Phelim McAleer: ​The Nazi survivor who died as a result of left-wing violence in America

Emigrating to America, she settled in Boulder, Colorado, becoming a librarian who lived to share her love of literature and the story of her survival. Known for her warmth and dedication to combating hatred, Diamond constantly advocated for peace even as the Israel-Gaza war escalated. At the beginning of June she was on a peaceful ‘Run for Their Lives’ walk in Boulder, raising awareness for Israeli hostages in Gaza. She was then the victim of a horrific attack.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, yelling ‘Free Palestine,’ hurled Molotov cocktails and used a flamethrower, seriously injuring Diamond and injuring 15. She died at the weekend.

You may not have heard much about her life and horrific death because her murder reveals a truth the American media are loath to admit: she died from left-wing violence and there is a lot of it around.

The American media’s selective curiosity and outrage is a dangerous scandal. Right-wing violence—Charlottesville, where a neo-Nazi killed a woman at a protest, the Capitol riot and the Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 including children — are amplified and etched into memory. The Oklahoma bombing, 30 years past, is invoked as if recent, painting the right as an existential threat. Yet, left-wing violence is covered up, misrepresented as right-wing, or memory-holed.

Some journalists trivialise it, treating it as ‘crazy kids messing around’ or a Robin Hood-style crusade against the rich and powerful. This was evident in April 2025, when CNN’s extremism correspondent Donie O’Sullivan (who is from Kerry) interviewed fellow journalist Taylor Lorenz about Luigi Mangione, who murdered UnitedHealthcare’s CEO. Lorenz, who has made a career warning of “the danger of right wing extremists” laughed and joked about those who view Mangione as “a revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart… a morally good man”. O’Sullivan, chuckling, quipped that the prominence of people like Mangione meant he was struggling in the dating world. “Women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me,” he said.

Their banter shows how some treat left-wing violence as quirky rebellion. O’Sullivan, tasked with uncovering threats, only seems to find extremism on the right, ignoring the left-wing violence that killed Diamond. The weekend she was attacked O’Sullivan was presenting a CNN programme that looked at the connection between right wing extremism and UFO hunters. Her death deserves better.

O’Sullivan has claimed that there’s “no equivalent on the left” to Oklahoma City, Charlottesville, or the Capitol riot. However left-wing violence in America has matched or surpassed these, yet it’s met with silence.

The 2020 George Floyd riots killed over 20 people, torched businesses, and gripped cities like my home town of Los Angeles in chaos. The media called them ‘mostly peaceful’, downplaying the death toll. Two 2024 assassination attempts on Trump were buried, with little scrutiny of their ideological roots. The May 2025 shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington DC, by a gunman shouting “I did it for Gaza,” was antisemitic, yet coverage faded fast.

The 2016 Dallas shooting, where Micah Xavier Johnson, an anti-white Black activist, killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest, was a racially driven slaughter that should have signalled left-wing extremism. Instead, it was memory-holed.

Law enforcement, under political pressure, focuses on ‘white supremacist’ and ‘militia’ groups, while left-wing violence festers. In 2023, Biden’s FBI labelled Catholics attending Latin Mass as potential “radical-traditionalist” extremists, proposing church infiltration to combat the threat.

This selective blindness has consequences. By refusing to name left-wing violence—or joking about it, as Lorenz and O’Sullivan did—the media embolden perpetrators and erode trust. Karen Diamond’s death demands a reckoning for all victims of ideological violence, regardless of the source. The right’s sins are well-documented; it’s time to hold the left to the same standard. Only by confronting this honestly can we stop the next Boulder, Dallas, or an attempt to assassinate a president. Until that happens there will be more Karen Diamonds in America.

• Phelim McAleer is a Co Tyrone-born journalist/producer working in Los Angeles. You can find him on the social media platform X: @PhelimMcAleer