Kyle Clark, a local anchor for Colorado’s 9News, interviewed Melat Kiros this week ahead of next Tuesday’s Democratic primary in the state in which Kiros is challenging fifteen-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO).

Clark pressed Kiros on several issues related to Israel, terrorism, and anti-Semitism, including asking whether or not she believed the 2025 firebombing attack on a Boulder, Colorado, Jewish group, which left several injured and one dead, was an act of anti-Semitism.

Kiros and DeGette are running neck-and-neck in the race as several progressive candidates are offering strong challenges to incumbent Democrats in Colorado.

Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, has stirred controversy with her hard-left policy positions, which include abolishing ICE and Medicare for All. She was fired from a law firm in recent years after penning an essay arguing that calling for the elimination of Israel is not anti-Semitic. She had also raised eyebrows with her past comments on Hamas’s brutal Oct 7 terror attack against Israeli towns, including calling it “the inevitable consequence of apartheid.”

“Is the suggestion that Israel had it coming?” Clark asked Kiros, referencing that comment.

“No, not at all. It’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happen, right? Israel is a country that has been accused of apartheid and occupation for decades now and has been able to resist any kind of change despite all of the frustration on the world stage that people have had for the conditions that Palestinians have been living in,” Kiros replied, adding:

And I hope that as an ally that Israel claims to be, they would be responsive to our demands to make sure that they change those conditions so that we can actually finally start the work of peacebuilding and delivering aid to the people in need.

Clark shared a clip of his interview on social media, noting, “I asked Kiros if she thought the same thing about 9/11 and US foreign policy. And she declined to call the firebombing of Jews in Boulder an act of anti-semitism.”

Clark also asked, “Do you believe that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America were the inevitable consequence of American foreign policy?”

“Inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East, which led people to believe that another act of violence was the only response. And again, just like I said before, our responsibility is to get rid of those conditions that lead to violence in the first place,” Kiros replied.

“You recently campaigned with Hasan Piker. He’s got a huge streaming audience. Do you agree with his statement that Hamas is a lesser evil than Israel?” Clark asked.

Kiros replied, “No, I don’t.”

Below is the rest of their conversation on the topic:

Clark: You’ve called Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide. You’ve called for an arms embargo against Israel. Would that include the U.S. selling or financing defensive weapons that Israel uses to protect itself against rocket attacks from Hezbollah or Iran?

Kiros: Yes.

Clark: It would?

Kiros: It would.

Clark: Why not differentiate between offensive weapons used to wage war against another population and defensive weapons that are used to protect civilians from outside attack?

Kiros: I believe that our selling of arms to Israel, defensive or offensive, gives them the cover to continue the genocide that’s taking place in Palestine and now the ethnic cleansing that’s taken place in Lebanon.

Clark: If there’s a debate within the Democratic Party and elsewhere about what is anti-Semitism and what is anti-Zionism — that firebombing attack in Boulder on the group of peaceful protesters there who were protesting in support of the Jewish hostages being held by Hamas — was that firebombing attack on them an act of anti-Semitism?

Kiros: I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he went and attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed. And I don’t even know what the people at that protest believed, either. In fact, most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on October 7th be returned home to their families. That’s not a political statement in and of itself.

Clark: But you would not describe it as anti-Semitism.

Kiros: I don’t know what his intentions were.

Watch the clip above.

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