Eighty-Twenty

Erick Erickson on Jun 6, 2025

Mohammed Sabry Soliman, armed with an improvised flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, attacked a group of peaceful Jews in Boulder, Colo., who were remembering the hostages taken from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. At least one of Soliman's victims was a Holocaust survivor.

Soliman and his family had come to the United States on a tourist visa from Egypt in August of 2022 during the Biden administration. One month later, Soliman applied for asylum, listing his wife and children as dependents. His tourist visa expired in February of 2023 and in March of that year, the Biden administration gave Soliman a work permit that expired in March of this year.

Soliman claims he had planned the attack for about a year. He yelled about freeing Palestine as he tried to murder the Jews. Authorities arrested Soliman, and the Trump administration proceeded to process his family for deportation.

On June 3, two days after Mr. Soliman's terror attack, USA Today ran a profile of his daughter. "Habiba Soliman wanted to be a doctor. Then, her father firebombed Jewish marchers in Boulder," ran the headline of the piece authored by Michael Loria. It provided sympathetic coverage to Mr. Soliman's daughter. It turns out her father had waited until after her high school graduation to carry out his attack. "She moved to the United States with a dream of studying medicine. She had stepped off her high school graduation stage in May," Loria wrote.

Mr. Loria never mentioned the family's immigration status or overstayed work permit. Mr. Loria had previously worked for "Report for America." The website Influence Watch documents that, "The GroundTruth Project (formerly the GroundTruth Initiative) is a 501(c)(3) left-of-center media and journalism nonprofit organization that covers local news. GroundTruth is the fiscal sponsor of Report for America, a group created in 2018 to insert left-leaning journalists into news organizations across the United States in order to fill 'a coverage gap' in local news reporting."

USA Today had to update Mr. Loria's piece after mass outrage over never even addressing the immigration status of the family, and added reporter Michael Collins to the piece. "Mohamed Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant who overstayed his visa, had moved to the U.S. from Kuwait. The immigration status of Habiba Soliman and her siblings is unclear," the paper helpfully added before diving back into the sob story of the daughter.

USA Today has thus far not profiled any of Mr. Soliman's victims, including the elderly Holocaust survivor.

ABC News, the same day USA Today ran its story, headlined a piece, "Colorado attack comes amid record incidents of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes." The news outlet had to go back to 2023 to reference two attacks on Muslims. In one of the two attacks, Vermont prosecutors claimed they did not have enough evidence to prosecute Jason Eaton, who shot and wounded three Palestinian American men in Vermont, for a hate crime for specifically targeting the men as Palestinians.

ABC News only had to go back a week from Soliman's attack in Colorado to find another attack on Jews -- the murder of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington, D.C., last week. A few months ago, a man burned down the Pennsylvania Governor's Mansion in an effort to kill the Commonwealth's Jewish Governor and his family. But going back to 2023, ABC News could go with a "both sides do it" story to downplay violence against Jews. NBC News captured the big takeaway of the Colorado attack with a piece headlined, "Lone wolf attacks on Jewish Americans in Boulder and D.C. highlight the difficulties in securing public spaces."

Now, a former President Joe Biden appointed federal judge has decided President Donald Trump cannot deport Mr. Soliman's family, though they do appear to be here illegally. This issue is an eight-twenty issue. Americans do not want terrorists, their families or illegal alien criminals here generally. But the Democrats, the press and progressive judges have sided with the terrorists and criminals. They should not be surprised if Americans keep rejecting them for Trump. Likewise, the progressive judges are undermining their branch of government and providing Mr. Trump ammunition to cross the Rubicon and simply ignore the judges.

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To find out more about Erick Erickson and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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