Divisions deepen in wealthy, liberal Boulder after antisemitic attack

USA Today

07-06-2025

Divisions deepen in wealthy, liberal Boulder after antisemitic attack instead of bringing the community together, the attack appears to have further exacerbated existing fault lines across the wealthy, liberal city of Boulder
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Boulder community honors attack victims, condemns antisemitism
The Boulder Jewish Community Center hosted a vigil for community members to come and support victims of a fire-bomb attack.
BOULDER ― In sandals and winter boots, in rain and snow and sun, their feet tread the red bricks with a silent request: Bring them home.
They push strollers and wheelchairs, carrying flags and signs with that same message: Bring them home.
They ignore the taunts and epithets flung by college students and counter-protesters, focusing on their goal: Bring them home.
These moments, these footsteps, they weren't political. It wasn't about their personal views on Israel's war against Hamas. "We just want them home," said longtime marcher Lisa Turnquist, 66.
"That's why we do this," she said.
The small group of "Run for their Lives" marchers in this college town were sharing their message on June 1 − 603 days since Hamas snatched concertgoers and ordinary people from southern Israel and vanished them into Gaza's tunnels.
But halfway through the Sunday afternoon march, a suicidal Muslim immigrant attacked them with a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, injuring 12, including an elderly Holocaust survivor.
Many regular marchers of the group are Jewish. Six of the injured in what federal officials have described as a terror attack were from the same synagogue, Bonai Shalom.
But instead of bringing the community together, the attack appears to have further exacerbated existing fault lines across this wealthy, liberal city where pro-Palestinian protests verging on outright antisemitism have become a way of life for elected leaders and college students.
After the attack, someone posted "Wanted" signs on the Pearl Street Mall just steps from the scene, naming the majority of city council members as guilty of "complicity in genocide" for refusing to pass a ceasefire resolution and not divesting from businesses that are helping Israel wage its war against Hamas.
"Not only has the rhetoric become increasingly centered around violence and division but we have an increasing amount of cowardice, from cowardly administrators, cowardly government officials," said Adam Rovner, who directs the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver. "We're seeing it much more clearly now. And unfortunately Jewish communities are paying the cost."
Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, faces more than 118 state and federal charges in connection with the attack, including hate-crime accusations. Investigators say he confessed and remains unrepentant, telling them he deliberately targeted the marchers because he considered them a "Zionist Group."
Divisions continue after Pearl Street attack
Amid the extreme positions on the Israel-Hamas war, Run for their Lives believed most people could get behind their message.
The national Run for their Lives organization has sponsored walks or runs in hundreds of cities and towns since Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust in which over 1,000 people were killed and 240 were taken hostage. As of June 5, 56 hostages are still being held by Hamas, although that number includes both the living and presumed dead.
On June 1, as she had dozens of times in the past, Turnquist was pushing her Australian shepherd Jake in a stroller as the group made its way past the historic Boulder County Courthouse on Pearl Street pedestrian mall. She saw a man dressed like a landscaper ‒ odd, she thought, since it was a Sunday ‒ and thought it would be best to just keep walking, as she had done so many times before when counter-protesters screamed and yelled.
There had never been physical violence against the group, but there were insults, jeers, accusations that the marchers themselves support genocide. Turnquist and others who have marched said they often felt unsafe.
"We ignore the people who are against us," said Turnquist, who is Jewish. "We can't let Boulder tell us what to do. We can't let university students tell us we can't do stuff like this, because that's what they do. Week after week, people are yelling at us all the time, saying we are causing genocide. We're not causing genocide. We were attacked and we are fighting to get our hostages back."
The conflict between the marchers and counter-protesters is a microcosm of the vicious disputes that have long been on display in Boulder, where Palestinian students disrupted classes earlier this year.
Turnquist, the protest marcher, said knowing the group lacked the full support of local elected officials made it harder to feel comfortable during those Sunday protests.
She said she went into a Boulder shop at the start of the Gaza war while wearing a necklace with a Jewish symbol on it. The shopkeeper suggested she hide it, so she didn't become a target, she said.
"One of the things I remember saying was ... the masks are going to come off and we're going to see who the antisemites are. We're going to see them for who they are. And sure enough it started happening all over," Turnquist said. "It was people that I didn't even think would be antisemites ‒ it was some friends."
Nationally, polls have shown that younger Americans are more likely to side with Palestinians than with Israel, including young Jews. And an April 2024 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 31% of Jews younger than 35 felt Hamas' reasons for fighting were valid, compared to just 10% for Jews aged 35 and older.
Turnquist said the Sunday marches were deliberately non-political: They didn't call for attacks on Hamas or for more retaliation by Israel. Instead, they focused on the one thing they thought everyone would agree with.
To Soliman, that apparently didn't matter. According to investigators, he researched the protest group online, took concealed-weapons classes and planned his attack for a year.
Video recordings of the attack captured Soliman shouting "Free Palestine" as he threw Molotov cocktails into the crowd of marchers, setting fire to several victims, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.
"Mohamed said it was revenge as the Zionist group did not care about thousands of hostages from Palestine," Boulder police wrote in an arrest affidavit. "Mohamed said this had nothing to do with the Jewish community and was specific in the Zionist group supporting the killings of people on his land (Palestine)."
Soliman's motivation, as reported by police, mirrored similar language used by the sole member of the Boulder City Council who declined to sign onto a group statement from city leaders condemning the attack.
Councilmember Taishya Adams condemned the attack but said she declined to sign the group statement, which identified Soliman's actions as antisemitic, because it didn't specifically note that he was also motivated by what she considers anti-Zionism.
"If we are to prevent future violence and additional attacks in our community, I believe we need to be real about the possible motivations for this heinous act," Adams wrote in a statement explaining her decision. "Denying our community the full truth about the attack denies us the ability to fully protect ourselves and each other."
Responded Councilmember Mark Wallach: "Your efforts to make what I think is a pedantic distinction as to whether a man who attempted to burn peaceful elderly demonstrators alive − to burn them alive, Taishya − was acting as an antisemite or an anti-Zionist is simply grotesque."
Jewish groups in Boulder have previously tangled with Adams over what they say are her own antisemitic remarks regarding Palestine, and pro-Palestinian protesters repeatedly disrupted city council meetings. Adams did not return a request for comment from USA TODAY.
On June 5, the first meeting after the attack, the mayor announced that in-person public comment would be prohibited because pro-Palestinian protesters have so often disrupted meetings.
Among those who have watched protesters disrupt council meetings was Barbara Steinmetz, a Holocaust survivor burned in the June 1 attack.
In a video interview last year, Steinmetz recounted what it was like to attend council meetings alongside pro-Palestinian protesters, including one interaction with a woman carrying a sign referencing "from the river to the sea," the rallying cry of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which called for erasing Israel.
"I turned to her and said, 'Do you realize that that means you want to kill me? You want me destroyed?' But she just turned away," Steinmetz said. "Jews in Boulder and maybe Denver and probably in cities all around the world, are afraid of wearing their Jewish stars. They're taking down their mezuzahs so that no one will know that it's a Jewish house. They're not identifying themselves because they're frightened."
Soliman's attack didn't happen in a vacuum
Rovner, from the University of Denver, said pro-Palestinian college protests helped lay the groundwork for increased violence, in part because many students don't truly appreciate what it means to repeat and thus desensitize the meaning of chants like "globalize the intifada" and declarations that Palestine should run "from the river to the sea."
Says the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs: "Calls to 'globalize the intifada' are not calls for civil disobedience, general strikes, or negotiations. They are calls for the murder of Israelis and Jews around the world and must be taken seriously by governments and law enforcement agencies."
Like CU-Boulder, the University of Denver was home to an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters last year, and Rovner said there were repeated confrontations between the protesters and Jewish students walking to class. Rovner has a close friend who often participated in the Boulder walks.
"These are precisely the kinds of things that cause terrorist groups to pick up weapons to attack people," Rovner said. "When you heighten the rhetoric of hatred and demonize one country and claim to only be opposing an ideology, you are almost inevitably going to see action based on that rhetoric."
Jewish scholars and community leaders say the attack on Boulder was frustratingly predictable given the sharp rise in antisemitism sparked by the war in Gaza, with escalating rhetoric, protests and demonstrations nationwide, particularly on college campus and college towns.
In response to those warnings, President Donald Trump specifically targeted pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses, launching investigations into 40 campuses that his administration has accused of not doing enough to protect the Jewish community from participants.
Security and extremism experts say a significant factor in driving violence is that many protesters draw no distinction between someone who is Jewish and someone who supports Israel's attacks on Hamas in Gaza, which is home to about 2.1 million Palestinians.
In April, a man firebombed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro's house hours after a Passover celebration, telling police he targeted Shapiro over "what he wants to do to the Palestinian people."
And on May 22, a man shot and killed a young couple outside the Lillian & Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. "Free Palestine," the man shouted. "I did it for Gaza," he later told investigators.
"These attacks and many more in recent months ‒ on campus, at Jewish institutions and this time at a peaceful gathering here in Boulder ‒ have targeted people whose only 'offense' is that they are Jewish. Or someone thought they were Jewish. Or they were standing as allies alongside Jews," the Rocky Mountain Anti-Defamation League said in a statement to USA TODAY.
A report released last month found that antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2024 hit a record high for the fourth consecutive year.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security on June 5 issued a security alert warning that more antisemitic violence could be coming.
"The ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict may motivate other violent extremists and hate crime perpetrators with similar grievances to conduct violence against Jewish and Israeli communities and their supporters," the security agencies said in the warning. "Foreign terrorist organizations also may try to exploit narratives related to the conflict to inspire attacks in the United States."
Survivor returns to site of the attack
Run for their Lives organizers say they remain undeterred as they gear up for this weekend's march.
"This didn't happen in a vacuum. It is the result of increasingly normalized hate, dehumanizing rhetoric, and silence in the face of rising antisemitism. But we will not be deterred," Rachel Amaru, the founder of Boulder Run For Their Lives said at a June 4 rally for the victims.
"We invite everyone to join us, not just with your feet, but with open hearts and minds. Choose humanity over hate, curiosity over judgment, and learning over condemnation."
The day after the attack, Turnquist returned to the scene of the attack to lay flowers and display a small Israeli flag on behalf of her injured friends.
Still shaken by the attack just 24 hours earlier, she visibly shook as she recounted her efforts to help the victims.
"I woke up this morning and didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't want to get out of bed and didn't want to talk to my friends who were calling me. But this is when we have to get up and stand up, and we have to push back," Turnquist said.
And she promised to be back walking every Sunday until all the hostages are home.