Earlier this month, Egyptian Muslim Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an immigrant residing illegally in the United States, threw firebombs at a group of Jews in Boulder, Colo. The planned attack targeted Jews gathering for their weekly peaceful vigil memorializing murdered victims and hostages remaining in Hamas captivity in Gaza since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Given Soliman’s declared intent was to “kill all Zionist people,” it is fortuitous that none of the victims were killed. Fifteen individuals were injured, and Soliman expressed his desire, “to do it again.”
He also conveyed the pious Islamic religious motivation for his firebombing of Jews—jihad for the sake of Allah. In an Arabic video recording made before the attack, which was independently validated by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), ABC News and the Independent in the United Kingdom, 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 United States. The pervasive, virulent Jew-hatred in both countries may have shaped Soliman’s attitudes. Hard Anti-Defamation League 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 10 worst antisemitic nations worldwide.
Moreover, under education, Soliman’s résumé listed Al-Azhar University, which, since the 13th century, has been a pre-eminent, authoritative Sunni Islamic religious teaching institution. It is colloquially denoted as “Islam’s Vatican.” Unfortunately, Al Azhar and its grand imams, the school’s papal equivalents, as well as other key Azharite religious officials, have propagated unrelenting jihadism and Jew-hatred for the past 75 years.
Al-Azhar has issued a continuum of formal Muslim declarations, fatwas, of jihad against all Jews of historical Palestine since Nov. 29, 1947, when the U.N. Partition Plan was approved. This bellicose exercise was repeated in 1948 at the outset of Israel’s War of Independence; in 1956, nine months before the start of the Sinai war; in 1967 at the outset of the Six-Day War; in 1968, during a global Al-Azhar conference in Cairo; in October 1973 at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War; and, on Oct. 18, 2023, less than two weeks after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
As documented by the late historian David Littman in his work Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel, in September of 1968, Al-Azhar hosted prominent Muslim theologians not only from the Middle East, but also from 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 in June 1967, this seminal conference marked the formal abandonment of pseudo-secular “Arab nationalism.” Instead, it favored 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, among them that Jews were frequently characterized as the “enemies of Allah,” manifesting a historical continuity of evil qualities, “as described in the Quran,” and that they did not constitute a true people or nation. 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. Also, that 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, one that is still relevant today, writing that Al-Azhar was promoting ideas that “lead to the urge to liquidate Israel, politicide and the Jews, genocide. If the evil of the Jews is immutable and permanent, transcending time and circumstances, and impervious to all hopes of reform, there is only one way to cleanse the world of them, by their complete annihilation.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Al-Azhar celebrated the brutal jihad carnage by Hamas as “the resistance efforts of the proud Palestinian people.” Some 10 days later, it issued a formal fatwa, one praised by Al-Qaeda, declaring that “Zionist settlers,” meaning all Israelis, were legitimate targets of jihad.
The university’s grand imams, Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi and Ahmed al-Tayyib, both rabid antisemites, have amplified this perverse Islamic ethos in recent decades.
Tantawi, a leading modern Quranic commentator who led Al-Azhar from 1996 to 2010, mined Islam’s rich Jew-hating canon to produce a 766-page Quranic screed against the Jews, “The Children of Israel (Jews) in the Quran and Traditions,” which can be found online in Arabic.
In it, he wrote “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 that such Quranic vices of the Jews “can be clearly seen anywhere and throughout the ages,” and that “the passage of time has only made these vices more ingrained in them.”
Al-Tayyib, the current grand imam, has also sanctioned homicide bombing against Israeli non-combatants, and promoted conspiratorial Jew-hatred ideologies claiming that Jews seek to conquer Mecca and Medina, and that Jews created jihad terror groups like ISIS. Twice in nationally televised Egyptian interviews, al-Tayyib explained how a central antisemitic verse in the Quran, verse 5:82, defines Muslim-Jewish relations, permanently, inflicting “suffering” upon Muslims for 1,400 years until now.
Soliman’s attack on Boulder’s Jews brought Al-Azhar’s authoritative Islamic Jew-hating, jihad ethos to Colorado. Hopefully, the attack will lead U.S. religious and political leaders to finally recognize and condemn this ugly phenomenon.