In less than a month's time, Ramzi Ali's entire world has changed. These days, the secretary of the Islamic Society at Dee Why mosque has been hearing of Muslim clerics being spat upon or screamed at, mosques being vandalised and headscarves being ripped off women's heads.

''Our women, when they walk in the street, some people yell, 'you're Muslim, you are terrorist, go back to your country','' says Ramzi, whose mosque at an upper middle-class suburb is a spiritual centre for mainly Asian Muslims here.

''After Bali, people look at us as the guilty community,'' he adds, referring to the Oct 12 attacks in the Indonesian island of Bali that killed nearly 200 people, most of them Australians.

But Ali says, ''They shouldn't look at us that way. . . we're concerned about religion in our mosque, we're not interested in political activity.''

Australian officials had blamed the Bali attacks on Jemaah Islamiyah, which seeks to establish a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia and is believed to be led by Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.

Indonesian officials at first blamed the al-Qaeda network, to which intelligence reports in the region had linked Jemaah Islamiyah. But although Indonesian investigators have identified suspects in the blasts, they said they have not identified a clear link between this group and the Bali blasts.

Nonetheless, as suspicions focus on the Islamic group that the United Nations and Australia recently classified a terrorist organisation, many Muslims here they are Australia's second-largest religious community with 600,000 people are feeling the backlash in many parts of the country.

Hate crimes

Indeed, Australia's reputation as a tolerant, multicultural nation is being tested by a spike in hate crimes against its Muslim community on top of the commando-type raids carried out on Indonesian Muslim homes in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney last week.

Not since the Sept 11 terrorist attacks or the 1991 Persian Gulf War has Australia witnessed this level of backlash directed against Australian Muslims.

The hate crimes Muslims in the country are experiencing are similar to those in the United States in the days and weeks following Sept 11, says Thomas Haidon, a US researcher in international law who is based in New Zealand and has studied in Cairo and Palestine.

''Islamic communities in both nations have found themselves in the harrowing position of themselves mourning the attacks and being blamed simultaneously for those attacks,'' he wrote in a commentary in the website 'Islam Online'.

''Muslims in Australia face a credible threat and danger of a backlash from their fellow countrymen,'' Haidon said.

That reality is now playing itself out in Australia. Last week vandals smashed several windows and walls of the King Abdul Aziz Islamic School in western Sydney. The adjoining mosque and Muslim leader's residence also were damaged. Also last week, a mosque in the southern city of Melbourne was firebombed.

Since the Bali bombings, there have been more than 40 attacks on Muslims in Sydney, says New South Wales state police commissioner Ken Moroney. He believes many attacks have not been reported, particularly on Muslim women, because people fear retribution if they report crimes to the authorities.

The hostility against Muslims has led to an ironic situation where Australia which used to regularly accuse Indonesia of human rights violations is now being charged with violating the rights of Indonesians and religious minorities.

Excessive force

Needless to say, the Indonesian government is not happy with Australia's raids on Indonesian Muslims in the past week. It has set up legal-aid hotlines to Indonesians being questioned by Australian authorities for alleged links to extremist Islamic groups.

The move follows a series of lighting raids on the homes of Indonesian Australians by the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officials, who used sledgehammers and drawn weapons to enter houses.

Members of the six families raided in Sydney staged a peaceful protest on Sunday opposite Prime Minister John Howard's official residence here. After being refused permission to meet him, they did their midday prayers outside his locked gates, closely watched by security guards and in front of media cameras.

The protesters said there was no need for ASIO to use excessive force when they are willing to answer questions peacefully.

All the homes raided by ASIO belonged to people who hosted Abu Bakar or attended his lectures, when he visited Australia during 1993 and 1996.

''We have been a very peaceful community. But now we feel very scared. Because Abu Bakar came here and gave a lecture, now it has become a big issue,'' says Ali. Abu Bakar had also given lectures at the Dee Why mosque.

The Australian government's actions have alarmed civil libertarians and some observers of Australia-Indonesia relations.

Greg Freely, a specialist in Indonesian affairs at the Australian National University, said on radio that a country like Australia, which has been asking Indonesia to upload the rule of law, is ''suddenly saying (regarding terrorism) that normal rules of evidence don't apply and you should be arresting people when the evidence is not really there''.

But Howard has defended the ASIO raids. ''You are entitled to anticipate that you could meet hostility, you could meet resistance, and in those circumstances, I defend everything that ASIO has done,'' he says.

Good Muslims

Islamic community leader Joe Wakim says Howard's statements that militant Islamic groups had established 'sleeper' agents in Australia only breeds further hostility.

Wakim says Howard is in a dilemma, because he needs to be seen publicly as doing something to protect Australia. But talk of 'sleeper cells' has ''been done one thousand times over, here and overseas, and I think people are fed up with it,'' he told ABC Radio.

''We have done nothing wrong,'' pleads Ali of Dee Why mosque. ''It's ridiculous, now days if we try to be good Muslims, we are called terrorists.'' IPS