By TIM RATH

Managing Web Editor

Neither 10-degree temperatures nor a largely Jewish population residing near the corner of Orchard Lake and Maple roads in West Bloomfield kept a crowd of more than 500 from protesting the Israeli military strikes in Gaza Saturday.

The event, which was free of incident save for a few verbal altercations between the protestors and pro-Israeli supporters stopped at the intersection, was organized by a group of metro Detroit area university students and largely advertised for on social networking websites Facebook and MySpace.

“This whole thing came together in just two days,” said Yusef Aref, a West Bloomfield resident and student at Wayne State University. “Just a group of friends that wanted a change in policies. We contacted news stations and received help from other organizations, but Facebook was most helpful to let people know about it quickly.”

Organizers acknowledged that the event was in direct response to an Israeli ground offensive against Hamas launched late last week.

“We feel like American foreign policy has been to support Israel blindly,” said Adam Siddiqun, a history major at Oakland University. “The amount of rockets being fired towards Israeli homes are disproportionate to the amount of killing that goes on in the Gaza Strip of innocent Palestinian civilians.”

Organizers also acknowledged the poignancy of the event’s location. The Department for Jewish Zionist Education estimates metro Detroit’s Jewish population at 103,000, many of whom concentrated in and around West Bloomfield.

“We wanted to bring it closer to where there might be Jewish people … and not just preaching to the choir,” said Michael Naimi, a student at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. “It would bring more controversy and other ideas to people that might not necessarily agree with us. [People in this area] are rich, they can make a change.”

Despite the strong turnout, which slowed traffic to a crawl between 3:30 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. when the rally took place, several onlookers were unimpressed.

“If they think that this is going to lead to any policy change, they’re sadly mistaken,” said Lisa Polk, a Farmington Hills resident who watched from across the street at Jax Kar Wash and identified herself as a Jewish Zionist. “I think it’s disgusting that they chose to have the rally at this intersection, only three miles from the Holocaust Memorial Center.”

“They’re just trying to cause trouble, to make this like another ‘Skokie Affair,'” she added, referring to the 1977 Supreme Court case dealing with a neo-Nazi group marching in the Village of Skokie, Ill., a largely Jewish community (see sidebar at right).

However, the organizers insisted that their aims were to educate rather than provoke.

“[In West Bloomfield], they don’t really hear about what really goes on … this is to inform, to incite people to say, ‘Let me do some more research, to find out what’s really going on,’ rather than having an obstructed view,” said Aref. “We’re not really trying to bring controversy.”