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sonz
01-01-2006, 09:28 AM
Chantal Carnes, a Chicago resident who converted to Islam 11 years ago said a friend e-mailed her a blogger's article which describes her as a supporter of terrorists, and a fan of “suicide bombing”. Her friend thought the article was a joke.

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

Carnes was preparing to speak at a spiritual retreat for Tampa Muslims this weekend, but after bloggers claimed that the meeting was nothing but a terrorist indoctrination, anonymous callers bombarded the Muslim American Society of Tampa with death threats and curses.

Which forced director of the Lithia church camp, which was supposed to host the event, to close the camp for the weekend. She also received threats.

And when Carnes finally faced a small group 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 audience. "There are a lot of people out there who want to define who we are for us."

Blogger Joe Kaufman began on Dec. 27 to write about an event he called "a jihad retreat for children."

He wrote that Carnes was "well known in the radical Islamist American community," and that the retreat's other speaker, Mazen Mokhtar of New Jersey, was linked to al-Qaeda network allegedly responsible for September 11 attacks against the United States.

Other bloggers started talking about the same theme.

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

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

In 2004, federal agents searched Mokhtar's home in New Jersey after another man was detained in London for allegedly running a Web site that helped fund terrorist groups. An identical site was found registered under Mokhtar's name. But he was never arrested.

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

"It is not now nor has it ever been my position that a Muslim should ever partake in an attack on an innocent person," Mokhtar said on Friday, stressing that the theme of his lectures at the retreat focuses on the story of Prophet Joseph, which the Qur'an 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."

Carnes says she’s worried what would happen if her family, which originally rejected her embrace of Islam, saw what Kaufman wrote about her? What would they think now?

This is the first time Carnes faces such threats, but for the Muslim American Society of Tampa, it’s not the first time.

Rania el-Sioufi, whose husband Mohamed Moharram is the society's president, said that earlier a paintball outing for Muslim youths was painted as terrorist training by bloggers, said, adding that they interpreted a lecture about the afterlife as preparation for “suicide bombing”.

"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.

But on Saturday, retreat participants gathered at a block hall on the grounds of a mosque in Temple Terrace, an alternate location that Moharram had found at the last minute.

"It's a disaster," said Moharram, who e-mailed the new location of the retreat to all the participants.

By noon about 20 people, black, white and Arab, were present at the hall, sitting quietly listening to the holy Qur’an recitation.

After 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", pointing 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."

Muslims must reach out to the greater American society around them, she added.

“If people would know who Muslims were. They wouldn't hate them. They wouldn't fear them”.

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

Source: SP Times
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