Eulogies for Michael Brown and Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir were read outside of Turlington Hall on Wednesday.
The UF Students for a Democratic Society and Students for Justice in Palestine joined forces to host a rally for students supporting the people of Palestine and Ferguson, Missouri.
Members of both organizations carried cut-out tombstones with the names and pictures of deceased youth who had lost their lives under tragic circumstances.
Tesneem Shraiteh, president of the UF Students for Justice in Palestine, said the deaths of Brown and Abu Khdeir should not be forgotten.
“We wanted to raise awareness to the systems of oppressions that cause these losses and to draw connections between them,” Tesneem, a 20-year-old UF linguistics junior, said. “They’re not isolated unfortunate events that happen to occur.”
During the rally, Jonathan Waring, president of UF Students for a Democratic Society, said demilitarization of the police could prevent deaths like Michael Brown’s from happening.
“The members of the Ferguson Police Department who were sent in to disperse the protesters were trained by the Israeli Defense Force,” said Waring, a 19-year-old UF psychology sophomore. “So there’s a connection between the national and the international events that are taking place.”
[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 9/11/2014 under the headline "Eulogy: rally in solidarity with Ferguson, Palestine"]
