loss of content moderation is a significant concern across the ideological spectrum," said William Braniff, executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. "The internet is becoming a more and more dangerous place, and AI is accelerating that trend as resources are being pulled back from not just content, moderation, but all the different ways one can make a platform a safer place."
An Israeli strike in Lebanon, then an attack at a Detroit-area synagogue
Investigators have not said what may have motivated a naturalized Lebanese-American citizen to fire a weapon, then crash a vehicle into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Mich., on Thursday. According to the FBI, the suspect, 41-year old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, died by suicide at the scene. But Ghazali had recently lost family members in his hometown of Mashghara, Lebanon. According to Iskandar Barakeh, the mayor of Mashghara, two of Ghazali's brothers, and a niece and a nephew, died in an Israeli air strike earlier this month. His parents and sisters-in-law also were hospitalized with injuries.
According to the Israel Defense Forces, one of Ghazali's brothers was a Hezbollah commander. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militia group and political organization in Lebanon, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
The synagogue attack has accentuated a continual escalation in threat toward American Jews over recent years. Last year, two Israeli embassy staffers were killed outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., by a man who allegedly said he "did it for Gaza." Also last year, an Egyptian national firebombed a group in Boulder, Colo., that was holding a vigil for Israeli hostages who had been taken by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. But Masters said the start of the conflict in Iran marked an unprecedented rise in antisemitic threats on social media.
"On an average week we're looking at somewhere around 3,000 violent posts directed towards the Jewish community," he said. "Since the conflict began, we've seen a 95% increase in those numbers."
But others note that the climate of intolerance and hatred toward Jews in the U.S. has been building for the better part of the past decade.
"This is not new since Oct. 7, 2023. This has been going on now for years in our community," said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America. "Go back to Oct. 27th, 2018, when you had the most violent attack on Jews in the history of the United States of America, in Pittsburgh."
The 2018 attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh killed 11 worshipers. It was carried out by a man whose social media posts indicated hostility toward immigrants and belief in the far right, antisemitic "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory.
Fingerhut said regardless of whether the violence is committed by someone inspired by homegrown white nationalism, by foreign terrorist groups or by overseas conflicts, the impact on the Jewish community is the same.
"We have now built a full-time professional security program in every single community, every synagogue and event that we have to have physical security at," he said. "Our community is spending over … $760 million a year on security. That's money not being spent on schools and camps and caring for the needy and the hungry and the seniors."
A pivot and an opening for ISIS recruitment
In 2025, there were seven ISIS-inspired plots and attacks in the U.S., according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization that studies extremism, disinformation and online threats. The number is roughly the same as it was in the prior year, according to Matthew Ivanovich, senior research manager at the ISD, and accounts for a small proportion of overall domestic violent extremist activity in this country.
But Ivanovich said those numbers represent a recent uptick. Between 2019, when ISIS's territorial caliphate in the Middle East collapsed, and 2023, there was a lull in the foreign designated terrorist organization's global activities. Now, said Ivanovich, ISIS has reconstituted in areas of Africa and Syria under a new, decentralized model. And rather than recruiting fighters to travel overseas to a foreign homebase, it urges them to conduct attacks where they are.
"It's much rarer these days to see a direct Islamic State coordinated and planned attack," said Ivanovich. "You know, it's not like in the heyday where you have recruiters on Telegram or individuals directing them [or] sending them funds. Their goal now is: get these self-radicalized individuals to conduct plots."
Ivanovich said that the two men who were charged with attempting to detonate improvised explosives outside the mayor's mansion in New York fit the typical profile of those answering the call. Six out of the seven ISIS-inspired incidents that ISD found in 2025 involved a teenager. The growing incidence of these plots also tracks with a greater presence of ISIS-aligned propaganda on social media platforms over the last year.
"With the lowering of moderation and trust and safety investment in online platforms, we started to see an increase in engagement by what could really just be called Islamic State influencers on mainstream platforms and mainstream social media," Ivanovich said, "from Facebook and Instagram and TikTok."
A need for more security and prevention
As the threat environment has worsened in recent years, some political and Jewish faith leaders have called for Congress to appropriate as much as $1 billion for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program. Any nonprofit is eligible to apply for the funds, which are distributed by FEMA. The last appropriation stood at about $300 million.
Now, many say that the attack on Temple Israel demonstrates that the need for increased funding is as urgent as ever.
"We absolutely call on government to recognize the level of threat," Fingerhut said. "It's the government's first responsibility to protect its citizens and their places of worship and in their places of communal gathering. It's not dependent on philanthropy to do that."
But the complexity of today's environment – from attacks that are inspired by homegrown white nationalist sentiment, by foreign terrorist groups or by personal hardship – is also prompting calls for more upstream investment in prevention. Braniff, who previously ran the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, said this approach was catching on just when the Trump administration pulled back staffing and resources for the office. Braniff resigned two months into Trump's current term.
"We were building national capacity to do exactly the kind of work that prevents targeted violence and terrorism," Braniff said. "Uptake was increasing. The professionalization of the field was happening and we were the catalyst for that."
Now, Braniff said, that work is largely left up to individual states to invest in.
Copyright 2026 NPR
