Sunday, June 1, 2025, Egyptian Muslim Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an immigrant residing illegally in the U.S., firebombed a group of Boulder, Colorado Jews. The planned attack targeted Jews gathering for their weekly peaceful vigil memorializing murdered victims, and hostages remaining in Hamas captivity in Gaza since Hamas’ brutal attacks of October 7, 2023.
Given Soliman’s declared intent, to “kill all Zionist people,” it is fortuitous none of the victims of his firebombing were murdered. Fifteen individuals were injured, however, including two who remained hospitalized at least 4-days later, while Soliman openly expressed his desire, “to do it (conduct an attack) again.”
Soliman further conveyed the pious Islamic religious motivation for his firebombing of Jews—jihad for the sake of Allah. In an Arabic video recording made prior to the attack, which was independently validated by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), ABC News, and the U.K. Independent, Soliman proclaimed:
“Allah is greater than everything else. So why do we fear those who are inferior to Allah?..Not the Zionists, America, Britain, France, or Germany – only Allah has the right to be feared…I attest before Allah and before you that Allah, His Messenger, and Jihad for Allah’s sake are more beloved to me than the whole world are.”
Born in Egypt, Soliman and his family lived in Kuwait for 17-years before coming to the U.S. The pervasive, virulent Jew-hatred in both countries may have shaped Soliman’s own attitudes. Hard Anti-Defamation League (ADL) data reveal Kuwait is currently the world’s most antisemitic country, with a prevalence of extreme antisemitism of 97%, while 84% of Egyptians harbor extreme antisemitism, placing Egypt among the ten worst antisemitic nations, worldwide.
Moreover, Soliman’s ostensible resume, under education, listed Al Azhar University, since the 13th century, a pre-eminent, authoritative Sunni Islamic religious teaching institution, colloquially denoted as “Islam’s Vatican.” Unfortunately, Al Azhar, and its Grand Imam Papal equivalents, as well as other key Azharite religious officials, have propagated unrelenting jihadism and Jew-hatred for the past 75-years, ongoing.
Al-Azhar has issued a continuum of formal religious declarations (fatwas) of jihad against all Jews of historical Palestine since the November 29,1947 UN Partition Plan This bellicose exercise was repeated in 1948 at the outset of Israel’s War of Independence, in 1956 (some 9-months before the Sinai War), in 1967 (at the outset of the Six-Day War), in 1968 (at a global Al Azhar conference in Cairo), in 1973 (at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War), and less than 2-weeks after October 7, 2023, on 10/18/23.
As documented by late historian David Littman, Al Azhar, in September, 1968 assembled prominent Muslim theologians not only from the Middle East, but Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, at the Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research. Following the Arab Muslim debacle during the Six-Day War, this seminal Conference, marked the formal abandonment of pseudo-secular “Arab Nationalism,” in lieu of jihadism and Islamic Jew-hatred, as a guiding ideological rationale for the simmering conflict with Israel. Littman summarized the Conference’s six key recurring themes: Jews were frequently characterized as the “Enemies of Allah,” manifesting an historical continuity of evil qualities, “as described in the Qur’an,” and they did not constitute a true people or nation. The State of Israel was the culmination of the historical and cultural depravity of the Jews, which must be destroyed by a jihad, while the superiority of Islam over all other religions was brandished as a guarantee of the Arabs’ ultimate triumph. It was outrageous for the Jews, traditionally kept by Arab Islam in a humiliated, inferior status, and characterized as cowardly, to defeat the Arabs, have their own State, and cause the contraction of the “abode of Islam.” Littman’s analysis concluded with a plaintive warning—still relevant today—that Al Azhar was promoting ideas which, “lead to the urge to liquidate Israel, politicide, and the Jews, genocide. If the evil of the Jews is immutable & permanent, transcending time and circumstances, & impervious to all hopes of reform, there is only one way to cleanse the world of them—by their complete annihilation.”
Indeed, on October 7, 2023, Al-Azhar celebrated the brutal jihad carnage of Hamas as “the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people.” October 19, 2023, Al-Azhar issued another formal “fatwa,” praised by Al-Qaeda, declaring that “Zionist settlers,” i.e., all Israeli Jews, including non-combatants, were legitimate targets of jihad.
For the past 30-years, Al-Azhar’s current and immediate past Grand Imams, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi (1996-2010) and Ahmed al-Tayeb (2010-now)—rabid antisemites, each—amplified this perverse Islamic ethos.
Tantawi, a leading modern Quranic commentator, mined Islam’s rich Jew-hating canon to produce a 766pp Quranic kampf against the Jews, entitled, “The Children of Israel (Jews) in the Quran and Traditions.” Tantawi’s opus, recorded “these and many more vices” of the Jews in the Quran: “disbelief, ingratitude, egotism, cowardice, deceit, rebellion, cruelty, deviance, hastening to transgression and aggression, unjustly consuming people’s wealth.” He avers such Quranic vices of the Jews, “can be clearly seen anywhere and throughout the ages,” and “the passage of time has only made these vices more ingrained in them.” During his tenure as Grand Imam, Tantawi labeled Jews with the Quranic epithet (verse 5:60) “apes and pigs,” and sanctioned homicide bombing “martyrdom” operations Israel’s Jewish civilians, including women, children, and the elderly.
Present Grand Imam al-Tayeb has also sanctioned homicide bombing against Israeli non-combatants, and promoted conspiratorial Jew-hatred, claiming Jews seek to conquer Mecca and Medina, and that Jews created jihad terror groups like ISIS. Twice in nationally televised Egyptian interviews, al-Tayeb explained how a central antisemitic verse in the Quran, 5:82, defines Muslim-Jewish relations, permanently, inflicting “suffering” upon Muslims for 1400-years, till now.
Unsurprisingly, during a recent “blessed month of Ramadan” evening prayer on March 6, 2025, in front of Al Azhar’s mosque, there was a gratuitous public recitation of Quran 5:82
Mohamed Soliman’s attack on Boulder Jews brought Al Azhar’s authoritative Islamic Jew-hating, jihad ethos to Colorado. Hope springs eternal willfully blind U.S. religious and political leaders finally recognize, and condemn, this ugly phenomenon.
