In Boulder, Colorado, eight elderly Jews were torched alive in a park. They wore red T-shirts bearing the names of hostages seized by Palestinian terrorists over 600 days earlier. Some carried Israeli flags. Walking peacefully in memory and solidarity, they were attacked with fire as a flamethrower and Molotov cocktails created flames as high as a tree. An 88-year-old Holocaust survivor was among the injured. The attacker, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, is reported to be an Egyptian national in the country illegally. He now faces murder charges.
This third such targeted attack on American Jews in three months confirms a disturbing trend. In April, the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor was firebombed shortly after he hosted a Passover meal. In May, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum. And this weekend, the fire returned – this time in Boulder. This time in broad daylight. This time with the specific intent to incinerate Jewish pensioners gathered to remember kidnapped civilians.
At a shooting range in South Florida, I met Jews who on October 7th, 2023 chose to arm themselves for the first time – a story I heard over and over as I met with members of the Jewish community, from lawyers to PR men to moms and dads. They’re training. Securing homes, temples, and schools as if a war has already begun. Because this week, we learnt it has. Had there been a single armed guard among the elderly marchers in Boulder, it’s possible we would be talking today about a foiled terror attack – not about charred flesh and burned lives.
There has been some outcry. Officials have condemned the attacks. Statements have been issued. But even as Jews in America are being attacked with increasing regularity, we have not seen the birth of a “Jewish Lives Matter” campaign. No nationwide reckoning. No marches filling the streets. The continued targeting and killing of Jews does not appear to summon the same political urgency or cultural solidarity as other forms of hate. That silence is only broken by the continued death chant of “Free Palestine”.
One answer lies in the narrative war unfolding alongside the real one. Just hours before the Boulder attack, major media outlets rushed to report that Israeli tanks had opened fire on starving Palestinians at an aid distribution site in Rafah. The headlines were brutal, the claims unchecked. There were no videos. No forensic evidence. The sources? “Local health officials” and “witnesses” – terms that in Gaza almost always mean Hamas.
Hours later, drone footage emerged showing a very different reality: quiet crowds, no gunfire, no chaos. The Israeli footage was not conclusive, but it did raise a simple, devastating question – was there even a mass casualty event? And if there was, what happened? To date, no reliable, verified evidence has surfaced. Yet the narrative had already run its course. Yet more tales of Israeli cruelty had already circled the globe. Jews, once again, had been painted as butchers. Hours later, in Boulder, someone lit a match.
Ambassador Mike Huckabee condemned the media’s role in this cycle. “Reckless and irresponsible reporting by major US news outlets,” he said, “are contributing to the antisemitic climate that has resulted in murder… and terror.” These aren’t exaggerations. They’re recognitions of cause and effect. When falsehoods from Hamas mouthpieces are repeated uncritically by CNN, the New York Times, or the Associated Press, they become fuel. Fuel for slogans. Fuel for rage. Fuel, quite literally, for firebombs.
Yet while the press was crying massacre, something real was taking place in Gaza – something almost entirely ignored. For the first time since the war began, a new aid distribution model – designed by the US and implemented with Israeli coordination – has begun to work. It bypasses Hamas. It is transparent. And its early results look promising.
In just one week of operations, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has distributed nearly six million meals via 87,360 aid boxes. On Sunday alone, one distribution site – SDS1– delivered 1,159,200 meals without a single security incident. No violence. No deaths. No chaos. Prices of basic goods in the area have reportedly dropped by over 35 percent. GHF is now expanding to four more sites, including northern Gaza. This is what actual humanitarianism looks like: structured, verifiable, non-political. And it’s working. Not in theory – in practice.
Meanwhile, Hamas has not paid its fighters for months. Its grip on the streets is weakening. Civilians have begun storming Hamas warehouses, some being shot in the process. The tide is turning, but you wouldn’t know it from the headlines. What we get instead is disinformation. One outlet even reported that Israeli naval ships were firing on civilians at a GHF site – a claim so implausible, so grotesque, that it barely merits rebuttal. But it made the rounds. To the Jew-hating media, it “felt true.” And that’s the problem.
The slogan “Free Palestine” has, for many, become a kind of moral shorthand. But we must now ask honestly: what does it mean? Increasingly, it is declared while slaughtering Jews. It is shouted outside temples and adorns placards not of peace, but of bloodlust. Like “Allahu Akbar” before it, it has become the cry beneath which Jews are murdered in the street. If the goal is statehood, we are forced to ask: what kind of state? What would it be for? What would it do?
Because what we are seeing does not point toward the birth of a liberal democracy. It points toward yet another theocratic terror state. There is no civic program behind the chant. No vision of coexistence. No blueprint for governance. The responsibility is on those who chant and their supporters to tie their movement to the actual goods of statehood – not to murder, not to arson, not to open war on Jews.
Central to that war is a news machine that cannot distinguish between elderly Americans at a vigil and a far-off war against terrorists in the Middle East. It is not a news ecosystem, but a propaganda machine. It does not simply mislead – it weaponizes. It invites violence. And increasingly, that violence is coming home. The attack in Boulder should been a national rupture. A moment to step back from the brink. But it won’t be.
Something fundamental has shifted. The veil has slipped. American Jews are learning what their coreligionists in Europe and in Israel have known for some time: that hatred of Jews is never defeated, never rational and never far away.
Jonathan Sacerdoti, The Spectator
