A Jewish man in Miami Beach is being charged with attempted murder after it was said that he shot at two men he thought were Palestinians but were Israeli tourists.
Police reports say that at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, security video seemed to show Mordechai Brafman, 27, getting out of his truck and shooting at a passing car with a semiautomatic handgun. Brafman is said to have shot 17 times, hitting one person in the left shoulder and lightly hitting the other in the left forearm.
Arrest records say that Brafman told officers on the spot that he had seen two Palestinians while driving his truck and had shot and killed both of them.
Police didn’t say for sure if the victims were Palestinians or not, and the Miami Herald said they were actually Ari Rabey and his father, who were on vacation in the United States.
Posts on Facebook after the killing show Rabey at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and his Hyundai with several bullet holes and other damage.
The news source said that the accused shooter, Brafman, was being held at the Miami-Dade Correctional Center on two counts of attempted second-degree murder as of Monday afternoon.
One of the men who was hurt allegedly posted “death to the Arabs” on social media after the shooting, which made things even more complicated. “On an antisemitic background, someone tried to kill my father and me,” he wrote.
A group in Florida called for federal hate crime charges to be brought in connection with the killing.
It is very telling that both the accused pro-Israel shooter and the pro-Israel victim in the Miami Beach shooting are said to have racist anti-Palestinian views, said Nihad Awad, national executive director of CAIR, on X.
“This is the latest act of hate against Palestinians in their home country and the Palestinian community in this country.” Our government should stop spreading the hate against Palestinians that led to the killings in Gaza and hate crimes in the US.
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