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The Marriott Hotel in South Florida canceled a conference of an Islamic group at the last minute after receiving calls from opponents claiming the gathering promoted Hamas, terrorism and anti-Semitism.
The Muslim Federation of South Florida, an alliance that includes an Islamic group and about 30 mosques, said on Friday that the Marriott Coral Springs Hotel and Conference Center informed the union that it had decided to cancel the conference due to security concerns, after the hotel received dozens of calls demanding that the Muslim group's conference be banned.
More than a thousand people were expected to participate in the second annual conference, which was to be held this weekend.
In a related context, hotels in Arizona and Virginia also canceled Islamic conferences after the October 7 attack carried out by Hamas in Israel, which led to the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip and ignited the current war.
Florida also banned a pro-Palestinian student group from enrolling in public universities.
Federation President Samir Kakli said that Marriott's decision was "surprising and came as a shock to the entire Muslim community in South Florida."
He added that many Muslim groups and families held large conferences, weddings and other events at the Coral Springs Marriott Hotel without incident.
Even before Marriott raised security concerns, the group had hired security personnel and private guards in Coral Springs for protection, Cackley said. He also said he told Marriott that the union would hire more, but the hotel insisted on refusing.
Hürriyet newspaper said that Washington recently supplied the PKK with weapons, ammunition and intelligence information, and is waging a “war of attrition” against Turkey.
The Turkish Air Force carried out an air operation in northern Iraq and Syria after an attack by Kurdistan Workers' Party militants on Turkish army positions in northern Iraq, which led to the death of nine soldiers.
The newspaper added: "There is information indicating that not only the United States, but also various other centers, have recently supplied the terrorist organization - the Kurdistan Workers' Party, with weapons, ammunition and intelligence information."
The newspaper noted that "the increase in the number of terrorist attacks is linked to internal and external events."
The newspaper continued: “Some countries do not want Turkey to be an effective player in the region, so they target it through terrorist organizations. It can be said that Turkey is exposed to a war of attrition, the basis of which lies in the recent period. Taking into account the calculations and interests of the major countries in the region, as well as the massacres that committed by Israel in Gaza, it would not be wrong to say that each of these countries is using its terrorist organizations or proxy forces in the region. Since the elections in Turkey (in local administrative bodies, at the end of March) are close, it can also be assumed that through the attacks mentioned above, certain objectives were pursued in relation to local public opinion.”
The newspaper assumed that the goal of all these actions was to push the public to open a discussion on the topic of “what Turkey is doing in this region, and the necessity of its return within its borders.”