It’s Just Another Isolated Incident

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

Melat Kiros, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Colorado’s first congressional district, is a dyed-in-the-wool Democratic Socialist. At least, that’s what the Democratic Socialists of America claim.

 

Kiros enjoys the endorsement of both the Denver-area DSA and the national DSA. And Kiros herself has returned the favor. “Kiros placed her campaign in the context of the broader effort to elect democratic socialists across the country,” the DSA’s national press organ observed recently, “specifically citing fellow DSA National endorsees.”

 

Like whom? Like Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb, who recently claimed that the 2025 Bondi Beach massacre of Jews was the work of “Zionists,” as well as “Hasan Piker’s favorite candidate,” Florida’s Oliver Larkin.

 

Kiros certainly belongs in that company:

 

 

In an interview that must be seen to be believed, Kiros made a variety of incendiary remarks in which she defended murderous, terroristic violence directed against — well, you know — the “Zionists.” But she also seemed to grudgingly comprehend the logic that leads to terrorist violence against the United States.

 

When asked by interviewer Kyle Clark whether America brought 9/11 on itself, just as Israel invited the October 7 massacre in her view, Kiros did not reject the premise. The September 11 attack was “inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East,” she said, “that forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response.”

 

By “destabilized the Middle East,” maybe she means that the U.S. maintained a presence in Saudi Arabia by invitation after the U.S. military ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. If so, Kiros is endorsing Osama bin Laden’s logic for declaring war on America.

 

Or perhaps she means the Beirut embassy and barracks bombings of 1983 — acts of Iran-backed terrorism that led to America’s pullout from the region. But that wouldn’t make much sense. So, maybe what she really means is that the United States contributed to Israel’s defense against a combined Arab onslaught in 1973, helping to prevent the collapse of the Jewish State and the second historic massacre of Jews within a generation.

 

Or maybe Kiros doesn’t know what she means. Maybe her anti-Westernism is so pronounced that she is just trying to retrofit a rationale onto what is, in essence, a blinding hatred for her home and the Israelis who benefit from America’s Western orientation.

 

“What tethers these candidates is not their shared hatred of the Jews or the banks or the moneyed and propertied classes,” I wrote of the DSA on Wednesday. “They hate America and the West.” Kiros has helped prove my point. Hopefully, that will be her only lasting contribution to the national  political discourse.