Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the Democratic nominee for governor, criticized his party’s socialist congressional nominee Melat Kiros for her refusal to describe the deadly firebombing of a Boulder, Colo., hostage awareness march last year as an act of antisemitism.

Kiros, speaking last week to 9News, a local channel, declined to call the attack antisemitic, because “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. … I don’t know what his intentions were.”

Melat Kiros, a DSA-backed congressional candidate in Colorado, declined to call the Boulder firebombing attack antisemitic in an interview with the local channel 9News.

"I don't know what was in the heart of the perpetrator," Kiros said.

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Weiser, who is Jewish, said in an interview with the same channel that he was concerned by Kiros’ comments, noting that he was personally friendly with Karen Diamond, the Holocaust survivor killed in the attack, and her husband.

“What happened on June 1 in Boulder was an antisemitic attack,” Weiser said. “We cannot look at that murder and say anything else happened than a hate crime, and so if someone isn’t going to acknowledge that I’m concerned about that, because this was tried, this was how we have a conviction” for a hate crime.

He said that he hasn’t spoken to Kiros yet, but when he does, he would raise his concerns about her comments.

“You hear it a lot in the context of Black Lives Matter — now we’re talking Jewish lives matter,” Weiser said. “Black Lives Matter, period. Black Lives Matter — Elijah McClain’s life mattered. Period. You don’t put a comma. Jewish lives matter. Karen Diamond’s life mattered. You don’t put a comma, an ‘and’ or a ‘but.’ Period.”

In a CNN interview on Wednesday, Kiros described the attack as “a horrific attack on a group of Jewish people that were engaging in peaceful protest” which “made many Jewish people … feel incredibly unsafe” but she again declined to directly call the attack antisemitic.

“The fact of the matter is, is that this conflation between the actions of the state of Israel and Judaism and the Jewish people is making Jewish people less safe. It is leading to a rise in antisemitism that’s taking place all across our country,” Kiros said. “My commitment is to protecting the sanctity and dignity of life for everyone. That means standing strong, side-by-side to our Jewish brothers and sisters and neighbors, to make sure that they are protected against this rising hate and this rising antisemitism.”

Pressed again on why she didn’t call the attack antisemitic, Kiros insinuated that Israel’s military actions in Gaza were to blame for the attack.

“What we’re talking about here is attacks that are taking place on the Jewish community as a result of the actions that are taking place in Palestine, the genocide that is taking place in Palestine, actively making Jewish people less safe in our city and across our country,” she said.

She repeated that “our commitment has to be to combating that hate, combating the conflation between the actions of the state and the Jewish people and standing against this antisemitism.”

Kiros’ campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.