Shooting Clouds Life as Both Muslim and Texan

posted on: May 8, 2015

When Muslim leaders in the Dallas area learned in February that a provocative blogger had rented space to exhibit caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, they decided to ignore her.

They were well acquainted with Pamela Geller’s vitriol against Islam and figured that there was no point protesting and giving her free publicity.

“We don’t want to be falling for her tactics,” Alia Salem, the executive director of the Dallas and Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said to her colleagues. “She’s trying to bait the Muslim community.”

So it was that on Sunday night, Ms. Salem was at a festive interfaith women’s event with hundreds of Jewish, Christian and Muslim women when she received a text message from a friend saying that two gunmen had been shot and killed while attacking the center where Ms. Geller was hosting her event. First, Ms. Salem said, she started to cry, fearing news of more deaths.

Source: www.nytimes.com