Mideast War blowback

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A Jewish man in Miami Beach was arrested Sunday and charged with two counts of attempted murder, a day after opening fire at a car in which he said he saw “two Palestinians” inside.

However, police said that the victims were actually two Jewish Israelis visiting the US. The victims, Ari Rabey and his father, initially thought they were being targeted in an antisemitic attack..

Mordechai Brafman, 27, was arrested and charged with two counts of attempted murder after he shot at the car 17 times with a semiautomatic handgun on Saturday.

Police said there was no altercation between Brafman and the two victims before the shooting, which they described as unprovoked, reports said.

According to the arrest sheet, Brafman said that while he was driving his truck, “he saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both.”

Neither victim was killed. One was hit in the left shoulder, while the other was grazed by a bullet.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Brafman to be charged with a hate crime, which would increase the severity of his offenses.

Brafman, who is married, gave his occupation as plumber, reports said.

A year ago he was interviewed by local media after vandalism to a bagel store on Miami Beach that had displayed an Israeli flag, Hebrew media reported. At the time Brafman called for more unity and less conflict between people.

Ari Rabey, who was hit in the shoulder, later posted to his Facebook page about the shooting.

“Dear Jews,” he began and then explained that he was in Miami with his father.

“They tried to kill us for nationalistic reasons,” he wrote.

Rabey went on to explain that his father had been wearing a yarmulke on his head when they were driving in the car at the time of the shooting.

Surveillance video posted to social media showed the Rabeys seeking help from a building they drove to. One of the men can be seen with blood on his shoulder.

The two men later spoke to the local ABC 10 News station with Ari talking in Hebrew which was translated by his cousin.

Ari said that Brafman pulled up alongside their car, rolled down his window, and opened fire. Even as they tried to drive away, Brafman kept firing, bullets hitting the back of their car with one round grazing his father’s ear as he drove the vehicle.

Ari at first thought his father had been shot in the head, he recalled.

“God gave me my life as a gift,” he said. He was treated at the hospital and later released.

Anti-Israel protest groups staged a rally in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, berating the residents as “settlers” and “Zionists” and sparking fights with pro-Israel counterprotesters.

The protest, led by the Pal-Awda activist group, took place in Boro Park, an area with a large Orthodox population.

Around 200 anti-Israel protesters gathered on a street in the neighborhood within a barricaded area set up by police. A crowd of Jewish neighborhood residents and other pro-Israel counterprotesters demonstrated on the sidewalk across the street. Dozens of police officers separated the two sides. The protest began just after sundown and the temperature was below freezing.

The anti-Israel protesters chanted, “settlers settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone,” “Zionists go to hell,” and “We don’t want no Zionists here.” Most wore masks or keffiyehs to cover their faces.

“How many kids did you kill today?” they shouted, to the beat of a snare drum. Some of the protesters held up their hands in an inverted triangle, a Hamas symbol, toward Jewish counterprotesters.

Others shouted insults, including at children. One man called neighborhood residents “filthy Zionist as*holes,” and a woman shouted at a pair of young girls watching from a crosswalk, saying, “you’re so gross. You’re disgusting.” Children on their way home from neighborhood yeshivas peered out their bus windows at the scene.

The anti-Israel organizers said they were protesting against an Israeli real estate event in the area, accusing organizers of marketing land in the West Bank.

“Flood Boro Park to stop the sale of stolen Palestinian land,” organizers said in a social media post announcing the event. Anti-Israel groups in New York often refer to their events as “floods,” an homage to the Hamas term for the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, the “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

On the Jewish side, dozens of adults and children from the neighborhood and other counterprotesters lined a police barricade across the street. Some were actively protesting, while others were curious passersby who stopped to take photos on their phones. Several held Israeli flags and shouted at the anti-Israel crowd. One woman held up the yellow flag of the far-right Jewish Defense League.

Brooklyn doesn’t want you,” one man shouted. “Get out of our neighborhood. We don’t want you here.”

“Nazis go home,” a group chanted. Others called the protesters “terrorists.”

Several participants danced and sang along to a song in Hebrew played through a cellphone held up to a megaphone.

“Who believes is not afraid,” the song said.

Several fights broke out. A couple of anti-Israel activists who walked into the Jewish side were shouted at and pushed out. Some participants traded blows on the sidelines of the rally. As the protest wound down, the two opposing groups walked down opposite sides of the street, with some crossing back and forth, leading to further scuffles. The police struggled to keep participants separated, and on the sidewalks, away from traffic.

“Were you guys like this on October 7? Stay in Palestine and there’ll be more October 7s,” a woman shouted across the street.

“We were dragging your soldiers on October 7,” she said.

As the anti-Israel group headed toward a subway station, NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor, the highest-ranking Orthodox Jewish police officer in the city, urged neighborhood residents to not follow them any longer.

“There’s no reason for it. They’re leaving,” he told a crowd of young men.

So allegedly both the victims and the perpetrator agree, this is all the fault of Arabs, not the guy who did it and his hateful ideology.

I could tell the passengers were not American. If two random guys just drove up to me and started shooting I would assume they were fired from work or dumped by their girlfriends and were on their way to a mass shooting but just could not wait.

I'm deeply grateful that such a scenario would seem completely alien to me to the point I wouldn't have any assumptions on my mind as it unfolds. Is this what they mean when they speak of American exceptionalism?