A group of students lit candles around the University of Central Florida Reflection Pond on Wednesday night to remember the victims of last month’s terrorist attacks.
Even as rainfall threatened to cancel the vigil, members of STAND at UCF, the Muslim Student Association, and other organizations set up candles around the perimeter of the Reflection Pond and found refuge under the entrance of Millican Hall. Candles were also handed out to the more than 50 people who attended.
Three speakers, including Rasha Mubarak, the Orlando regional director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reflected on the attacks themselves as well what it means for the global community.
“All these acts, these senseless acts of terrorism, let us call it what it is: it’s terrorism. They all have different faces. But they all wear the same armor that represents hate. But today, we are all holding a candle of love. So let us stand united and always remember November and today we extend that to remembering December,” she said.
Mixed Mode, a 14-member acapella group on campus, was invited to attend the event. They performed James Bay’s “Hold Back the River.”
“It’s a song that’s very important to us as group because of how it unites us as a group,” Max Kuchenreutcher, the group’s president, said. “The message of the song is very unifying, and so we were honored to perform for the vigil as a tribute to the victims of the attacks.”
The purpose of the vigil was to “remember November” after the deaths of dozens of people in the attacks on Paris, Beirut and Baghdad conducted by the Islamic State. It also included the victims of an unrelated shooting of a developmental disability center in San Bernardino, Calif., earlier that day.
STAND, an anti-genocide student organization originally formed to address the war in Sudan in the early-2000s, hosted the event with the idea of bringing students together to stand in solidarity with the victims.
“What terrorists want is to change your beliefs and your actions,” club president Danny Cheng said, referring to how these and other attacks have tried to stoke fear and hatred. “When that happens, it’s when they win.”
The attacks sparked debate about the American role in accepting refugees from Syria, where the terrorist group mostly operates. Many Republican presidential candidates were quick to note the Muslim faith of the attackers and have suggested from not accepting any refugees to only accepting Christians.
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump drew national controversy after seeming to suggest establishing a registry for Muslims—an idea that many, including MSA’s president Mohamed Mohamed, have condemned.
“It makes me sad to think that Muslims are under fire, but if you look in the past, people compare this to Nazi Germany and how they wanted to incorporate that,” he said. “A lot of people are afraid of Islam, and I just want to emphasize to people that there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and the vast majority of them, and everyone I know, are strongly, strongly against ISIS.”
Other groups on campus have expressed their solidarity with the victims. The College Democrats hosted a banner signing last month in the aftermath of the attack in Paris, which was delivered to the French consulate in Orlando, as well as a social media photo campaign in response to similar attacks elsewhere.
