Something good happened this past week in south Florida. After being briefed and educated by activists affiliated with the Middle East Forum (MEF), a group of responsible public officials and business leaders prevailed upon a local hotel to refrain from hosting an Islamist-organized gathering of extremists slated to take place near Fort Lauderdale. The cancellation of the event, scheduled for the second weekend of January at the Marriott Hotel in Coral Springs, has prompted the all-too-predictable cries of bigotry and “Islamophobia” on the part of its organizer, the South Florida Muslim Federation (SFMF), which is now scrambling for another venue to hold its gala.
If it were allowed to proceed, the event would have given Hamas-aligned Islamist organizations a chance to portray themselves as something they are not — friends of the American republic and its way of life.
Floridians have every reason to be concerned about a local hotel chain hosting SFMF’s event, which would, by design, allow pro-Hamas activists who applauded the October 7 massacre in Israel to rub shoulders with service-minded Muslims and the organizations they lead. If it were allowed to proceed, the event would have given Hamas-aligned Islamist organizations a chance to portray themselves as something they are not — friends of the American republic and its way of life.
Founded in 2017, SFMF represents several of the state’s Islamist organizations which themselves promote the ideologies of movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, its South Asian counterpart Jamaat-e-Islami, and Shiite extremists of Iran. One thing that unites these organizations is hostility toward Israel, which has manifested itself in one of SFMF’s high-profile members, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), notorious for its involvement in a 2007 terror finance trial involving Hamas.
Late last year, the Biden Administration disavowed CAIR after a video emerged showing CAIR national director Nihad Awad celebrating the October 7 massacre and providing liberationist cover for the rape and murder of Israeli civilians, which he depicted as akin to Nazis by declaring, “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7.”
SFMF itself has organized demonstrations alongside Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student organization that has been prohibited in Florida universities due to support for Hamas. SFMF disseminated pictures from a “March for Palestine” held in Fort Lauderdale on October 29. The images revealed attendees carrying placards endorsing Palestinian “Resistance,” a term synonymous with Hamas, advocating for the obliteration of Israel, and placards featuring Adolf Hitler.
In light of this, it should come as no surprise that numerous Islamist Israel-haters were scheduled to speak at the convention, which was promoted as a “family” event where attendees would find hope during their current time of crisis by invoking the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in the 630s. The irony is palpable. Islamist organizations and their allies on the left routinely invoke European conquests in the Western hemisphere to demonstrate the evils of Western civilization, but these same Islamist organizations invoke Islamic expansionism as a sign of hope for Muslims. And despite this, the conference organizers declared it was not a “pro-Hamas” event. Hamas is all about Islamic conquest that the event was going to celebrate.
The decision by the Coral Springs Marriott to cancel the SFMF event comes on the heels of other Marriott-owned hotels in Virginia and Arizona canceling Islamist-organized events in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre.
The decision by the Coral Springs Marriott to cancel the SFMF event comes on the heels of other Marriott-owned hotels in Virginia and Arizona canceling Islamist-organized events in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. While these cancellations are good news, it would even better news if rank-and-file Muslims in Florida (and elsewhere) acknowledge that SFMF provides cover to Islamist hate groups and in so doing, brings legitimate Muslim organizations into disrepute.
In its press release, the SFMF complained that the MEF’s efforts to educate local leaders about the event “smeared” 32 charities and thousands of Muslims in south Florida as “terrorists.” SFMF did that all by itself. To be sure, not every organization scheduled to take part in SFMF’s event is an Islamist organization intent on using the rights enjoyed by U.S. citizens to promote its hateful agenda, but enough of them were to make Marriott’s decision to cancel the conference an absolute necessity.
It may not seem like it now, but the Marriott hotel in Coral Springs did Florida’s Muslim community a favor. It put Muslims who want to live in peace with their fellow citizens in the region on notice that their leaders are bringing them — and the faith they practice — into disrepute in the minds of their neighbors. If they want this process to end, American Muslims must wrest control of their institutions from the Islamist radicals who currently control them.
