(SF Chronicle) The Jewish and Muslim communities have a 20-year history of working together in Silicon Valley to create bonds of trust and respect. Recent events relating to People Acting in Community Together, an interfaith organization in Santa Clara County, and Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, sadly undermine these longtime joint efforts.
Billoo’s work on behalf of the civil rights of Muslim Americans is laudable and the reason why PACT chose to honor her. As a people tragically deprived of our civil rights in the past, we also applaud PACT’s decision to build interfaith partnerships in support of this cause. The parallel world on social media can be used to further build these partnerships, or it can destroy them with inflammatory hate speech. Whether spewing bigotry against Jews and Israel, or against any faith or ethnic group, we would stand strongly opposed as it goes against our common cause.
