Police cordon off Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, following an incident that the FBI is investigating as an act of terror, June 1. Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images
By Hannah Feuer
June 3, 2025
A number of influential conservatives and right-wingers are generalizing the extremist views of the man alleged to have firebombed a Jewish community event in Colorado as representative of all Muslims and Arabs.
Federal authorities charged Mohammed Sabry Soliman with multiple crimes after he allegedly set fire to participants at a Boulder event on Sunday to raise awareness for hostages in Gaza. Eight people were hospitalized, including a Holocaust survivor, and four suffered moderate wounds.
Soliman was born in Egypt and lived in Kuwait for 17 years before moving to Colorado. He was in the U.S. “illegally,” according to Tricia McLaughlin, a deputy Homeland Security secretary, after entering the U.S. on a tourist visa and obtaining a work permit that expired in March. According to charging documents, Soliman told investigators he had been planning the attack for a year and that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
A number of commentators and politicians on the right almost immediately took to social media to generalize those extremist views as representative of all Muslims and Arabs.
“Islam is not compatible with western civilization,” Charlie Kirk, a media personality and the founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, posted to X the night of the attack.
The phrase echoed across conservative social media: “Islam just isn’t compatible with our society,” Eric Daugherty, a Florida based influencer said on Monday. “This is a fact.” And just hours after the attack, Valentina Gomez, who is running for Congress in Texas, said, “islam [sic] is not compatible with America.”
On Monday, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, posted a photo of the shirtless suspect alongside the caption “Not all cultures are equal.”
Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican congressman who has suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, on Monday posted a Fox News video about the attack on X with the caption “We need to not be afraid to call evil by its name. Palestinianism.”
In an interview on Monday with the conservative news site The Daily Signal, Fine called Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib “Muslim terrorists” when asked about their failure to condemn the Boulder attack in its immediate aftermath. Both Omar and Tlaib condemned the attack on social media later that same day.
Laura Loomer, a far-right media personality who is increasingly influential on Trump administration personnel decisions, posted to X that “Palestinians are inherently violent people,” called for the deportation of all non-U.S. citizen Muslims, and wrote that “Mohammed is the most dangerous name in the world.”
Groups advocating for interreligious tolerance urged people not to make sweeping generalizations based on the attack in Boulder.
“Muslim families share concerns about violence just like anyone else,” said Nina Fernando, the executive director of The Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign, which trains faith leaders to combat anti-Muslim hate.
“Who benefits from this kind of violence? It’s not the families who are missing their loved ones. It’s not any of us here, at home or abroad,” she said. “It’s the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda.”
