RUTHFULLY YOURS

They’re burning Jews again. Yesterday, in Boulder, Colorado, a man used a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to try to incinerate Jews. Eight people, aged 52 to 88, were injured. Their ‘crime’? They had gathered in public to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. In Europe in the 1930s it was punishable by death to assist the wretched Jews. It seems that in America in the 2020s there are people who dream of resuscitating that grim, violent punishment for Jew sympathy.

It was a truly nauseating assault. The suspect has been named as Mohamed Soliman. He’s reportedly an illegal immigrant from Egypt. He is alleged to have doused the people at the vigil in a flammable liquid and then sprayed them with flames. He ‘set people on fire’, as CNN bluntly put it. Read that again. In the US in 2025, a gathering of people expressing solidarity with the Jewish victims of neo-fascism was set on fire. Video footage shows the suspect holding a combustible cocktail in each hand as he yells ‘Free Palestine!’. At his feet lie the scorched Jews.

It is being reported that the oldest victim, who is 88, is a refugee from Nazi-era Europe. She is a ‘very loving person’, said a local rabbi. The moral enormity of that feels overwhelming. Someone who escaped the mass Jew-burning of 1940s Europe falls victim to a new kind of Jew-burning in 21st-century America. Someone whose relatives were reduced to ash by Nazis finds herself ‘set on fire’ by a supposed Palestine activist in modern-day Colorado. It will be a dark day for humanity if the American republic, once a safe haven for Jews fleeing the derangements of the Old World, becomes infected by the fiery ancient hatred for the Jewish people.

The FBI is calling it a suspected terror attack. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, says it was an act of ‘pure anti-Semitism’. We’ve tried to warn the world about chants like ‘Globalise the intifada’, said Ted Deutch of the American Jewish Committee. He says these burned Jews are the end result of that fevered cry to internationalise Hamas’s violent loathing for the Jewish homeland. Jews in America are nervous. Understandably. Just 10 days ago two people were shot dead as they left a Jewish event in Washington, DC, also by a man barking ‘Free Palestine!’. And now this.

The FBI says the suspect in the Colorado Jew-burning acted alone. It should go without saying that he’s the only one responsible for the terror and the burns inflicted on those poor people. And yet he did not strike in a vacuum. In the 20 months since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023, we’ve witnessed the savage demonisation of anyone who offers solidarity to the Israeli hostages. ‘Kidnapped’ posters featuring photos of the hostages have been defaced and destroyed. Some were graffitied with the word ‘colonialist’ and even Hitler moustaches. Yellow ribbons for the hostages have been torn down.

Calling for the freeing of the hostages has come to be seen as a suspect act. Even calling them ‘hostages’ is a risky business – they’re ‘prisoners of war’, cry the West’s legion Israelophobes. Sympathy for the hostages is a thin disguise for ‘genocidal sentiment’, say anti-Israel agitators. The hatred for the Jewish State among the activist classes has become so furious, so unhinged, that even sympathy with the Jewish State’s citizens is viewed as murderous lunacy. That people calling for the release of the hostages were so brutally assaulted in Colorado is profoundly shocking. But – and it feels gross even to say this – it is not wholly surprising.

It feels like we are living through something even worse than a resurgence of the oldest racism – it’s as if there has been a fascistic turn in the West. Consider some of the horrors of the last fortnight alone. A Jewish woman in DC slain as she desperately tried to crawl away from the man pumping bullets into her. Three synagogues and a Holocaust memorial vandalised in Paris. A Jewish schoolkid taken to hospital following a violent attack on the London Tube. A Jewish-owned business wrecked by vandals in London’s Stamford Hill. And now Jews ‘set on fire’. And throughout, that constant noise: the sound of armies of activists denouncing the Jewish nation as the wickedest nation, the spiller of babies’ blood, the nefarious controller of world affairs. The medieval echo grows louder. The darkness spreads.

Some of these grim acts involved the cry of ‘Free Palestine!’. Some said it, others spraypainted it. Isn’t it remarkable that so much of what is done in the supposed name of ‘freeing Palestine’ has the distinctive whiff of fascist hatred to it? The broken glass of Jewish businesses, the desecration of synagogues, the murder of Jews, Jews on fire. These assaulters and activists can cry ‘Free Palestine’ as much as they like – to some of us, if it looks like fascism and quacks like fascism, maybe it’s fucking fascism.

It is so clear now that ‘Free Palestine’ has nothing to do with Palestinians. That this slogan was the last thing Sarah Milgrim heard as she forlornly crawled from her assassin in DC, that it rang in the ears of a Holocaust refugee in Boulder as she was set on fire, confirms that it is a cry of venomous hatred wrapped in a seemingly progressive demand. It seems to me that the plight of Palestinians has been entirely hijacked by the West’s self-loathing activist class, who hide their violent rejection of reason and the Enlightenment behind a keffiyeh, to make medieval hysteria seem edgy and leftish. An ideology of inhumanity stalks the modern West, and its echoes of humanity’s darkest history can no longer be ignored.

‘Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people’, said Heinrich Heine. We might now say that where they violently deface expressions of solidarity for Jewish hostages, they will also violently assault the people who offer that support. The violent actors are responsible for what they do. The rest of us are responsible for how we respond. And if we fail to respond to a literal Jew-burning with the righteous fury such a sick crime calls for, then we risk compounding the original horror. Humanity’s conscience has slept long enough.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy