Karen Diamond was, by all accounts, an amazing, kind, and generous woman.
She was a volunteer for myriad philanthropic causes, a beloved member of the community—both in the Jewish community and secular Boulder at large. Married to the love of her life, Louis, since 1967, they raised two sons. The family moved to Boulder in 1986, where Karen became a fixture in the charity world, hosting guests in their home who participated in CU’s Conference on World Affairs.
She was a member—and past President of—the University Women’s Club in Boulder (she received the Margaret Willard Award in 2019 in recognition of her service). And she volunteered at Bridge House Community Table, Historic Boulder, and through her synagogue, Bonai Shalom, she volunteered delivering food and other items to elderly and immobile congregants. And yes, she believed in Israel’s right to exist.
It should come as no surprise that she found her way to the Run for Their Lives organization, which emerged after Oct. 7, 2023 in response to the Hamas terror attack on Southern Israel. Run for Their Lives was created expressly to keep public interest engaged on the hostages that Hamas had taken during their slaughter incursion through the simple act of a quiet, non-political, weekly 1-mile march. From their site:
I’m concerned for my safety
That’s a valid concern these days. Make your best judgment to decide if it’s safe.
However, we encourage a couple of principles to make this safer:
- Don’t protest!
- Don’t disturb your neighbors. Do it quietly and don’t block roads. Be polite and peaceful.
- Focus on humanity. This is about innocent children, women, the elderly, and other civilians being held by terrorists—not about the war.
- We encourage carrying flags of all countries from which there are hostages.
And despite all of that, Karen Diamond was savagely set ablaze on her quiet walk in Boulder on June 1, 2025. She succumbed to her wounds a few weeks later. She was 82 years old.
That day, a man named Mohamed Sabry Soliman attacked her group with molotov cocktails, sending Diamond and several others in the group to the hospital for burn treatment. One of those was Barbara Stenmetz, a Holocaust survivor. Soliman pleaded guilty to state murder charges last month and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Federal prosecutors are still weighing the decision whether or not to seek the death penalty for the federal Hate Crime and terrorism enhancements.
And while this should effectively allow us to turn the page on this chapter of unbridled hate and unconscionable murder, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at CU Boulder—currently unrecognized by the University—has chosen to exploit this horrifically tragic story for their own myopic political tantrum and anti-Jewish hate campaign. On full, unrepentant display: a bloodthirsty, hate-filled perspective that deserves nothing less than a full-throated condemnation from every corner of the political spectrum and every Colorado citizen.
“One year ago today, Mohamed Sabry Soliman took direct action against the Zionist death cult festering in our city. He struck against the colonist procession that gathers weekly to celebrate the pretext for ongoing genocide,” reads the statement published on their webpage, underneath which includes banners claiming “Chickens coming home to roost,” “Abolish ICE,” and “Victory to the resistance.”
It’s obvious the semantic game at play, seeking to align support for the murderous actions of Soliman with the completely separate political discussion happening around immigration, as if to say, “If you’re against the way ICE is conducting its roundups, then you need to support those who murder Jews.” (Later in the statement, they make a cynical effort to connect the two topics via Soliman’s family detention by ICE after the attack. Solimon deliberately put his entire family’s immigration status at risk by his actions under even the most liberal of previous administrations, however.)
To ensure there’s no confusion as to their position, the manifesto published on the Boulder SJP site goes on: “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 and we reject the state’s inversion of it. Mohamed chose the only sane response available to a rational human being confronted with the normalization of genocide. He refused the comfortable position of the grateful immigrant and the role of obedient subject, choosing confrontation with a violent system over passive proximity to the comfort of empire… We honor a man who sacrificed his comfort and his proximity to empire, willingly expending his own liberty in attaining his objective.”
Make no mistake here, the voices at play in this disgusting missive are saying it very plainly: If you support the mere existence of the singular Jewish state in the world, they would like to see you dead. And yes, that’s the definition of Zionism: The belief that Jews have the right to self-determination in their own homeland. Hard. Stop.
Any definition other than that is simply a re-casting of far left antisemitism under a word that allows them to pretend otherwise. And you can see that in the language they use, cribbing gleefully from such seminal antisemitic texts as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and copping language used by former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, to provide only a hint of the reams of hate they continue to espouse.
I explained before how the Horseshoe Theory is evidenced nowhere more accurately than it is with regard to antisemitism today (it’s important to note, I wrote that a few months prior to the Oct. 7 terror incursion). With each passing week, it only demonstrates itself more clearly as the one-issue far-left continues to embrace and plant itself on the ground fertilized by decades of far-right, neo-Nazi-adjacent groups.
This murderous fervor—puportedly in support of a “free Palestine”—could not be more damaging to the interests of those they say they support. The colors painted with the language chosen, i.e., “genocide,” simply frees this camp from any sense of moral failing. What could be more morally upstanding than stopping a genocide?
Let’s ignore for a moment the argument of whether or not an actual genocide is occuring in Gaza. The guilt-by-association thread that connects the government of Israel’s actions—all of them, everything they’ve ever done—all the way to an octogenarian Jewish-American philanthropist marching in support of civilian hostages held by a murderous militant organization—is not just damning as far as the SJP in Boulder is concerned. For them, it’s worthy of a death sentence, and the executioner should be applauded, pardoned, set free, and carried on their shoulders to a banquet in his honor.
By that measure, each and every American citizen is now a target. And that’s not hyperbole or a “slippery-slope” argument. It’s a simple 1:1 comparison. Given the U.S. involvement in myriad unpopular political movements, our bloody history, and even this current administration’s support of Israel—if you’re an American who has ever lit a single firework on July 4th, or voted for a single politician who supported Israel in any fashion whatsoever, how are you so different from Karen Diamond? Heads up—SJP thinks your murder is justified, too.
The question has yet to be answered as to how those involved with the SJP will be admonished by CU officials. It’s clear the SJP statement is a violation of the CU Code of Conduct. So far, all we’ve seen is a paint-by-numbers “we denounce the glorification of violence and antisemitism” statement released by the administration. Enough. Any current student who is still a member of the SJP in Boulder should be expelled. Now. Their glorification and vocal support for the murder of Jews is yet another bridge too far and it’s long past time CU acted, otherwise the statement they published isn’t worth the bandwidth it takes to read it on your screen.
This is an unending cycle of Jew-hatred, no matter how the SJP chapters of the world want to color it. And worse, it works against the Palestinians. The current right-wing powerbase in the Knesset is there because fear-based politics favors extremism. The first and second intifadas nudged political leaders to the right. Ongoing escalations from Gaza since Hamas seized full control after their civil war with Fatah in 2007 have kept the Likud Party strong and entrenched since.
Simply put, the more you ratchet up anti-Jewish hate around the globe, the more you burn Jews in the streets, or shoot us on the beaches, or rape our girls and women, or burn our synagogues, or vandalize our businesses, or attack us on subways, or stab us on sidewalks, or drive your cars into us, or beat our children, or glorify those who murder us, the more you prove one inescapable point: Israel is the only place left for us to go.
And sure, if you’re not Jewish, or if you’re not Israeli, maybe you don’t care. But if history is any indication: It always starts with the Jews.
It never ends there.
