Tonca, speaking from Holland's Turkish community, says he understands the appeal of the Arab European League, and cautions that Europe has no choice but to accept a cultural evolution. "We have to accept that Muslims are a part of Europe," he says. "It isn't just a Judeo-Christian culture anymore."

Moroccan-born Mohamed Sini, a Dutch Labor Party official who chairs the organization Islam and Citizenship, calls the league an "extremist group" that only exacerbates tensions. Tonca, too, accuses Jahjah of being not much different than his opponents -- Fortuyn, le Pen, the Vlaams Blok. All, he says, divide in anger rather than unite in peace.

The European establishment is wrestling with similar worries. Last December, the European Union shelved a report that blamed Muslims for the recent wave of anti-Semitism; when a new draft was issued last month, it blamed neo-Nazi and other racist groups, with Muslims being only a secondary cause -- even though the numbers in the report showed that Muslims were in fact behind most of the incidents.

But to those who say that Europe must become a melting pot now in a way that it has not been in modern times, Jahjah and other league members say they're not interested in blending in.

Absorbing the principles and norms of Holland, Belgium and other European democracies, they say, would mean sacrificing their integrity, their identity as Muslims. Rather, they argue, the Judeo-Christian majority of Europe should incorporate Islamic norms and values into its own. "Europe would be a better, safer place," a message on the now-defunct Dutch Arab European League Web site proclaimed, "if it observed the values and the norms of Islam."

"As a minority group," says Azzuz, "we have rights."

"Idiocy!" Naftaniel snaps in reply. "Integration doesn't ask that you give up your culture."

Despite the league's plans to expand its presence in the coming year, especially in France, Naftaniel, Tonca and Sini all maintain that the movement will eventually fall by the wayside. "They fail to serve the real concerns and interests of [European] Muslims," Sini says, "mostly because they blame everyone else for the tensions without looking within themselves."

But he is nonetheless concerned, both about the AEL's actions and about the responses they engender. "Extremism," he warns, "breeds extremism."

Tonca likewise worries that Abou Jahjah's call will produce Turkish militants. "The most dangerous terrorists are those who are well educated in the West," he notes, "and I fear that the Muslims who are educated here are becoming radical."

Separation, Naftaniel says, is not compatible with democracy; coexistence requires collaboration and cooperation. "If one believes in democracy," he says, "then the most challenging thing is to sit down with those who with whom you differ."

That might be the starting point for détente, but does the league want détente? Its signals have been mixed, at best. Jahjah himself has publicly denounced the chants of "Hamas, Hamas, alle Joden aan het gas!" Elsewhere, though, he has expressed impatience with talk of peaceful coexistence. "The days of sharing couscous with a Jew are over," he told Belgian newspaper De Morgen in April 2002.

Another top league official, apparently distressed by reports that Muslim children in Holland refuse to listen to classes about the Holocaust, wrote in a statement on a league site that the organization is "against each and every form of discrimination and racism. As Muslims we see the Jews as 'the people of the book' and it is obligatory to fight the hate against these people." But the statement continues: "With equal fury the AEL fights Nazism and Zionism." This association of Israel with Nazism, common these days among European Muslims, is widely seen as a crude and inflammatory form of anti-Semitism.

Which to believe, then -- the overtures of peace, or the rhetoric of fury? In the interest of the vrijheidstrijd, or the freedom fight, Jahjah wraps himself in the mantel of the American revolutionary hero Patrick Henry. "We seek only to live in peace and with the freedom to live our own lives with equality, appreciation, and respect," he writes in "Between Two Worlds." "And if anyone tries to remove that right and to oppose us, we will fight until the oppression stops, and we acquire freedom -- or die in the attempt."

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