A Manufactured Crisis:
Phil Weiser Drinks the Kool-Aid?
Is Phil Weiser already off track?
Phil Weiser, fresh off his primary win over Senator Michael Bennet, has made his first notable move as the Democratic nominee for Colorado governor to publicly press congressional candidate Melat Kiros to call the June 2025 Boulder firebombing an act of antisemitism.
On June 1, 2025, a man named Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw Molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower on a group gathered in Boulder to call for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Kiros, when asked whether the attack was antisemitic said she didn’t “know what was in the heart of the perpetrator.”
She called it “a horrific attack on a group of Jewish people that were engaging in peaceful protest” and said it left many Jewish Coloradans feeling unsafe. She clearly stated that conflating the Israeli government’s conduct in Gaza with Jewish identity generally is itself what’s fueling antisemitism, and that her responsibility as a candidate is to name and combat that conflation rather than adjudicate one attacker’s psychology.
Weiser, who is Jewish, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, and has called himself a Zionist, said he found her answer inadequate. “We cannot look at that murder and say anything else happened than a hate crime,” he said, noting the conviction. “Jewish lives matter... you don’t put a comma, an ‘and’ or a ‘but.’ Period.”
The issue here is that Weiser spent his primary framing himself as the best candidate positioned to stand up to an administration that his own campaign describes in existential terms. His first public initiative as nominee was not aimed at that administration. It was aimed at a fellow Democrat, over language, days after she won her own primary. Whatever the merits, that’s a choice about priorities and sequencing, and it’s fair to ask whether it serves the coalition Weiser says he needs.
Coverage of a Democratic civil war over antisemitism language does more for the pro-Israel advocacy groups than it does for Democratic unity. Even a sincerely held position can be poorly timed, and Weiser had the standing and the political capital, this week, to spend it somewhere else.
This feels like manufactured outrage over nothing.
Colorado has no shortage of problems that have nothing to do with this dispute. Whether Weiser returns to them or lets this become the frame for his general election campaign, will say more about his judgment than Kiros’ comments do on their own.
