The 'Anti-Zionism, Not Antisemitism' Alibi: The Boulder Firebomber Stalked, Burned, and Killed People Assembled as Jews

On June 1, 2025, a man walked onto Boulder’s Pearl Street with a homemade flamethrower, 18 Molotov cocktails in a box, and a year of preparation behind him. He had disguised himself. He had, by his own later admission, searched for a “Zionist” target. He found one: the weekly walk of a group called Run for Their Lives, which had gathered every week since Hamas started this war on October 7, 2023, to ask for the release of the hostages dragged into Gaza. He lit and threw two of the eighteen, shouting “Free Palestine” and “End Zionist.” A dozen people were burned. A dog was burned. Karen Diamond, 82, died of her injuries on June 25.

On May 7, 2026, Mohamed Sabry Soliman — an Egyptian national who was in the United States illegally, his work authorization having lapsed — pleaded guilty to 101 state counts and was sentenced to life without parole plus 2,128 years. Through an interpreter he told the court, “Yes, I am against Israel and I can’t deny that. And that is my right.” He called Zionism the enemy and denied that any of it was antisemitism. On June 1, 2026, his federal hate-crime trial opened in Denver, where his defense will run on a single proposition: that attacking “Zionists” is protected political speech, not a hate crime.

That proposition is the firebomber’s alibi, and the conduct refutes it. When a man stalks a target for a year, disguises himself, and immolates people who have assembled as Jews to plead for Jewish hostages, the chant does not launder the act into politics. It confesses the motive. Anti-Zionism that hunts Jewish bodies is antisemitism — and the cleanest real-world test of the “anti-Zionism, not antisemitism” defense has just delivered its verdict in burn scars and a grave.

What is actually contested — and what is not

It is worth being precise about who is arguing what, because the defense is counting on the imprecision.

No court has yet ruled that the Boulder attack was a federal hate crime. That question is what the federal trial that opened June 1, 2026 exists to decide; the death penalty is on the table because Colorado abolished its own, leaving the federal counts as the capital exposure. At the probable-cause stage, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kathryn Starnella found only that the case could proceed — she acknowledged that “some of the evidence undercut the government’s allegation” while “other evidence supported it,” and explicitly deferred the deeper question. So when we say this attack was antisemitism, we are not reporting a jury verdict. We are stating MissingBridge’s own evidence-driven judgment, and we mark that line so no reader mistakes it for a ruling.

The federal prosecution is not even arguing the case the way we are. Assistant U.S. Attorney Melissa Hindman has framed the government’s theory as national origin — that Soliman targeted the marchers for their “perceived connection to Israel,” and the government has quoted Soliman’s own statement that “not all Jewish people are Zionists” to thread that needle. That is the prosecution’s strategic choice under the federal hate-crime statute, and we will not put our argument in the government’s mouth.

And “this was not a hate crime” is the defense’s position. Soliman’s attorney, David Kraut, has argued that opposition to Zionism is opposition to a political ideology — that “Zionists” are not a federally protected class, and that a man who searched online for a “Zionist” event and shouted anti-Zionist slogans was acting on politics, not bigotry. That is the alibi this article exists to test. It is not a court’s finding and it is not the prosecution’s theory; it is the thing the defense needs the public to believe.

The ADL standard, applied to conduct

Here is where the alibi breaks, and the instrument that breaks it is not our coinage but the Anti-Defamation League’s stated standard.

The ADL — a research and civil-rights organization whose competence is the documentation of antisemitism, which is exactly the question on the table — wrote, in a statement issued the day after the attack, that the word “Zionist” “has come to be used as a slur” and now functions as “a codeword for a Jewish or Israeli person (or anyone deemed supportive) often with dehumanizing comparisons or calls for harm.” Its load-bearing line is the syllogism the defense cannot survive: because the overwhelming majority of Jews feel a connection to Israel, “attempts to disparage or target ‘Zionists’ are, in practice, targeting Jews.”

That is the standard. Now apply it to conduct rather than rhetoric. The defense wants “Zionist” to be a political category the way “tax policy” is a political category — a set of ideas one may lawfully despise. But Soliman did not picket an idea. He did not debate Theodor Herzl. He physically hunted human beings who had gathered, week after week, as Jews, to plead for Jewish hostages — and he set them on fire. The ADL’s point is that the word does the dehumanizing work that makes the bodies seem like fair game; Soliman’s box of Molotov cocktails is what that dehumanization looks like when it stops being a chant. The “Zionist” framing did not make his target political. It made his target legible to him as Jews he had given himself permission to burn.

The certainty that needs no test — and the test it failed

There is a deeper structure under the alibi, and it is worth naming because it is the engine of how movements absorb atrocity without flinching.

A movement that has decided, as doctrine, that “Zionists” are a legitimate enemy does not need to re-examine that doctrine when one of its slogans turns up at a crime scene. The doctrine is held for its certainty, not for its accuracy — and certainty of that kind is built to be unfalsifiable. So when a man who searched for a “Zionist” target burns elderly Jews at a hostage vigil, the doctrine has its answer ready before any evidence is weighed: he opposed Zionism, not Jews; the act was political; the category is fair. Every fact that should force a revision — the year of stalking, the disguise, the Jews-as-Jews who were the only people there — gets reabsorbed into the slogan instead of testing it.

That is the move this case exists to refuse. The honest standard is the opposite one: a claim about motive has to survive contact with the conduct, and it has to name in advance what would prove it wrong. The defense’s claim — “anti-Zionism, not antisemitism” — fails that test on its own terms. If the category were genuinely political and not a proxy for Jews, the attacker would have needed a target that was not simply Jews assembled as Jews. He did not have one. He went looking for “Zionists” and what he found, and burned, were Jews at prayer for their kidnapped. The slogan was not a description of his politics. It was the permission slip for the antisemitism.

CAMERA, documenting the attack the day after it happened, named the cost of letting the alibi stand unchallenged: when CNN puts “peaceful” in scare quotes, when the BBC omits the attacker’s shouted words, when outlets sanitize the target’s identity, they are not being neutral. They are doing the laundering the doctrine needs — converting a hate crime into an ambiguous “incident” so the slogan can keep its innocence. The verbatim record exists precisely so the laundering can be reversed.

Methodology and the conditions that would force a revision

This is an investigation, and it carries its falsifier on its face. Our central claim is a judgment, not a court finding, and we have kept the two apart throughout: the verifiable record is the spine of dated, sourced facts above; the inference is our verdict that this conduct is antisemitism under the ADL’s own standard.

We would revise or retract the inference if any of the following were established: that Soliman’s target on June 1, 2025 was something other than people assembled as Jews to advocate for Jewish hostages (e.g., a generic political office or a non-Jewish venue); that the “Zionist” search and the during-attack shouts were misattributed or fabricated in the record; or that a documentary account overturns the dated facts of the plea, the sentence, or Karen Diamond’s death. We would correct any factual particular — the count of injured, the immigration timeline, a quotation — on a showing it is wrong. We will not retract the verdict merely because the federal prosecution argues national origin rather than antisemitism, or because a court, applying the hate-crime statute’s protected-class requirements, reaches the legal question differently than we reach the moral one; the prosecution’s theory and the court’s ruling are reported here as themselves, distinct from our judgment.

What we will not do is treat the slogan as exculpatory. “I oppose Zionism, not Jews,” spoken over the burned bodies of Jews, is not a fact about the speaker’s tolerance. It is evidence of how the word works.

Where to check every claim

The single most important document is the Anti-Defamation League’s June 2, 2025 statement, which sets out the standard we apply: “Zionist” as “a codeword for a Jewish or Israeli person,” and the conclusion that targeting “Zionists” is “in practice, targeting Jews.” CAMERA’s same-day statement documents both the attack and the media coverage that obscured it.

For the spine of fact: JNS and Deseret News both report the May 7, 2026 plea to 101 state counts, the life-plus-2,128-years sentence, and Chief District Judge Nancy Salomone’s words from the bench — “You chose to victimize these people because they were members of the Jewish community.” Boulder Reporting Lab carries the precise figures — two of 18 Molotov cocktails thrown, the dog injured not killed — and the verbatim sentencing line, “Yes, I am against Israel and I can’t deny that. And that is my right.” JTA confirms Karen Diamond’s death on June 25, 2025 and the murder upgrade. The Department of Justice’s June 2025 charging announcement is the original 12-count federal hate-crime framing.

For the federal prosecution’s national-origin theory and the defense’s political-speech position, the contemporaneous court reporting is in prose above (CBS Colorado and the AP wire account of the probable-cause hearing); we cite those in prose because they do not archive cleanly, and the load-bearing legal attributions — AUSA Hindman’s “perceived connection to Israel,” the “not all Jewish people are Zionists” line, defense attorney David Kraut’s protected-class argument, and Magistrate Judge Starnella’s probable-cause deferral — are reported there.

Read the ADL standard. Read the verbatim sentencing record. Then ask whether a man who searched a year for “Zionists” to burn, and found only Jews at a hostage vigil, was opposing an idea or hunting a people.

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The reason to say this plainly is that the alibi is portable. “I oppose Zionism, not Jews” is not a one-time courtroom strategy; it is the formula by which an entire movement has trained itself to commit and excuse violence against Jews while keeping its hands clean of the word “antisemitism.” If the formula works in Boulder — if a firebomber who killed an 82-year-old woman at a hostage vigil can recast himself as a political dissident — it works everywhere, for everyone who has learned to say “Zionist” when they mean Jew.

The receipts are not in dispute. The year of preparation is on the record. The disguise is on the record. The “Zionist” search is on the record. The 18 Molotov cocktails, the two that were thrown, the dozen burned, the dog, and Karen Diamond’s grave are on the record. The slogan shouted over them is on the record. The ADL’s standard for what that slogan does is on the record. The only thing the alibi has ever had going for it is that decent people are too polite to call the chant what the conduct proves it to be.

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