By Ahnaf Kalam | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Just over a week ago, I warned that the shooting of two young Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C., by a far-left zealot chanting “Free Palestine” was not an isolated act but a harbinger.
In progressive strongholds, where criminal fanatics like Luigi Mangione are lionized, such violence would not merely persist—it would metastasize. And so it has. In Boulder, Colorado, barely an hour from my home, the grim prophecy has been fulfilled.
Last Tuesday, I was in Washington, D.C., attending a policy conference under heavy security. That morning, I spoke with a friend and colleague, an IDF reserve major in the Homefront Command, about the gnawing vulnerability we felt in a city like D.C.
Stripped of the Sig Sauers we carry daily for protection, we were left defenseless, reliant on others to keep us safe. It was a worry that would sadly be vindicated in blood.
That same evening, I sat with Yaron Lischinsky, a bright young man with a future ahead of him, and conversed at length. Hours later, as my plane touched down in Denver, I learned that he and his fiancée-to-be, Sarah, had been gunned down by a “Free Palestine” activist on a meticulously planned mission of murder.
A week later, in Boulder, another atrocity unfolded. A group of mostly elderly Jews and Israel supporters, gathered to raise awareness for the 58 hostages still languishing in Hamas’s tunnels, were firebombed by a man shrieking the same poisonous slogan.
Among the victims, we now know, was a Holocaust survivor—a detail so grotesque it could double as a parable.
What unites these horrors is not merely the targeting of Jews or those who dare support Israel’s existence.
It is the perfect distillation of what some call the “red-green alliance”—the unholy marriage of far-left progressivism and violent Islamist extremism. Picture Greta Thunberg sailing to Gaza or those hordes of Columbia students with blue hair and keffiyehs erecting pro-Hamas encampments, and you basically get it.
But the reality is much uglier.
In Boulder, the assailant was not some woke Party for Socialism and Liberation foot soldier as was the case in DC. He was Mohamed Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian national who arrived in the U.S. two years ago under the Biden administration’s porous border regime, overstayed his visa, and brought with him a calculated, likely religiously fueled hatred of Jews and Israel.
This is the harvest of Colorado’s woke indulgence.
Governor Jared Polis, without a single Coloradan’s vote, has declared the state a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, defying federal mandates from the Trump administration.
The results are as predictable as they are catastrophic.
First, Denver became a haven for the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua. Now, Colorado has borne witness to what appears to be its first Islamist terrorist attack against Jews and Israel supporters in decades, at least.
Irony, that cruelest of muses, reached its zenith in the footage of Soliman hurling Molotov cocktails at his victims beneath the rainbow-drenched “progress” flag flapping above the Boulder County Courthouse. Queers for Palestine, meet your champion.
Nor can we absolve Colorado’s political class. State Senator Iman Jodeh, whose career has been a monomaniacal devotion to the Palestinian cause at the expense of her constituents, has spent years stoking the far-left, pro-Islamist rhetoric that holds the door open for such violence.
Her response to the Boulder attack was a masterclass in moral evasion: “We understand the pain of violence and hatred. Our hearts break seeing it here in Colorado, or anywhere. Hurting innocent people will never bring justice or peace. We must resist hatred with humanity.”
No mention of antisemitism, anti-Israel vitriol, or Islamist extremism. No acknowledgement of the victims, let alone the Holocaust survivor among them.
It was a statement so spineless it might have been drafted by an algorithm programmed to offend no one.
But the rot goes deeper.
Colorado’s progressive policies harm its citizens in two insidious ways.
First, they enable unvetted jihadists and criminals through sanctuary laws that flout reason and responsibility. Second, they disarm law-abiding Coloradans, stripping them of the means to defend themselves against the very menaces these policies import.
In the Boulder attack footage, a woman’s voice can be heard, anguished: “If only I had my gun, I would do something.”
But in Colorado, a state that prides itself on its progressive credentials, the right to self-defense has been suffocated by unconstitutional gun control laws. Apparently, the most persecuted and marginalized group in history does not deserve the means to protect itself from those who openly call for its annihilation.
Colorado is reaping what it has sown. Its government’s reckless embrace of woke ideology—sanctuary policies, anti-gun fanaticism, and the tacit endorsement of anti-Israel hatred—has endangered its people and emboldened its enemies.
One can only hope that the incoming federal administration holds this state to account for its wanton negligence.
For now, the flames in Boulder cast a stark light on a truth too many refuse to see: when you fetishize the slogans of “progress,” you invite the savagery that follows.
Ahnaf Kalam, a born-and-raised Denver native, is the digital editor and podcast host at the Middle East Forum. Since 2017, he has been a writer and researcher for the Forum’s Islamist Watch Program, and he writes regularly on issues of counterterrorism, foreign policy, national security, and the Middle East. He holds a B.A. in international studies and political science from the University of Colorado, Denver.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.