The city of Boulder, Colorado was recently rocked by a mass murder at a local supermarket that took the lives of 10 people. The suspect police have arrested in connection to the murders is a Syrian man named Ahmad Al Issa who has a history of complaining about “racist white people” and cultural insensitivity.
For nearly a decade, liberal activists have focused on the alleged problem of “whiteness” within Boulder and have sought to increase the city’s diversity by importing Syrian migrants.
In 2015 liberal foundations in Boulder began to stress the importance of welcoming Syrian immigrants, celebrating the fact that “In 2016, we expect nearly 2,000 refugees will be welcomed into Colorado, and, according to the TRENDS Report, some 419 refugees became permanent legal residents of Boulder County between 2003 and 2013.”
Boulder’s then-mayor Suzanne Jones noted, “We have inclusivity aspirations that we are working to live up to.” The Boulder City Council then continued to hold votes to allow even more Syrian refugees to take up permanent residence in the city in a “declaration regarding inclusivity for the refugees and other disenfranchised populations.”
Even after the founder of Boulder’s largest Syrian refugee charity pleaded guilty to felony charges of embezzling more than $130,000 from his own organization in 2018, the city continued to push for racial change. Articles lamented the city’s “crushingly white majority population,” and liberal activists expressed horror about the city’s relatively small proportion of foreign-born residents.
In 2019, residents engaged in “anti-racism training” provided by anti-white Black Lives matter activists.
Most recently, students at the University of Colorado Boulder were invited to take part in a webinar titled “Difficult Dialogues: Unpacking Whiteness (what it means to say that CU Boulder is ‘so white’),” which queried, “How can we engage the CU Boulder community about these issues, and how can white people address and combat white privilege and white supremacy in our classrooms, our departments, and the campus at large?”
The man who murdered 10 people inside a Boulder King Sooper this week, Syrian-born Muslim Ahmad Al Issa, frequently complained about white people and threatened fake hate crimes charges against those he didn’t like. All of his victims were white.
