A South Florida Marriott Hotel canceled a Muslim group’s conference at the last minute after a protest group claimed the coalition was promoting Hamas, terrorism and antisemitism.

A South Florida Marriott Hotel canceled a Muslim group’s conference at the last minute after a protest group claimed the coalition was promoting Hamas, terrorism and antisemitism.

The South Florida Muslim Federation, a coalition of about 30 mosques and Islamic groups, said Friday that it was told by the Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Convention Center that its conference was being canceled because of security concerns after it received 100 calls demanding it bars the group. This weekend’s second annual conference was expected to draw more than a thousand people.

Kakli said that even before Marriott raised security concerns, his group hired Coral Springs police officers and private guards for protection. He said he told Marriott that the federation would hire more, but was rebuffed.

Kakli denied that he or his group supports terrorism or antisemitism. He said those accusations are often made against Muslims who criticize Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its treatment of Gaza to strip them and their arguments of legitimacy.

  • @eskimofry
    6•10 months ago

    Only people crying about jews being exterminated are people like you who can’t distinguish between calling israeli actions in Gaza a genocide vs. Retaliating against Hamas specifically. How deliberately do you people muddy the waters so people can’t question the clearly more powerful force of IDF?

    It’s not like people who hate what the IDF is doing are completely oblivious to some level of antisemitism. Extremists shouldn’t be spared. But people that shout about Jews being targeted in hate speech seem to either be too daft to separate the wheat from the chaff or have their own agenda when they can’t stop and say “wait a minute… The government of Israel is commiting genocide. Even their own citizens have been jailed and harrassed for stating as such. If that is true then there must be similarly anti-hamas palistinians on the other side. We are fighting for the same things!”

    Do you think the world has suddenly forgotten about what Jews went through? Or is it a more realistic situation were people are aware of that past and yet found it important to criticize Israel for repeating history?