RUTHFULLY YOURS

A woman has died following a savage racist attack. She was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire by a man barking bigoted insults in her face. She later succumbed to her injuries, her precious life extinguished in a 21st-century lynching by fire. But you will not see blacked-out squares on Instagram for this victim of racist violence. The left will not march. No hashtag will trend. Few hands will be wrung in woke circles over this most hellish assault. Why? Because the victim was a Jew.

Her name was Karen Diamond. She was 82 years old. She was one of 29 people who gathered at Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado on 1 June to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. Their small, prayerful assembly was intruded on in the most sickening fashion by one Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He is suspected of having splashed the gathering with petrol before wielding a homemade flame-thrower to try to immolate them. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews again.

Thirteen people were injured. Karen Diamond’s injuries were too severe to survive: she died last week, as revealed in court documents filed this week. What made this act of savagery especially heinous was the age of the victims. The eight people hospitalised were aged 52 to 88. The oldest, Barbara Steinmetz, was a Holocaust survivor, having fled Nazi Europe as an infant in the 1940s. She escaped Hitler’s flames, but not the flames of the rabid ‘anti-Zionism’ raging in the West in 2025.

Officialdom has expressed grief over Diamond’s tragic yielding to the fires of Jew hate that swept Pearl Street Mall four weeks ago. The City of Boulder has extended its ‘heartfelt condolences’ for the loss of this good, long life to an ‘anti-Semitic attack’. But you will search in vain for commentary from ‘anti-racists’. The activist classes are shamefully and horrendously mute. Opinion-makers who pose as ‘anti-fascist’ seem blissfully unbothered by this fascistic horror that entailed the death by fire of a Jew. There will be no ‘George Floyd treatment’ for Karen Diamond.

In part, this grim apathy speaks to the ruthlessness of identity politics. This ideology of the elites has the brass neck to call itself ‘anti-racism’ when in truth it callously sorts ethnic groups according to their supposed moral worth. In the eyes of this most baleful doctrine, all blacks are oppressed, and thus deserving of sympathy, and all whites are privileged, and thus deserving of scorn. So George Floyd’s death triggers angst, but Karen Diamond’s arouses nothing. She was white – ‘hyper-white’, in fact, as some identitarians see Jews – and so the idea of her as a victim of hateful barbarism simply does not compute. Her merciless killing does not fit into their careful calculations about skin colour and worthiness. So they look the other way, like people in 1930s Europe looked the other way.

But there’s something else going on, too. Something even more troubling. Where the silence of the ‘anti-fascists’ shines an unforgiving light on their own latent racism, it was their noise, the things they do and say, that helped to birth this cruel new world in which an 82-year-old woman can be executed for her sin of Zionism. Only Mohamed Sabry Soliman should answer for what happened on that terrible day. But there’s a truth we can no longer ignore, hard as it might be: the ‘anti-Zionist’ mania of the elites has fomented a feverish, malicious climate that endangers Jewish life.

Soliman is reported to have yelled ‘Free Palestine’ as he set the Jews and their allies on fire. He said his desire was nothing less than to ‘kill all Zionist people’. It would appear that in his mind, the great crime of those who gathered in Boulder was to sympathise with the Jewish State. He seemed to view their weekly vigil for the Jews still held by Hamas as a Zionist outrage. These elderly folk had exposed themselves as ‘Zionist people’ and thus they had it coming. They deserved death. They deserved to feel the fire of his furious moral judgement.

Here’s the thing, the truly chilling thing: Soliman is not alone in viewing ‘Zionist people’ as the lowest form of human life. His suspected actions in Boulder may have been extreme, but his literally burning contempt for ‘Zionists’ is entirely mainstream. It chimes with the fanatical loathing for the ‘Zionist entity’ that seethes and courses in influencer circles. It echoes the zealous and myopic hatred for the Jewish nation that is rampant among the woke. He gave murderous expression to the key belief of polite society: that Zionism is the great cancer of our times and we all have a duty to cut it out.

Liberal commentators damn Zionists as ‘depraved monsters’. They brand the ‘Zionist entity’ a ‘uniquely murderous’ nation. They call for Zionism to be dismantled, destroyed, so that humankind might finally be free of its noxious, bloodletting ways. ‘Zionism is a cancer to this planet’, their placards say. ‘Death to Zionism’, they chant. ‘End Zionism’, said scrawled, makeshift banners on those deranged Zio-hating protests that swept Ivy League campuses last year.

Zionism must be excised from the Middle East – ‘from the river to the sea’ – and its army must be destroyed, they cry, violently if necessary. Indeed, how striking that in the same week we learn that an elderly lady perished upon the flames of a man’s frothing hatred for Zionism, the left in the UK are defending that sick chant that rang out at Glastonbury: ‘Death, death to the IDF.’ They won’t say the name Karen Diamond because they’re too busy saying the name Bob Vylan, the punk-rap duo that whipped up that anti-Zionist mania at Glasto. Just think about this: they ignore a Jew who fell victim to the fascistic loathing for Israel because they’re too busy engaging in such fascistic loathing themselves.

This is not about blaming anyone other than Soliman for what happened in Boulder four weeks ago. It’s about examining, with frankness, the consequences of the latest elite hysteria. When you call Zionism ‘evil’ and its supporters ‘monsters’, when you depict Zionism as the wickedest ideology of all time, you have no right whatsoever to feign alarm when Zionists – Jews – are subjected to violent retribution. You found them guilty of evil, so why should others not pass sentence on them?

A huge majority of the world’s Jews identify with Israel. They are Zionists. So when the influencer classes demonise Zionists, and rob them of their humanity, and damn their nation as a cesspit of sin, and chant for the death of their soldiers, and dream of the coming violent erasure of their homeland, they are hanging a target sign on the neck of Jews. They are inviting, wittingly or otherwise, racial hatred and even worse for the people most likely to be Zionists: the Jewish people. There’s no more avoiding it: the elite derangement of ‘anti-Zionism’ is fostering a mob loathing for our Jewish compatriots. And challenging it is the great anti-racist cause of our time.

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