Scarcely a day goes by in South Florida that there’s not at least one rally in support of Israel, or a protest against the Israeli assault in Gaza. Florida is home to both sizeable Jewish and Muslim populations.
Muhammed Malik is organizing rallies that include both Palestinians and Jews ””which some people might consider risky, even foolhardy. Tensions flared at the first event, earlier this month in Miami, with taunts and jeers being thrown by both sides until police stepped in.
He says there were maybe a dozen hotheads out of a crowd of more than 1,000 people.
“When you take that 1 percent, it ruined the rest for everyone else,” says Malik, of the South Florida Palestine Solidarity Network. “We all know the media likes to focus on violence, because it’s sexy and attracts a lot of advertisers ”¦ . But we hope that peace will also be sexy, too.”
Can somebody explain to me the logic of choosing sides in an intractable foreign conflict, and then importing the protagonists from [i]both[/i] sides to here? Absolute madness.