Congressional candidate justifies attacks of October 7 and 9/11

The Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate refused to retreat from controversial comments during a recent interview.

By World Israel News Staff

A far-left Democratic congressional candidate in Colorado described both the October 7 Hamas attacks and the September 11 terrorist attacks as “inevitable,” while also defending anti-Israel campus protests that erupted after the massacre in southern Israel.

Melat Kiros, who is backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, recently appeared to downplay terrorism and expressed support for the anti-Israel demonstrations that swept college campuses after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack.

During an appearance on the livestream of anti-Israel commentator Hasan Piker, Kiros described the Hamas-led massacre as “an inevitable consequence of apartheid, of occupation, decades of occupation.”

The comments drew renewed attention after Kiros was asked about them during an interview last week with Next9 News, a local Colorado television station. Rather than distancing herself from her earlier remarks, she seemingly doubled down on her comments.

“It’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happen, right?” Kiros said. “Israel is a country that has been accused of apartheid and occupation for decades now and has been able to resist any kind of change despite all of the frustration on the world stage that people have had for the conditions that Palestinians have been living in.”

The interviewer then asked whether she would similarly characterize the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as “inevitable.” Kiros appeared to answer in the affirmative.

The attacks, which killed more than 2,000 Americans, were “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East, which led people to believe that another act of violence was the only response,” Kiros said.

She added that “our responsibility is to get rid of those conditions that lead to violence in the first place,” though she did not elaborate on what specific policies she believed would accomplish that goal.

Kiros has also attracted attention for her response to anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses following the October 7 attacks.

In late 2023, she was dismissed from the law firm where she had worked after publicly criticizing the firm’s statement condemning the anti-Israel campus protests.

“You are complicit in Israel’s weaponization of anti-Semitism against legitimate concerns for the right of self-determination and the livelihood of the Palestinian people,” she wrote in an open letter.

“By conflating ‘calls for the elimination of the Israeli state’ with anti-Semitism, you delegitimize any solution that forces Israel to reckon with its colonial role in Palestine,” she added.