The man accused of fire–bombing a Colorado march by people who wanted to raise awareness of Israeli hostages in Gaza was charged in state court on Thursday with attempted murder and other crimes, as those he targeted vowed to carry on their efforts.

If he is convicted, state prosecutors said Egyptian citizen Mohamed Soliman, 45, faces well over 600 years in prison for 28 attempted murder charges. There were 118 counts against him in total, including assault, use of incendiary devices, and animal cruelty for the injury of a dog.

Soliman also faces federal hate crimes charges that carry a life sentence if he is convicted. He is scheduled to appear in federal court on Friday.

Soliman wore orange prison clothing at Thursday’s state hearing in a courtroom inside the Boulder County jail. He appeared behind thick glass, and his hands and feet were shackled.

Judge Nancy Woodruff Salomone asked if he could hear her and if he agreed to his next court date, set for July 15. Soliman nodded affirmatively in response to both questions and made no other comments or gestures. He was not asked to enter a plea.

Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty said three victims from Sunday’s attack remained in the hospital. Prosecutors said there were 15 victims in total, ranging in age from 25 to 88, in the attack, of whom 10 had injuries.

The Boulder public defender’s office, listed in court documents as representing Soliman, did not respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors say that Soliman tossed Molotov cocktails and yelled “Free Palestine” at people taking part in the walk organized by Run for Their Lives, an organization devoted to drawing attention to the hostages seized during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Soliman entered the US on a tourist visa in 2022 and recently lived in Colorado Springs. Federal officials say he overstayed that tourist visa and his work permit had expired, so he was in the country illegally.

His family, including his wife, two teenagers and three younger children, was taken into custody on Tuesday and may be deported, though a federal judge on Wednesday blocked their immediate removal.

The attack was the latest act of violence aimed at Jewish Americans amid Israel’s escalating military offensive in Gaza. It followed the fatal shooting of two Israeli Embassy aides outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum last month.

WALK ON

Run for Their Lives global coordinator Shira Weiss said the Boulder attack had stunned her organization, which has 230 chapters around the globe and says it is apolitical.

“This is so sad that we were trying to do something positive and something good, and this horrible thing happened,” she said.

Following the attack, Weiss asked local chapters to pause their weekly walks, but overwhelmingly heard that people wanted to carry on.

About 80 percent of chapters will hold their scheduled walks this weekend including in Boulder on Sunday. That will coincide with the city’s 30th annual Jewish festival, which organizers said would go on with heightened security measures and a focus on Run for Their Lives.

Weiss has received 20 inquiries about starting new chapters since the attack in Boulder, and has also seen an increase in the number of people wanting to walk with existing groups.

Maya Bajayo, organizer for the Denver chapter of Run for Their Lives, said she expects all 50 members of her group to join the Boulder chapter on its Sunday walk.

The post Suspect in Colorado Antisemitic Firebombing Faces 28 Attempted Murder Counts first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A French rabbi was attacked on Friday for the second time in a week, reflecting a rise in antisemitic hate crimes across France including high-profile assaults.

Elie Lemmel told Reuters he was sitting at a cafe in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine on Friday when he was hit in the head by a chair.

“I found myself on the ground, I immediately felt blood flowing,” he said.

He was stunned and unsure what exactly had happened, he said, initially thinking something must have fallen from a window or roof, before it occurred to him he had been attacked.

“Unfortunately, given my beard and my kippah, I suspected that was probably why, and it’s such a shame,” he said.

Friday’s incident follows another in the town of Deauville in Normandy last week, when Lemmel said he was punched in the stomach by an unknown assailant.

Lemmel said he was used to “not-so-friendly looks, some unpleasant words, people passing by, spitting on the ground,” but had never been physically assaulted before the two attacks.

The prosecutor’s office in Nanterre said it had opened an investigation into the Neuilly attack for aggravated violence and that a person was being held for questioning. It said it could not provide further details.

“This act sickens us,” former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal wrote on X regarding Friday’s incident involving Lemmel. “Antisemitism, like all forms of hatred, is a deadly poison for our society.”

Last weekend, five Jewish institutions in Paris — the Holocaust Memorial, three synagogues, and a Jewish restaurant — were vandalized with green paint.

In a separate incident last Saturday, a 21-year-old man was arrested after climbing a synagogue in the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in north-central France, removing an Israeli flag from its façade, and attempting to set it on fire.

Then on Monday, an elementary school in Lyon, east-central France, was set on fire and defaced with antisemitic and pro-Palestinian slogans, as well as swastikas.

“I condemn in the strongest possible terms the antisemitic attack that targeted a rabbi in Neuilly today. Attacking a person because of their faith is a shame. The increase in anti-religious acts requires the mobilization of everyone,” Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said in a post on X on Friday.

Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.

Antisemitic incidents targeting French Jews continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews.

The total number of antisemitic outrages in 2024 was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.

Anti-Jewish outrages have continued this year, with no sign of abating. In March, for example, Arie Engelberg, the rabbi of Orléans, was violently attacked while walking home with his nine-year-old son from the synagogue in the city, located south of Paris. There have also been multiple high-profile incidents of Jewish mean wearing kippahs and Stars of David being brutally attacked and called a “dirty Jew.”

The post French Rabbi Tells of Two Attacks in One Week as Antisemitic Hate Crimes Rise first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Heads you win, tails I lose. That’s how it feels watching the world’s reaction to Israel and America’s new food aid model in Gaza.

For months, Israel was condemned for not letting enough aid in and for blockading aid until the hostages were released. Now that Israel is letting in food directly — but cutting the corrupt United Nations and the Hamas terrorists out of the picture — those same voices are howling even louder.

First, the accusation was: “You’re starving Gaza!” Now, it’s: “You’re weaponizing aid!” and “You’re manipulating Gaza’s hunger!” Heads you win, tails I lose. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It’s utterly grotesque.

The images from Gaza tell the real story. Thousands of hungry people, many of them openly and unabashedly critical of Hamas, lining up at distribution points — eager to accept boxes of food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is quietly, without fanfare, working with Israeli and American support.

Suddenly, we are witnessing a population that’s been exploited and abandoned by Hamas and used as political pawns by the UN finally ready — and finally able — to challenge their oppressors.

Yet instead of celebrating this breakthrough, the usual chorus of international do-gooders — all of them card-carrying haters of Israel and America — are up in arms.

The UN leadership is outraged at being usurped from its traditional role as the world’s perpetual busybody. Apparently, if the UN is to be taken at its word, delivering aid outside of Hamas’s control somehow violates humanitarian norms.

Even European diplomats are muttering darkly that this new scheme is some kind of Israeli conspiracy.

And it goes without saying that academics in distant universities are warning about “the instrumentalization of aid for war purposes.” Has anyone in all of history ever uttered something quite so ridiculous? In any event, try telling that to the Gazan father, who eagerly thanked “everyone who helped us” to a reporter on the scene.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Since the October 7th Hamas-perpetrated atrocity and the war against Hamas that followed, all these same voices have been deafeningly silent as Hamas turned food and medicine into tools of terror. Surely, that was “the instrumentalization of aid.”

But they said nothing while Hamas stole international donations in plain sight, extorted desperate families at military checkpoints, and funneled the profits into weapons and ever more violence. Now, as soon as Israel steps in to break that deadly cycle—taking real risks to ensure that Gazan civilians aren’t starved or blackmailed—these critics suddenly find their voices. But instead of using them to support real humanitarian work, they stridently protect the “principles” of an aid system that Hamas has been openly using as a cash cow.

It’s easy to stand in Geneva or New York and patronizingly tut-tut about “neutrality.” It’s much harder to look a starving child in the face and say: “Sorry, we can’t give you food unless your terrorist overlords sign off on it,” or “There’s food for you, but you can’t have it because it’s the Israelis giving it out.”

This is the greatest moral inversion of our times: Israel’s “sin” is that it’s doing what every serious humanitarian ought to do: stop the abuse of aid by criminals and ensure that food actually reaches the hungry.

Hamas is so eager to keep control, and its international enablers are so equally keen to keep Hamas from being ousted, that a shooting last week at a food collection point quickly became an international incident. The so-called mass casualty event occurred as hundreds of Gazans made their way to the only open distribution center in Rafah.

The Hamas-controlled “health ministry” claimed that 31 people were killed and nearly 200 wounded in the pre-dawn shooting near the site — and of course, inevitably, Israel was guilty of a deliberate massacre.

But even as news outlet after news outlet blindly reported the atrocity, the IDF denied responsibility and later published an audio recording featuring a local Gazan who insisted that it had been Hamas, not Israel, that opened fire. “They don’t want the people to receive aid,” he told an Israeli officer. “They want to foil the plan so that the aid will go to them, allowing them to steal it. They’ve gone completely bankrupt.”

The Torah in Parshat Nasso teaches us about the Nazir, someone who vows to separate themselves from wine and other mundane aspects of ordinary life for a period of spiritual self-discipline. The Torah says, “for the crown of his God is upon his head” (Num. 6:7).

It’s a powerful image: by abstaining from doing what others do, the Nazir isn’t running away from the world. Instead, they’re being true to themselves — choosing to do the right thing, even if it means breaking from routine in order to achieve something positive. And for that, they are depicted as having the crown of God on their heads.

The commentators add that the Nazir’s vow of abstention is really about reclaiming control. Instead of being pulled in every direction by outside influences — whether it’s peer pressure, popular opinion, or the desire to fit in — the Nazir says: “Enough is enough. I will not be ruled by these forces. I will decide my own path.”

That’s precisely what Israel’s new aid model is doing. Israel has finally, and wisely, entered into the status of Nazir. For too long, everything about the “aid system” in Gaza has been governed by what everyone else thinks is right and what Israel should or should not be doing or allowing on their borders.

But Israel the Nazir has taken a vow of abstention. Instead of working with the UN, they’ve taken a stand. They’re saying: “Enough. We will not let terrorists decide who eats and who starves. We will take control of the situation and do what is right for us and for those who are most in need.”

And yes, it’s messy. The Torah itself acknowledges that the Nazir’s vow isn’t the norm — it’s a response to a world that the Nazir feels is no longer working for them. But when everything around you is distorted, you’ve no choice but to do something radical to restore balance.

So here we are: Israel, with America alongside it, is stepping in to provide real aid — no strings attached, no financial siphon for Hamas’ tunnels, no middlemen selling precious food that was meant to be free so they can fund terror. And just as every Nazir in history has been seen as odd or extreme, Israel is being seen as venturing outside accepted norms.

But the Torah says that when you stand apart from the mob and refuse to play by their twisted rules, you wear a crown of holiness: “The crown of his God is upon his head.”

No Nazir was ever perfect. That’s a given. Neither is Israel perfect, nor is this new system. But to those who can’t see past their own dogmas, who only find their voices when Israel acts to fix the mess they ignored –maybe it’s time to take a lesson from the Nazir. Be independent. Worry about your spiritual and moral responsibilities. And whether the rest of the world turns their noses up is unimportant.

Because when you do that, it’s heads I win, and tails you don’t lose.

The author is a writer in Beverly Hills, California. 

The post It’s Important That We Know the Truth About the Aid Situation in Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.