A minority causes collateral damage to the way we live, writes Paul Sheehan.

One of the edges of the global clash between Muslims and the rest is a bottle shop in a small and ratty shopping mall in western Sydney. The owner of the bottle shop is suffering low-level but steady harassment from his neighbours, who want him gone. He's a Christian who has been told repeatedly: "This is a Muslim area," and he is selling alcohol, which is proscribed by Islam.

The one-hour parking zone outside the bottle shop is always occupied because local Muslims leave their cars there all day. The owner has written to the local council to complain, and nothing has been done. He does not want to be identified because he fears retribution. His reaction is sensible.

A friend of mine, Jenny D, used to live in Lakemba. She began receiving insults from people in the street, usually Muslim women wearing headscarves, and sometimes Muslim men. If she wore a short skirt, she could expect abuse or comment. She left Lakemba. Soon after, I moved to America, stayed away for 10 years, and thought nothing more of her story. But after I came back to Sydney I found Jenny's experience had been part of a larger pattern.

One particularly strong witness to this pattern was Judith, who managed an agency helping war widows, because she encountered "dozens" of cases where people were harassed by Muslim neighbours who wanted them gone. "It was common," she told me. "A lot of these ladies couldn't take it and moved out. It happened in Campsie, Belmore, Lakemba, Bankstown, Punchbowl ...

"It was everything ... throwing rubbish over the fence, screaming abuse, blocking the driveway, knocking fences down. One guy would throw coffee grains on the windows and bottles on the roof late at night ... I confronted some of them, and the men would call me a lot of names, mostly in Arabic."

Our Western multiracial ideals have been assaulted yet again this week, via the plan by Islamic jihadists to commit mass murder by blowing up airliners flying out of Heathrow Airport. Even in failure, the plot is producing immense collateral damage in disruption, fear and suspicion.

The collateral damage is particularly severe among the proverbial people "of Middle Eastern appearance". Apart from the majority of Muslims who are just trying to get on with the normalcy of live-and-let-live, most Australians do not appear to realise that the majority of immigrants from the Middle East are not Muslim but Christian. The harassed operator of the bottle shop, for instance, is an Arab Christian. The Maronite, Catholic and Orthodox Christians from Lebanon, the Christian Palestinians and Iraqis, and Coptics from Egypt, collectively outnumber Muslim immigrants from the Middle East in Australia.
This majority of Middle Eastern immigrants have been innocent bystanders in the cultural tensions in Sydney since the Cronulla riot and self-styled "intifada" that followed it in December. They are experiencing collateral damage just as Lebanon itself is suffering as Israel uses a sledgehammer on Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims, while causing enormous suffering to the Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims who had largely run Lebanon in partnership for many decades.

Anyone who traces the growth of problems in Sydney involving Muslims who began arriving from the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s must encounter a two-way street, though you would never know it from most reporting. Not just the failure of government policies, high unemployment, and Australian distrust, but numerous episodes of racism or aggressive insularity that arrived as part of the cultural baggage of some refugees. The open contempt some Muslims have for non-Muslims is a common thread throughout the world where Muslims communities rub against the kafirs, or non-believers.

This is especially so in Britain, where Western liberalism, freedom and the rule of law have been used as tools to help make it an operational centre of global jihad. A report by British intelligence estimates a quarter of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain support jihad at least somewhere in the world.

It is a place where fanatical intolerance hides in plain sight. On February 3, between 500 and 700 men marched from the Regent's Park mosque to the Danish embassy in Knightsbridge to protest against the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to Islam. Demonstrators carried posters stating "Exterminate those who slander Islam", "Be prepared for the REAL holocaust", "Massacre those who insult Islam" and "Behead those who insult Islam".

No arrests were made. As a senior Scotland Yard officer explained after complaints by several British MPs: "We have to take the overall nature of the protesters into account. If they are overheated and emotional we don't go in. It's a risk assessment. If we went in to arrest one person with a banner the crowd would turn on us and people would get hurt."

The chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Asghar Bukhari, said this demonstration should have been stopped by police. "The protesters did not represent British Muslims," he told the BBC. "The placards and chants were disgraceful and disgusting. Muslims do not feel that way. I condemn them without reservation."

But he didn't have to confront the mob. Police in Sydney reached a similar conclusion in December, as an incident report prepared by Bankstown police made clear: "On the evening of 12/12/05 numerous vehicles were sighted congregating in the vicinity of Punchbowl Park situated on Rose Street, Punchbowl. These vehicles and the crowd that had gathered were suspected to be Middle Eastern criminals who have been involved in malicious damage and civil disobedience offences throughout the Sutherland Shire and St George areas. A direction was given to police about midnight not to enter the area and antagonise these persons."

The armed and dangerous enemies of tolerance were hiding in plain sight.