Individual Acts of Terror
—No Solution

Jun 9, 2025

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian immigrant, is charged with carrying out a horrific attack on pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado. Soliman allegedly used a “makeshift flame thrower” and threw a Molotov cocktail into a crowd, injuring 15 people, one critically, and a dog.

The demonstrators were part of an organization called Run For Their Lives, which aims to draw attention to the remaining hostages taken by Hamas during its October 7, 2023, attack. The police say Soliman planned the attack for a year with this specific group in mind. Court documents say Soliman said “he hated this group and needed to stop them from taking over ‘our land,’ which he explained to be Palestine.”

This latest attack comes on the heels of the attack in Washington, D.C. in which two staffers from the Israeli embassy were shot and killed. The shooter in that attack yelled, “Free Palestine!”

The politicians, especially those on the right, and the press were quick to label these attacks antisemitic and pointed to a dramatic increase in antisemitic acts in the U.S. in recent years. Antisemitic acts certainly do appear to be on the rise in the U.S. The American Jewish Committee reported earlier this year that 33% of American Jews said they have been the target of antisemitism at least once in the past year. They added that 56% of American Jews said they changed some behaviors due to fear of antisemitism in the last year, up from 46% in 2023 and 38% in 2022.

This would not be shocking given the long history of antisemitism in this country throughout its history.

In the context of the current killings and massive suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza following the terrorist attack carried out by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, and the violence being carried out by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank, it can be hard to sort out what constitutes antisemitism as opposed to what are acts of protest in support of the Palestinians.

In the current context, defenders of the Zionist state in Israel are quick to point to antisemitism, but they say nothing about the state terror being carried out by Israel, both in Gaza and the West Bank, with the complete support of U.S. imperialism. Nor do they discuss the long history of the Palestinian people being driven off their lands, going all the way back to the beginnings of the state of Israel in 1948.

But many more people around the world are outraged at the slaughter in Gaza. Clearly, acts of individual terrorism are not a solution. In both of the recent attacks, the victims were ordinary people with no power to affect the current situation in Israel. This individual terrorism, in addition to the loss of lives, is a mistake because it gives politicians and the corporate media a way to divert the discussion away from that of the suffering of the Palestinian people.

Even acts of individual terrorism against powerful officials would not bring an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people, nor to that of any oppressed nationality. They do nothing to organize the power of the population, and especially that of the working class, the only force capable of transforming society.

Take down imperialism and the system of exploitation which repeatedly invokes war in the interests of domination and profit!