No antisemitism here: How the media distorted the Boulder, Colorado attack

Hiding the fact that Jews were deliberately set on fire legitimizes their targeting.

By Rinat Harash, HonestReporting

It was a tragically straightforward story: Eight people were injured on Sunday (June 1) when a man yelled “Free Palestine” and threw fire bombs into a crowd of Jews in Boulder, Colorado, where they called for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Media headlines, however, did not mention Jews, nor the antisemitic slogan. They did not even call it an act of terrorism, although this is how the FBI labelled it.

For many media outlets, Jews being set on fire was merely an attack like any other. And this is precisely the narrative that enables the very antisemitism they failed to report on.

The BBC‘s headline, for example, is about “the attack in Colorado” — too vague to know who attacked whom and why:

AP’s headline took an extra step, acknowledging the existence of “suspect” and “victims” — as in any attack — but failing to identify them:

The headlines from NPR and Newsweek were equally bad, saying that random “people” were burned with no mention of their identity or the perpetrator’s antisemitic motive:

And an editor at CBS News thought it was more important to mention the full name of the Boulder Pearl Street Mall in the headline, rather than the identity of the victims:

Some of the worst headlines came from ABC News and ABC Australia that questioned the entire event by using scare quotes around words like “terror” and “flamethrower:”

AP went further, actively shilling for the attacker, Mohammed Soliman, who “appeared to have second thoughts” and threw only two out of 18 Molotov Cocktails:

There is no excuse for such bad journalism. This isn’t Gaza, where Hamas controls the narrative. And the perpetrator himself declared he wanted to “end Zionists!”

The appropriate headline should have been simple:

“Pro-Palestinian attacks Jews supporting Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado,” or “Eight Jews burned after pro-Palestinian attacker targets solidarity march with Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado.”

So why were media outlets unable to accurately report it?

The only answer, other than incompetence, is complicity: Hiding the fact that Jews were deliberately set on fire legitimizes their targeting.

Because it’s antisemitic to cover for antisemites.