CAMERA on Campus condemns the antisemitic terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, where eight Jewish Americans, ages 52 to 88, were set on fire during a peaceful gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The attacker, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, shouted “Free Palestine” while reportedly launching Molotov cocktails and wielding a flamethrower. The FBI has described the incident as a terror attack, and Colorado’s Attorney General has identified it as a hate crime.
“This was not a random outburst of violence,” said CAMERA CEO Kurt Schwartz, a former Massachusetts Undersecretary for Homeland Security and Undersecretary of Law Enforcement. “That some media outlets have downplayed or distorted the story makes the situation even more alarming.”
CNN cast doubt on whether the victims were peacefully protesting by putting the word “peaceful” in quotation marks. The BBC omitted the attacker’s shouted words and seemed to question whether it was even a targeted attack. CBS’s vague headline — “Attack at Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in Colorado burns several people, police say” — gave no indication that this was a heinous antisemitic hate crime. Similarly, Reuters buried the identity of the victims and the nature of the crime under a generic headline: “Man attacks Colorado crowd with firebombs, 8 people injured.” Colorado’s NPR affiliate went further, erasing the antisemitic context entirely with the headline: “Multiple people burned in attack on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.”
“When the media buries or sanitizes attacks like this, it contributes to the normalization of antisemitism,” Schwartz said. “This is a journalistic failure and, more troublingly, a moral one.”
CAMERA on Campus calls on editors and reporters to clearly state the facts, name antisemitism when it occurs, and treat these attacks with the urgency and gravity they demand.
We stand with the victims of Boulder and with every individual targeted simply for being Jewish. Antisemitism is on the rise. It is being normalized. And the media has a responsibility to report it.
