Meet Melat Kiros, the Ethiopian-American Politician Who Thinks Israel Has No Right to Exist

On June 30, Melat Kiros, an Ethiopian-American, won the Democratic primary for the First Congressional District in Colorado, defeating Diana DeGuette, a 15-term incumbent, and thereby insuring that, in this bluest of states, she will be sitting in Congress as of next January. For reasons that deserve to be pondered, the main area of disagreement between the candidates was not affordability, nor the war in Iran, but tiny Israel. DeGuette has long been a supporter of the Jewish state. Kiros, on the other hand, has not the slightest sympathy for the embattled country that is now fighting a four-front war, against Hamas in Gaza, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, against the Houthis in Yemen, and against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran.

More on this former lawyer, Ph.D. candidate, and — like AOC — a former barista, can be found here: “Who Is Melat Kiros? The ‘Progressive’ Congressional Hopeful Who Thinks the 9/11 Terror Attacks Were ‘Inevitable,’” by Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting, June 29, 2026:

CNN recently profiled Democrat socialist and lawyer Melat Kiros as a “rising progressive,” highlighting her primary challenge against 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado. The piece foregrounds familiar campaign rhetoric, quoting Kiros’ claim that Democratic leadership is “failing to meet this moment.”

But only deep into the article does CNN acknowledge what has actually defined Kiros’ candidacy: a pattern of statements on Israel, antisemitism, and political violence that go far beyond conventional policy critique.

CNN notes that Kiros faced criticism for declining to describe as antisemitism the Colorado firebomb attack targeting demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, in which one person was killed and more than a dozen injured. Investigators say the attacker planned the assault for a year and told police he wanted “to kill all Zionist people.”

Not antisemitism? The attacker firebombed a small group of Jews standing by the side of a road holding signs asking for the Israeli hostages to be released. For that, he tried to burn them alive; one elderly Jewish lady did burn to death. But Melat Kiros refused to describe this as antisemitism.

When asked whether the Boulder attack was an act of antisemitism, she replied: “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.”

No, Ms. Kiros, he attacked them not for what they believed, but only because they were Jews. You deny this was an act of antisemitism? The attacker had been planning to attack Jews for a year. He told the police “I want to kill all Zionist people.” He found his moment when he saw a small group of Jews quietly holding up signs asking for the Israeli hostages to be released. For that, he firebombed them. But Melat Kiros steadfastly refuses to describe this attack on Jews as antisemitism.

CNN might also have informed readers that the open letter it briefly references as leading to her firing from a law firm in 2023 was Kiros’ own Medium essay responding to a 2023 law‑firm letter about antisemitism, in which she not only argued that “calls for the elimination of the Israeli state” should not be considered antisemitic, but went on to frame dismantling the world’s only Jewish state as merely a “geo‑political question.”

Even more striking is what CNN chose to omit entirely.

In the same televised interview in which Kiros commented on the Boulder attack, she was also asked whether the September 11 terror attacks – in which nearly 3,000 people were murdered – were an inevitable consequence of US foreign policy. She responded: “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.”

The overall mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was Osama bin Laden, the son of a billionaire Saudi construction magnate and the leader of Al-Qaeda. And 15 of the 19 terrorists who carried out the attack were Saudi citizens. What did the Americans ever do to Saudi Arabia to justify such attacks? Nothing. The Americans have for decades provided the Saudis with military protection. Americans first discovered, and then produced, the oil that has provided Saudi Arabia with trillions of dollars. The 9/11 attack was a violent jihad, carried out against the most powerful Infidel state. Islam, and nothing else, explains that tremendous act of terror, and explains, too, the tens of thousands of smaller terror attacks carried out by Muslims since 9/11. The texts and teachings of Islam are beyond Melot Kiros’ comprehension. In all of her vaporings about Israel and its Arab enemies, she never once mentions either “Islam” or “jihad.”

Describing 9/11 as “inevitable” is a grotesque moral inversion. By shifting agency away from the perpetrators and toward the United States, Kiros recasts an act of mass-casualty terrorism as a predictable consequence of policy rather than a deliberate atrocity in which 3,000 innocent people were murdered. Yet CNN’s profile does not meaningfully interrogate this position.

Kiros has also called for a full US arms embargo on Israel, explicitly including defensive systems used to intercept rocket fire from groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. When asked why she would not distinguish between offensive and defensive capabilities, she argued that any military support “gives [Israel] the cover” to continue what she describes as “genocide.”

A US arms embargo on defensive weapons to Israel would leave its civilians in even greater peril from incoming missiles and drones than they are today, and the embargo on offensive weapons would greatly undermine its ability to take the fight to the enemy, or many enemies, that surround the tiny state. But Melat Kiros doesn’t care. She likes the idea that the Jewish state — the “genocidal Jewish state” — will cease to exist.

Melat Kiros requires careful monitoring in order to halt her ascent up the greasy pole of politics. This is no sweet “Abyssinian maid and on her dulcimer she played.” Kiros is a threat to the wellbeing both of Israel and of the West. And come to think of it, she’s even a menace to Ethiopia, that needs all the Western diplomatic support it can garner in its war, which is not yet a shooting one, with Muslim Egypt, that is trying to hamper Addis Ababa’s diversion of the waters of the Blue Nile to run its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Given her “progressive” worldview, she’s bound to support Muslim Egypt against Christian Ethiopia.