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Blogs, threats force Muslim meeting to relocate

The struggle to define Islam in America becomes the focus of a weekend retreat.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published January 1, 2006

	[Times photo: Brian Cassella]
	Chantal Carnes delivers a lecture during the Muslim American Society of Tampa's retreat on Saturday. The retreat was to be held in Lithia but moved to Temple Terrace after threats.

TEMPLE TERRACE - Chantal Carnes didn't recognize herself.

A friend had e-mailed her a blogger's article. It described Carnes as a supporter of terrorists, a fan of suicide bombing.

Her friend thought the article was a joke.

"No, dude," Carnes said. "This is really serious."

Carnes, a Chicago resident who converted to Islam 11 years ago, was scheduled to speak at a spiritual retreat for Tampa Muslims this weekend.

But after bloggers alleged that the event was a thinly veiled terrorist indoctrination, anonymous callers bombarded the Muslim American Society of Tampa with death threats and curses.

The director of the Lithia church camp that was to host the event decided to close the camp for the weekend after she, too, received threats.

So when Carnes finally faced a small audience of adults in a block building in Temple Terrace on Saturday, there was an urgency to her words.

"Since everything that's happened, this is the right time for me to talk about who we are," Carnes told the group. "There are a lot of people out there who want to define who we are for us."

On Dec. 27, blogger Joe Kaufman began writing about an event he called "a jihad retreat for children."

Over the course of the week, he wrote that Carnes was "well known in the radical Islamist American community."

He wrote that the retreat's other speaker, Mazen Mokhtar of New Jersey, was linked to al-Qaida.

Other bloggers quickly picked up the theme.

"You gotta start your kids on the road to martyrdom early, or there'll be no one left to murder," a blogger known as "Ace of Trump" wrote about the retreat.

On Dec. 29, Kaufman appeared on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto to talk about the retreat. On the air, he said that Mokhtar "should be behind bars, and in shackles."

In fact, federal agents searched Mokhtar's New Jersey home in 2004 after another man was arrested in London for running a Web site that helped fund terrorist groups.

An identical site was found registered under Mokhtar's name. But he was never arrested.

This week, Mokhtar said that he sold server space to host other people's Web sites. He never knew about the content of that particular site, he said.

"It is not now nor has it ever been my position that a Muslim should ever partake in an attack on an innocent person," he said on Friday.

He said the theme of his lectures at the retreat would be the story of Joseph, which the Koran has in common with the Bible.

"You can read Joseph in many ways, but the primary message is that God's power is everything and patience and perseverance pay off," he said.

"Joseph went through so many trials, but he continues to stand up for what he believes in."

In Chicago, Carnes worried.

What if her father saw what Kaufman wrote? Her own family had been upset when she converted to Islam. What would they think now?

"I go skiing, I play soccer, I listen to Nickelback," she said. "That's me, the big ol' "radical."'

Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, she said.

But for the Muslim American Society of Tampa, this had happened before.

An earlier paintball outing for Muslim youths was painted as terrorist training by conservative bloggers, said Rania el-Sioufi, whose husband Mohamed Moharram is the society's president.

Bloggers interpreted a lecture about the afterlife as preparation for suicide bombing, she said.

"If you go to one of these Web sites, you'll be surprised how much they're watching what Muslims are doing, and how much they're twisting it," she said.

Still, this was the first time blog posts had sparked threatening calls and e-mails.

Moharram said he tried to argue with each caller. He tried to explain that the purpose of the retreat was to teach the "true Islam" - the moderate, mainstream Islam.

"We're trying to help," he told them. "Let us do this."

Meanwhile, calls were also coming in to Cedarkirk camp and conference center in Lithia, where the retreat was to be held.

The Rev. Debbie Bromkema, a Presbyterian minister who runs the Cedarkirk center, called the Sheriff's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigations to ask if there was any truth to the allegations against Carnes and Mokhtar.

"They informed us there was nothing about the scheduled speakers or this group that would not allow (them) to come on retreat," she said.

But after the calls became threatening, she contacted the Sheriff's Office and the FBI again, to make a complaint about the threats.

And she decided to close the camp for the weekend.

On Saturday, retreat participants showed up to a block hall on the grounds of a mosque in Temple Terrace. It was the alternate location that Moharram had found at the last minute.

"It's a disaster," said Moharram. He had e-mailed the new venue to all the participants, but some still had gone out to Lithia instead, he said.

By noon about 20 people had shown up. Inside the hall, they sat quietly listening to a Koran recitation.

Many were college students. They were black, white and Arab. Some had grown up in Islam; others had converted. The men sat on one side and the women on the other.

When the recitation ended, Carnes took the floor to speak.

"We're going through a lot of challenges," she said. "Islam is still considered a foreign religion."

She pointed out that the structural design of the Sears Tower, in Chicago, was the work of a Muslim engineer. The ice cream cone, she said, was invented by a Muslim.

"Islam is a part of American society," she said. "We're a part of everything that is going on here."

As she spoke, she moved her hands. Under her white head scarf, her eyes shone.

She told the audience that as Muslims, they had to reach out to the greater American society around them.

Then, she said, people would know who Muslims were. They wouldn't hate them. They wouldn't fear them.

"Inshallah," she said - as God wills it - "in time, people will start to see who we are."

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 813 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 1, 2006, 00:28:15]