Yesterday, the man who firebombed the Run for Their Lives walkers in Boulder pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes. He admitted killing Karen Diamond and trying to kill others because they were, or he believed they were, Jews and Israelis. “By his own admissions, [the] attack on our neighbors in Boulder was antisemitic,” said U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly.
That shouldn’t be controversial. Last October, more than 50 Democratic state legislators, including some very outspoken critics of Israeli policy, signed a statement condemning rising antisemitism that called Boulder “an anti-Jewish firebombing attack.”
That is why Melat Kiros’s words stand out. She is the only prominent Colorado politician to question whether the attack was antisemitic. In the past two weeks alone, she has doubled down in interviews with Politico, Denver7, and CPR.
I want to be fair to Kiros and precise in my critique. She has condemned the attack as a hate crime and said she wants to keep Jews safe. My concern goes deeper than whether she uses the word “antisemitic.” And it isn’t her point, on its own, that Israeli policy can fuel antisemitism, a view many American Jews share.
The problem is her relentless effort to make Israel’s conduct the moral issue at the heart of a deadly attack on Jews—and how that very maneuver reinforces the logic that turns anger at Israel into hostility toward Jews. Worse, in a recent Politico interview, that logic reached its extreme: she said we cannot keep the Jewish community in her district safe while Israel continues its war against Hamas.
Here is Kiros explaining on Monday why she resists calling the attack antisemitic:
“If we just blanket it as a form of hatred against Jewish people, I think it’s a disservice of examining what role Israel’s actions might have had in inspiring somebody to have this level of hatred for a group of people that were just protesting for hostages to be returned. [The attack] is deranged and hateful and must be condemned in the fiercest terms. I just get confused about why we can’t have a conversation about making sure that we’re clear about what those motivations were to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”
I want to clear up that confusion. Making sure “it doesn’t happen again” depends less on understanding one man’s anti-Zionism than on dismantling the permission structure that turns anger at Israel into violence against Jews here at home.
Anger at Israel, by itself, doesn’t explain why Jews become targets. Something transforms that anger into moral permission to harm us. That is the permission structure. We build it through the stories we tell about who is guilty, whose pain matters, and which attacks we condemn plainly and which we feel the need to qualify. People can reinforce it even while sincerely condemning prejudice and violence. It works in four steps:
- Israel becomes a symbol of evil. A complex conflict is flattened into a simple moral story, and Israel becomes the explanation for problems far beyond the war.
- Jews’ connections to Israel become evidence of guilt. Family ties, faith, support for Israel’s existence, even concern for hostages are treated as complicity. In Boundless’s poll ahead of the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, one-third of those who believe Israel is committing genocide said at least some American Jews are complicit.
- Jewish suffering counts for less. Our fears are brushed aside. Antisemitism unrelated to Israel gets the reflexive reply “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism.” Whether Jews deserve empathy depends on their relationship with Israel, though attackers don’t stop to ask.
- Hostility toward Jews starts to seem righteous or inevitable. Violence is defended as resistance or excused as an inevitable consequence Israel’s actions. In the same poll, 21% of American adults, and 35% of those 18–34, said antisemitism can be a legitimate way to protest Israel’s conduct. Attacks like Boulder follow, or Michigan, where a man seeking revenge against Israel drives an explosives-laden truck into a Jewish preschool.
Whether or not she intends it, Kiros’s framing of the Boulder attack has become one of the most visible reinforcements of this structure. She casts Israel as the central wrongdoer, points to our ties to it to explain the attack, dismisses our good-faith objections, and has let stand her claim that our safety depends on Israel changing course. I worry some will hear in her words a reason to turn on Jews who don’t talk about Israel the “right” way.
Kiros does say blaming Jews for Israel’s actions is wrong. But she then treats that blame as Israel’s fault too, because Israel calls itself a Jewish state and claims to speak for all Jews. That leaves out the people who quite literally choose to blame and attack us. Rejecting collective blame in principle doesn’t help when your explanation keeps reproducing it.
Jewish communal leaders have raised these concerns with Kiros for months. We know we will continue to disagree with her about Israel. But she has told many of us privately that she did not mean to suggest Jews in Denver cannot be kept safe while the war continues. It is time for those private conversations to shape her public leadership.
Yesterday’s plea gives her a real opportunity to do that. She should say publicly what she has said privately: that Jews here can and must be kept safe, whatever Israel does. When Jews are attacked, she should keep the attacker’s choice, not Israel’s conduct, at the moral center of the story. She should also make clear, especially to her own supporters, that our ties to Israel do not make us guilty by association and that we need not disavow Israel or Zionism to deserve empathy, safety, or belonging.
Kiros has the influence to help break the cycle that makes hostility toward Jews seem righteous. Our community needs her to use it.
– Brandon Rattiner
Senior Director, Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)