Marketing Florida tourism to Syrians crosses a red line

Frank Cerabino

It’s a shame we’re not marketing our state to Syrian tourists anymore.

Visit Florida, the state’s tourism outfit, signed a contract in March that paid a German company to market Florida as a tourist destination to people in Syria and nine other Middle East countries.

But that contract was quickly altered to remove Syria when The Naples Daily News discovered it last week.

Too bad. I was looking forward to an edgy ad buy in Aleppo that might show how “getting bombed” in Florida has a completely different meaning. Or maybe a catchy Florida pitch with the tag line: “Come to escape the genocide, stay for the Waffle House.”

But Visit Florida has been a target for lawmakers, who think it wastes too much pub- lic money on promoting Florida. The Syria marketing campaign could be even harder to defend than the taxpayer funding of Pitbull’s next hoochie-mama music video, or continuing to give the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars $1.25 million a year to advertise Florida on the jerseys of his English soccer team.

Gov. Rick Scott has become a bit tetchy these days over tourism issues. You see, he wanted the state Legislature to cough up $100 million for Visit Florida, a 31.5 percent increase over last year’s budget. But instead, lawmakers slashed Visit Florida’s take to $25 million.

I know what you’re thinking. This is a crisis. After all, how will people know that Florida is a warm place to go in the winter if we don’t pay $11.6 million to fund celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse’s cooking show?

And so now Scott is threatening a veto and talking about how essential it is to spend tax dollars to lure tourists here.

While this is going on, it’s less than helpful to explain a Syrian tourism push — espe- cially since Scott is in favor of a Syrian travel ban.

The governor even wrote a letter to Congress a little over a year ago, telling federal lawmakers that Florida didn’t want any Syrian refugees to come here.

“I can ask Congress, which is what I’ve done, to say don’t fund one dollar of federal money to relocate one Syrian refugee to our state until we slow down and get the facts and we understand what’s going on,” Scott said at the