(AFP) Muslims around the world are flashing a message to the United States as it desperately seeks a target to avenge the terror attacks on New York and Washington: Islam is not the enemy.

At the same time, sympathy for the victims is tempered with a sense that the US had it coming and had better rethink its foreign policy - even though Islamic involvement remains just a theory.

From Muslims on the street to newspaper editorial writers and Islamic pundits, comments followed a predictable path: the attacks were horrific but, in some way beyond the reach of most Americans, understandable.

An editorial in Utusan Malaysia read: "The tragedy in US teaches us that the strong and powerful should not oppress the weak. This is the price that America must pay for their own attitude."

Khalid Ismail, a businessman taking a tea-break in Kuala Lumpur said:"When you press people too much, they will reach their limits and retaliate."

Suri Rahmat, 45, out shopping with her children in the city Lumpur: "I pity those who died... but the Americans have been harassing other countries and they do practise double standards ... like in Iraq."

Mona Yahya, 29, a banker said: "Of course I feel sad about the people who died, but I believe America has gotten what they deserved."

While Maisuharah Basaruddin, 23, an accountancy student reasoned,"If you want to compare what Israel has done against the Palestinians, it is 10 times worse than what the Muslim terrorists, if they are behind it, have done to the US now."

Hideous act

A prominent Shiite cleric in Kuwait, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Abdullah al-Habib, condemned the attacks but said the United States should revise its foreign policy, especially in regard to the Middle East.

In an attempt to put politics aside, major Muslim groups defended their faith.

"To kill innocent men, women and children is a horrible and hideous act (of) which no monotheistic religious approves," said the imam of Al Azhar, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, the top authority for millions of Sunni Muslims.

"Islam is a religion of tolerance which disapproves of violence and injustice" said Ahmed Omar Hashem, the president of Al Azhar University.

"We condemn these savage and criminal acts which are anathema to all human conventions and values and the monotheist religions, led by Islam," said the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which groups 57 Muslim states.

Many in the increasingly atheistic West may find religion an absurd base for enmity. But while in Europe clerics are lamenting the end of Christianity as a major force in people's lives, US politics are unashamedly Christian.

President George Bush himself, perhaps inadvertently, brought religion into the equation in his address to the nation when he quoted the 23rd Psalm: "Yea though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we will fear no evil..."

Frustration-based attack

The executive director of the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre, Abdul Razak Baginda, tried to put the political and regligious elements into context.

"One school of thought is that Islam and Muslims all over the world will be seen as the enemy. A lot depends on how Muslim countries respond to these attacks," he told AFP .

"If Muslim countries dissociate themselves from the attacks then people can distinguish between the attacks and Islam as a whole.

"However, the Muslim world is very sympathetic to what is happening in Palestine. It is frustration that finds its way out in this type of attack.

"The US is ready to respond, but the big question is: Respond against what?"