SYDNEY (Reuters) - In a Sydney suburb, where signs are in Arabic and women in hijabs buy halal meat, few Australian Muslims want to raise their heads over the parapet to talk about the bombs in Bali that killed scores of their countrymen.
As in many Western countries, anti-Muslim sentiment surged in Australia after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, blamed on Islamic militants.
Now, with up to 119 Australians among the 181 people killed in the Indonesian resort island of Bali, many Australian Muslims fear the backlash is likely to be worse.
Already, a Muslim school in Sydney and the imam's house adjoining it have been attacked by assailants armed with bricks, and a mosque in Melbourne fire-bombed.
"It's opened a new wound," said Nasser Alameddine, 25, a Lebanese Australian working in his family's supermarket in Sydney's western suburb of Bankstown. In a road lined with a Turkish kebab shop, an Arabic music store, an Islamic bank and other Muslim-owned shops, only Alameddine was willing to speak publicly about the rift between Australia's 500,000 Muslims and the Anglo-Celtic mainstream. "It's dangerous to talk, you get threats," said a Lebanese businessman who did not want to be identified.
While attacks on Muslims are perpetrated by a minority of Australia's 20 million people, anti-Islamic tirades on talkback radio and in newspaper letters pages have many cowering in fear.
Islamic associations say Muslim women who insist on wearing their hijabs, or veils, cannot get work. Muslims face harassment riding trains into the city. If they go outside their neighbourhoods, they feel uncomfortable or even unsafe.
Their cause was not helped by the recent convictions of several Lebanese youths for gang raping white Australians.
CALLS FOR TOLERANCE
Prime Minister John Howard has called on Australians to show tolerance and not to point fingers at the innocent.
Yet with September 11 blamed on Osama bin Laden's militant al Qaeda network and suspicions over the Bali bombings falling on an affiliated Islamic group, Jemaah Islamiah, Australian Muslims constantly find themselves having to defend their faith.
"I am tired of Western leaders pedalling this sycophantic, and incorrect line about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance. It is not," wrote a John Mayberry in a letter to Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph.
"It is about time we woke up to the fact that the problem of world terrorism today lies firmly rooted in Islam."
Police have stepped up patrols around mosques.
But police have also angered Muslim leaders by refusing to treat the latest attacks on Islamic centres as hate crimes.
Police say the stone-throwing in Sydney was vandalism and are treating the fire-bombing in Melbourne as ordinary arson.
"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that a bunch of youths...attacking a mosque and the imam within his house with three children and his wife, I mean what other thing would motivate them?" said Kuranda Seyit of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils.
Muslims trace their roots in Australia back to Afghan camel drivers who opened up the arid outback in the 19th century.
Now made up mainly of Lebanese and Turks, Muslims hope history will not repeat itself. Many of the Afghan cameleers were driven out of the country they had lived in for up to 30 years when racial intolerance swept the land in the late 1800s.
For modern Australian Muslims who are as Australian as anyone else, the growing antagonism is more than just a frustration.
"The Muslim community normally would react (to Bali) the same way as any other section of the Australian community in that we would be out there trying to support the injured, trying to give support to the grieving families," said Keysar Trad of the Lebanese Muslims Association.
"Now in the circumstances...unfortunately you end up having to divert some of your attention towards protecting elements in your community, protecting women, protecting children at school."