Police cordon off Pearl Street on June 1, 2025, in Boulder, Colorado, where a suspect was taken into custody after reportedly throwing firebombs at a group of people participating in an organized walk in solidarity with hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. (Chet Strange/Getty Images)
Reactions to the latest attack targeting the Jewish community, a deadly firebombing assault on a “Run for Their Lives” event in Boulder, Colorado, for Israeli hostages in Gaza, followed a familiar pattern to the May 21, 2025, murder of a couple leaving an event for young Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The Boulder attack claimed the life of one victim, an elderly woman who died weeks after the assault from the severe injuries she sustained, and injured 12 others.
Many of the same anti-Zionist groups and influencers who celebrated or justified D.C. shooting suspect Elias Rodriguez’s actions reacted similarly to the Boulder attack, while other extremists also responded with predictable antisemitism and conspiracy theories by claiming the attack was a “false flag” or blaming Jews. Others downplayed the attack or legitimized it as a response to the war in Gaza.
The suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, of Colorado Springs, CO, was arrested on site on June 1, 2025, after allegedly using a makeshift flamethrower and homemade Molotov cocktails to attack Jewish community members who gathered there weekly to bring awareness to the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and still held in Gaza.
Soliman indicated his motive for the attack in comments made at the scene and in subsequent interviews with law enforcement, including yelling “Free Palestine” during the attack and later stating that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead.”
The assault on Sunday, June 1, 2025, further highlights an unprecedentedly high threat environment for the Jewish community across the U.S.
Anti-Zionist Reactions Justifying and Downplaying the Attack
Radical anti-Zionist groups Bronx Anti-War Coalition and Unity of Fields, which both openly and repeatedly glorified Rodriguez’s alleged actions over the past week and a half, reacted similarly to Soliman’s alleged attack. The Bronx Anti-War Coalition posted shortly after the attack: “May all Zionists live in perpetual fear and paranoia until the day the criminal entity crumbles.” Unity of Fields reposted their own tweet, initially published in the aftermath of the D.C. shooting, that read, “We ain’t condemning shit.”
Various other anti-Zionist accounts and influencers tried to downplay Soliman’s actions and shift the blame to Israel. Palestinian-American author and poet Remi Kanazi shared a series of posts about the attack with his 93,000 X followers, including writing: “All of a sudden Zionists are against burning people alive. Doesn’t seem to bother them as Israel does it to Palestinians on the daily.”
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Extreme anti-Zionist group Palestine News Network (PNN) shared a video of Ramsey Aburdene (AKA Abu Rahss), one of its founders, similarly downplaying the attack. In the video, Aburdene states: “They say six people were wounded in Colorado, elderly people between the ages of 67 to 88, suffered some sort of burn injuries…That’s every five minutes in Gaza. So, can somebody explain to me why I should give a fuck?”
Substack author and X influencer Alex Lawson, who has more than 44,000 followers and goes by the monikers @DialecticsofDecline and @barbarismcrit, wrote, “In light of the news out of boulder [sic]. 20 months of live-streamed genocide is bound to drive people to desperate acts. It is wholly the fault of Israel and its supporters. End the genocide.”
Language equating the victims with “Nazis” and the hostage awareness event with a “Nazi rally” was also shared by various users, a common rhetorical tactic among anti-Zionist activists. On X, for example, comments included: “nazis got attacked at a nazi rally and we are supposed to condemn that?” and “I don't give a shit about the people in Boulder. That is exactly what should happen to people who support a genocide & apartheid regime. They are zionists [sic] - NAZIS. You wouldn't cry for a Nazi.”
Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer with nearly three million subscribers who frequently criticizes Israel and Zionism and has justified the atrocities of October 7, spoke about the Boulder attack during his livestream on June 2, 2025. Piker and his guest, journalist and Presbyterian minister Chris Hedges, downplayed both the Boulder and D.C. attacks, characterizing that violence as the “natural” response to Israel's actions in Gaza.
Overseas Arabic-language anti-Israel influencers also shared commentary about the attack. A pro-Hamas Telegram channel with 28,000 followers shared a post, in Arabic, that characterized the victims as “pro-genocide Jews.” Yousef al-Doumoky, an anti-Israel Egyptian writer with nearly 500,000 combined followers across Instagram and X, wrote a post in Arabic praising Soliman, calling him “a real man” and stating, “May God accept your fervor and help you to pay the price for your noble act.”
Attempts by some to condemn the violence, like with the D.C. shooting, were met by criticism. After the Muslim Political Affairs Committee (MPAC) posted a statement condemning the attack on Instagram, for example, comments expressing agreement or gratitude were outnumbered by those criticizing the statement or blaming the victims.
Additional Antisemitic and Conspiratorial Reactions
Many right-wing extremists and antisemites reacted to the firebombing attack with antisemitism, as well as anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry. Various social media users seized on reports of Soliman’s immigration status to bolster their bigoted responses (the Department of Homeland Security stated that Soliman, an Egyptian national, entered the U.S. in 2022 on a visa that expired in 2023 and that a subsequent work permit expired in late March 2025).
In various Telegram channels popular with antisemites and white supremacists, reactions included praise for Soliman and jokes about the attack, in some instances using anti-Muslim slurs. Others dismissed it as fake, such as one user who quickly deemed it “another Jew hoax.” In a Telegram channel affiliated with the Goyim Defense League (GDL), an antisemitic extremist network, users invoked “replacement theory” rhetoric, blaming Jews for allowing refugees into the country and thus, in their view, allowing the attack to happen. Other users accused the media of trying to cover up Soliman’s race and immigration status.
Another common thread in both anti-Zionist and conspiratorial right-wing responses to the attack was the accusation that some combination of the U.S. government, law enforcement officials, Israel, Zionists, or Jews at large coordinated the attack. Commentators and influencers such as far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters and members of the antisemitic JQ Radio network on X suggested the attack was a “false flag” designed to expedite federal laws that would criminalize antisemitic hate speech.
Peters commented on X, “These ‘attacks’ will continue until all those deemed antisemitic under the IHRA’s ever-evolving definition are jailed and/or silenced,” adding in another post, “The only thing inciting violence is jewish [sic] behavior.” A user affiliated with JQ Radio wrote, “Hate to say it but this looks like the false flag we’ve been expecting to fast-track antisemitism laws folks.”
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As part of the “false flag” accusations, various anti-Zionist and right-wing conspiratorial accounts alike baselessly suggested that the suspect was Israeli or an Ashkenazi Jew. Some alleged that the attack was orchestrated by Israel and “Zionists” to distract the public from a disputed incident that had occurred earlier in the day in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where Israel denied opening fire on Palestinian civilians seeking humanitarian aid.
Khalissee, an X influencer account with over 350,000 followers, commented on the suspect: “He has been named Mohammed Soliman. He looks more like a Benjamin Benzion Mileikowsky [referring inaccurately to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was born Benzion Mileikowsky]! Isn't it strange that these ‘attacks’ always occur after Israel commits a massacre? This will now dominate news headlines for days whilst Israel’s nightly massacres are ignored. It’s a cycle on repeat.”
Antisemitic conspiracy theorist Ryan Matta, whose X account has over 200,000 followers, commented, “Another false flag attack planned and plotted by the Jews carried out by a MK ultra pastry! Amplified by the Jewish controlled congress who was on film raping children!” and “The IDF just deployed their latest false flag distraction. Get ready for another massive attack in Gaza. This is your distraction.”
Background on Suspect and Context of the Attack
According to an FBI criminal complaint filed on June 1, 2025, Soliman said he intentionally targeted the “Zionist Group” and had been planning the attack for a year, waiting for one of his five children to graduate from high school to carry it out. Videos reviewed by the ADL Center on Extremism showed Soliman moments after the attack gesturing toward the victims and stating, “We have to end Zionists,” “How many children you killed,” and “They are killers.”
After being taken into custody, law enforcement officials said that Soliman told police, “I did it to avenge my people” and indicated that he would do it again.
Near the site of Soliman’s arrest, local law enforcement found 16 unlit firebombs, according to the Boulder district attorney who spoke at a press conference on June 2, 2025. He said Soliman told law enforcement he previously tried to purchase a gun but resorted to the firebombs because he couldn't buy a firearm due to his status in the U.S.
According to an FBI update on June 4, 2025, the 15 victims of the Boulder attack were between the ages of 25 and 88, among them a Holocaust survivor, and suffered from varying degrees of burn injuries.
Increasingly since Hamas’s antisemitic October 7 attack, the word Zionist — someone who believes in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — has come to be used as a slur among anti-Israel activists, commentators and antisemites across the political spectrum, and as a codeword for a Jewish or Israeli person (or anyone deemed supportive) often with dehumanizing comparisons or calls for harm. This language can be used to obscure antisemitic actions and rhetoric: the vast majority of Jews around the world feel a connection to Israel, so attempts to disparage or target “Zionists” are, in practice, targeting Jews. Soliman’s violent actions show where this harmful rhetoric can lead.
