Unity campaign reaffirmed at task force meeting
Members of Bay Ridge’s Unity Task Force have met to recommit themselves to their partnership, whose goal, as the Reverend Khader El-Yateem, the group’s chair, stressed is to “build bridges, and work together to collectively respond to this community and continue to make this community great.”
At the March 16 get-together, held at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd, Fourth Avenue and Bay Ridge Parkway, the task force debuted its new campaign, #MustLove, and El-Yateem and other group members reiterated their intentions of creating an atmosphere which encourages residents to recognize the similarities that unite them rather than the differences that might set them apart, in a community populated by many different sects of Christianity, as well as Jews and Muslims.
The meeting and recent efforts of the group were responses to a sense of growing unrest and a perceived backlash toward Muslims in the neighborhood and beyond, in the wake of attacks such as those in Paris and San Bernardino (and, subsequent to the meeting, in Brussels), as well as divisive statements by presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.