A pro-Palestinian student group at the University of Colorado Boulder said in a post on its website this week that the Pearl Street firebombing was justified and called for the man who pleaded guilty to murdering an 82-year-old woman to be freed.
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The group, Boulder Students for Justice in Palestine, said it honors the “man who sacrificed his comfort and his proximity to empire, willingly expending his own liberty in attaining his objective,” according to a page on the group’s website that has since been removed from the homepage. CU Boulder denounced Boulder SJP’s statement and reiterated that the university doesn’t recognize the group as an official student organization.
The group said the prosecution of Mohamed Soliman mimics the tactics used against Arabs and Muslims across the United States in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks.
“The state would have us believe that Mohamed took the action he did because he is insane — a fanatic, a terrorist, guilty of a hate crime — but we know the truth and we reject the state’s inversion of it,” the group’s site reads. “Mohamed chose the only sane response available to a rational human being confronted with the normalization of genocide.”
The group called for Soliman’s release and called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, citing the immigration turmoil Soliman’s family faced for months after the firebombing attack.
Boulder SJP has remained formally unrecognized by CU Boulder since 2024 because it has not remedied policy violations, CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Cousins said in a statement. Cousins denounced the glorification of violence, according to the statement.
“We denounce antisemitism, Islamophobia and violence in all forms, and prohibit discrimination and harassment on the basis of a protected class,” Cousins wrote.
Cousins said the post has been reported to the “appropriate campus offices,” according to a statement.
Boulder’s mayor pro tem, Tara Winer, said the post was hurtful and just another antisemitic statement in a string of hate toward Jewish people.
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“It dehumanized the death of Karen Diamond and the suffering of the burn victims,” Winer said. “However, justice prevailed.”
Soliman was sentenced to life plus 2,178 years in prison in May after pleading guilty to 101 charges in the Pearl Street attack. He apologized for the attack, but denounced Israel during his final words before being put behind bars.
Victims who were set on fire during the June 1, 2025, attack confronted Soliman, 46, during the May 7 hearing, recounting the horrors they experienced that day on the Pearl Street Mall.
“When I’m alone and close my eyes, I can vividly see Karen’s body in flames,” said marcher Orrie Gartner, who also described the smell of burnt flesh and singed hair.
The day of the attack, Run for Their Lives demonstrators gathered on the mall for the group’s weekly demonstration denouncing Hamas and urging the release of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza. Soliman saw the weekly walks as an opportunity to take revenge on the group he believed did not care about Palestinian hostages and supported the deaths of Palestinians, according to an affidavit.
He carried out the attack, originally planned to be a mass shooting, by throwing multiple Molotov cocktails at the demonstrators, burning 13 and killing Diamond.
Soliman faces a dozen federal hate crime charges in the attack. He pleaded not guilty in that case in June, but offered last year to plead guilty to those charges as well.
He is expected to appear in court for a motions hearing in the federal case t 10 a.m. June 29 in the Alfred A. Arraj U.S. Courthouse in Denver, according to court filings.
This is a developing story.
