Source: The New York Times
On October 5, 2000, The New York Times published an article entitled, "New Hostility in Mideast Echoes in a Brooklyn Neighborhood." It reported that "along Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn's Sunset Park, Hasidic Jews and Palestinian Muslims cross paths at every corner. Women with unmistakable Yiddish accents shop in Islamic markets, alongside Arabic women in head scarves. In the evenings, Jewish fathers pass Muslim fathers clutching the Koran, each on the way to pray to God or to Allah. A few return home to the same blocks. In Sunset Park, both sides say they have found peace, a refuge from the warring that has historically divided the Middle East. For years, Jews and Arabs have raised children here and taught them to believe that in Sunset Park it is possible for people of divergent beliefs to coexist. But now some residents are concerned that their neighborhood peace is in jeopardy. They worry that graffiti at a synagogue and a Jewish cemetery and two violent incidents this week in which Jews reported attacks by people identifying themselves as Palestinian may be linked to the gun battles and rioting between Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East...Because of the attacks, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has ordered increased police patrols. At a meeting with 50 Jewish and Muslim leaders at City Hall yesterday, he said, 'Whatever is going on in the Middle East or in other parts of the world, people in New York have a right to have very strong feelings about it, very strong passions about it, but they have no right to harm anyone else.'"