Mohamed Sabry Soliman used Molotov cocktails and a flamethrower on a crowd of people gathered on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado on June 1. He killed Karen Diamond, an 82-year-old woman. He injured 13 others. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, with a federal hate crime charge still pending.
The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Colorado Boulder just called him a hero.
Not in whispered conversations. Not in encrypted group chats. In a public statement, SJP described Soliman as a "man who sacrificed his comfort and his proximity to empire, willingly expending his own liberty in attaining his objective." That's their language for a man who set an elderly woman on fire at a pro-Israel rally.
It gets worse. The statement called the Pearl Street firebombing "a case of chickens coming home to roost" — borrowing a phrase most Americans associate with blaming victims for the violence committed against them. SJP wasn't hedging. They weren't offering some mealy-mouthed "we condemn violence but understand the frustration" dodge. They went all in.
"The state would have us believe that Mohamed took the action he did because he is insane — a fanatic, a terrorist, guilty of a hate crime — but we know the truth," the group wrote. Then they delivered the line that should be printed on every tuition bill in America: "Mohamed chose the only sane response available to a rational human being confronted with the normalization of genocide."
The only sane response. Molotov cocktails and a flamethrower aimed at civilians. An 82-year-old woman burned alive. That's what passes for rational behavior in the minds of an organized student group at a major American university.
CU Boulder and its Board of Regents condemned SJP's statement and noted the group is not officially recognized by the university. That's the standard institutional response — distance, denounce, move on. It checks the PR box. But it doesn't answer the harder question: how did a campus culture develop where students feel comfortable publishing statements like this under their real organization's name, on a public platform, without any apparent fear of consequence?
The university can say SJP isn't an official group. Fine. But those students are enrolled. They're sitting in classrooms. They're walking across that campus every day. And they just told the world that burning an 82-year-old woman alive was a rational act of resistance. Nobody kicked them out. Nobody revoked their enrollment. The condemnation was a press release, not a policy.
We've watched campus radicalism escalate for years. The tent encampments. The takeovers of administration buildings. The harassment of Jewish students. Each time, we were told it was free expression, youthful passion, protected speech. Each time, the line moved a little further. Now we're past protest and past disruption. We're at a student organization publicly celebrating a convicted terrorist who murdered an elderly woman with fire — and calling it sanity.
Parents are writing $60,000 checks for this. State legislatures are funding it. Alumni donors are subsidizing it. And the institutional response is a statement of condemnation that changes nothing about who's admitted, who's enrolled, and what's tolerated on campus tomorrow morning.
Karen Diamond was 82 years old. She went to a public rally on a street in Boulder. She didn't come home. A campus organization just called her murder the act of a rational hero.
The university issued a press release. The students are still enrolled.
