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Are bloggers against hate, or feeding it?

Blogs dedicated to protecting America against terrorism are troubling the Muslim community.

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published January 16, 2006

It's 4 a.m. Somewhere near Coral Springs, Joe Kaufman is still at his computer.

Blurry with fatigue, he types:

It has been said that 80 percent of all the mosques ... inside the United States are ... tied to a radical form of Islam. ...

One of the American locations that ... influence has been prevalent is the Tampa-St. Pete area of Southwest Florida.

Kaufman is 35, clean-shaven, a lawyer's assistant. He goes inline skating and writes love songs on guitar. But his passion is his Web site, AmericansAgainstHate.com, where he monitors the activities of Florida's Muslim community, looking for terrorist links.

Kaufman's site is only one of a constellation of blogs with names like JihadWatch.com, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, and WesternResistance.com that are dedicated to the surveillance of American Muslims. The blogs link to one another, with more-traveled sites amplifying stories from more obscure ones, like Kaufman's.

He claims he has not found a single mosque in Florida that is not linked to terrorists.

A lot of people are listening.

Last month, after Kaufman called a Tampa Muslim religious retreat a "jihad camp for children" and wrote that the speakers were "linked to al-Qaida," death threats poured in to the Presbyterian camp hosting the event.

Muslims say the blogs breed hate.

"He's spreading lies, slandering individuals," said Ahmed Bedier, spokesman for the Tampa Bay chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "These are vigilantes."

Kaufman and other bloggers say their work is vital to the country's safety.

"I don't hate Muslims," Kaufman said. "But I'm going to fight to have the public understand that there are enemies of America ... that are living in America as we speak."

* * *

As a boy, Kaufman says he was tormented for being Jewish, which shaped his view of himself.

"These kids turned me into an animal," Kaufman said.

In college, things were better with more friends, especially his roommate, he said. Then he came back to his dorm room one day to see a swastika flag on the wall.

"It was like time stopped for me. And I thought to myself, either I'm going to go through this for the rest of my life, or I'm going to fight it."

Kaufman said he got his roommate kicked out of school for smoking marijuana.

"It made me feel ... that I finally punished the people who were punishing me all of my life."

On Sept. 11, 2001, watching the World Trade Center's twin towers fall, he said it felt again as if time had stopped.

"I decided, like I'd decided in college, to fight against hatred."

* * *

To Kaufman and other bloggers, the events of Sept. 11 were born of Islam's teachings.

"We want to wake up the people of the Western world to the dangers of Islam," said Miami's Sorge Diaz of WesternResistance.com.

The bloggers cite verses in the Koran that encourage believers to kill enemies of the faith. But Muslims say these passages are taken out of context and refer only to historical times.

"It's not an open-ended edict to go out and kill people," said Bedier, the CAIR spokesman. "There are hundreds of thousands of verses that talk about peace."

Bedier of Tampa is familiar with the blogs. His name often appears as a supporter of terrorism on Kaufman's site.

"It's a clearinghouse for defamation and attacks against Muslims," Bedier said.

"I like to go out and reach out to folks and build bridges," he added. "These types of people, they want to be able to wedge a gap between Muslims and the rest of society."

To fight back, Bedier is starting his own blog, AhmedBedier.blogspot.com. He said he wants to set the Internet record straight.

"Nowadays when you meet people, they go home and Google your name," he said. On the search engine, the top hits for Bedier's name are articles by Kaufman.

"I'm not going to let bigots like that define who I am," Bedier said.

* * *

The bloggers say they're safeguarding the country.

Kaufman said he has worked with law enforcement to uncover terrorists, leading to deportations and arrests.

Daniel Sutherland of the Department of Homeland Security said the government is more interested in forging bonds with Muslims.

"There is no clash of civilizations going on here, there is no "us' and "them,"' he said.

William Carter of the FBI said the bureau wants citizens to pass on helpful information. But, he added, "It's not like we have people who are scanning the Internet, looking at bloggers."

Daniel McBride, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Boca Raton, sees a different picture. His mosque has tangled with Kaufman, especially last May when a member was arrested on terrorism-related charges. (McBride himself is facing criminal insurance fraud charges, but that case is unrelated to his religion.)

Now, McBride said, he and others sometimes hear from FBI agents who are following up on something from a blog - often Kaufman's.

"They check out all that stuff," he said. "They'll tell you, "Joe said this' or "Joe said that.' They say, "We have to follow up on it, because if we don't and something did happen ..."'

* * *

Jennifer Valko opened her e-mail and saw a message of hate.

I will undress you paint your body with pig fat & light you. America is on to you! Watch your back!

It was the Thursday after Christmas. In two days, the Muslim spiritual retreat she had helped plan was scheduled to take place at Cedarkirk, a Presbyterian camp and conference center in eastern Hillsborough County.

That morning, Kaufman had appeared on Fox News to talk about the retreat.

On his Web site, he had posted articles about it. He posted computer-altered images of masked terrorists standing in front of the Lithia campsite.

He said these images were meant to be "tongue in cheek." But some readers took them seriously. Hate mail and death threats poured in to the Tampa Muslim American Society.

The conference center's director also got death threats and closed the center for the weekend, forcing the retreat elsewhere.

Kaufman called the threats "disgusting," saying he gets death threats because of his blog.

"I know what I went through growing up, and it was never my intention to cause any type of hatred against anyone."

But he added, "I can't let it stop me from what I'm doing. ... I'm assisting in the safety and security of the American people."

Other bloggers agree.

Robert Spencer of JihadWatch.com said his blog sometimes attracts racists. He bans them, he said.

But he won't stop blogging.

"If I give it up and go away and take up the saxophone, then what the heck is going to happen to society and to the rest of the world?" he asked.

* * *

Last month, while Kaufman was researching his story about the Tampa retreat, he found himself reading about a man named Mazen Mokhtar, a scheduled speaker. Then Kaufman began to recall a Mazen he once knew.

One of his closest friends in high school was a Palestinian named Mazen, he said. They had never discussed politics.

"He seemed like a very good person," Kaufman said. "I believe he was a true friend."

They lost contact, he said. Kaufman thought of looking him up. Then he thought better of it.

"I don't really know what he would think about what I do," he said.

--Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 813 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 16, 2006, 00:41:10]