The Boulder Attack

This article first appeared in New English Review.

 I was on vacation in Mexico when we got the news of the horrific attack in Boulder, Colorado. Only days after the deliberate murder of two people at a Jewish event in the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC, when many of us asked if that attack represented an escalation in the effort to “globalize the intifada” in other words, striking Jews wherever one finds them (to borrow a phrase), another deliberate attack has been carried out in Boulder by an Egyptian man who was illegally in the country, using Molotov cocktails.

Post-arrest information indicates that Mohamed Sabri Soliman had posted Islamist expressions and support for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Naturally, his self-professed hatred for “Zionists” goes hand in glove with the above sympathies. (The DC suspect, Elias Rodriguez, is presumably not Muslim. He does, however, appear to be a member of the “Red-Green Alliance”)

Speaking of the Muslim Brotherhood, I note with amusement the template response of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Naturally, they condemn the act in Boulder, but then qualify it with their own list of grievances against Israel and all the bad things supposedly being done to Muslims who speak out against Israel. Where did they think this rhetoric was going to lead? CAIR, for those who do not know, is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, created as a branch of the Brotherhood in the US during the 1990s. To make things worse, they have supported Hamas-long before October 7, 2023, and ever since. They are subversive and anti-Semitic to the core, and yet they sell themselves as a civil rights organization. When October 7 happened, CAIR CEO Nihad Awad expressed his happiness at the resistance of Hamas.

But I digress.

Can we infer that “globalizing the intifada” means trying to kill Jews who were merely demonstrating on behalf of the Jewish hostages still being held in Gaza by the evildoers of Hamas? Does it mean that they should go out and literally set people on fire, including an 88-year-old woman who survived the Holocaust and was merely asking for Hamas’ hostages to be freed?

Once again, we must ask ourselves, “What’s next?” And there will be a next time.

The call on our campuses and in our streets-in our own country- to “globalize the intifada” has now led to the inevitable: Our Jewish citizens are now at even a greater risk than was previously the case. This is unacceptable. The time has come for us here in the West to relegate the word “intifada” to the same category as terms like “final solution”. This is not resistance; this is a call to kill Jews wherever one finds them, and it has, indeed, reached our shores, as well as Europe’s.

And even in the wake of October 7, the DC murders, and now this, we have world leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron, suggesting it is now time to recognize the “State of Palestine”. Instead of outrage, these leaders have been cowed by the increase in horrific attacks by Palestinians, Hamas, and their supporters, and have apparently decided it is time to submit and reward the Palestinians (and their supporters)  for having carried out these horrific and evil acts.

Indeed, it is world leaders like Macron, Angela Merkel and her German successors as chancellor, Justin Trudeau of Canada, our own Joe Biden, and the feckless leaders of almost every Western European country in the past decade who have opened the floodgates to phony asylum-seekers, criminals, and jihadists, who have no regard for the cultures and values of the West, who are murdering innocent people as we speak, who have destroyed the good reputation of previous generations of immigrants to the West who have assimilated and contributed to their adopted countries. 

And like the children of Hameln, who foolishly followed the Pied Piper into the river and disappeared, we have a new generation of mostly college-educated misfits, both students and professors, in the West who have taken to the campuses and streets to support the Pied Pipers of Hamas, spouting terms like “genocide”, “free free Palestine”, “from the river to the sea”, and “globalize the intifada”. 

Our Western countries in America and Europe are being put to the moral test: Will we act decisively against those who are instigating and committing deadly acts of violence against our Jewish citizens (and others)? If we don’t, what does that say about us as a civilization?