SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND THE MIDEAST CRISIS : For Arabs Here, Mixed Emotions : Reaction: Many in Southland find their loyalties torn between their native land and their new one. Some fear an anti-Arab backlash.

Holy day prayers at the mosque on Vermont Avenue seemed to take on an air of urgency Friday as the peoples and lands of the Persian Gulf were thrust ever closer to war.

“It is a mess. God help us,” an Iraqi woman dressed in a brown hijab said as she made her way barefoot to the women’s section--behind the men--of the mosque at the Islamic Center of Southern California.

“I am praying for peace, of course,” she said before joining in Friday’s jumma prayer, the principal oration of the day. Like other nervous Iraqis, she declined to give her name.

Many of the estimated 300,000 Arabs and Arab-Americans who live in Southern California have found themselves caught in the middle ever since Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait Aug. 2 and President Bush launched this country’s largest military mobilization since the Vietnam War.

They are a community divided by conflicting loyalties, conflicting opinions. Some openly support Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, seeing in him a symbol of triumph over Western colonialism; others condemn him but just as quickly denounce Bush’s decision to send American troops into their Arab homeland.

Still others support U.S. efforts in the gulf.

And many, remembering the backlash that Iranians in the United States experienced after hostages were taken at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, fear acts of retaliation.

The Islamic Center, for example, has received a handful of telephoned bomb threats since the invasion, spokesman Omar Ricci said--despite the fact that only 10% of the Islamic world is Arabic, and many of the worshipers at the mosque on any given day will be of Pakistani, Indian or other non-Arab origin.

“Whenever something happens in the Middle East, we are the ones who get the phone calls--and the bomb threats,” said Ricci.

Despite the center’s multi-cultural, multi-ethnic membership, events in the gulf have colored religious services since the invasion. On Friday, the imam , Fat-hi Osman, told several hundred worshipers sitting cross-legged or prostrate before him that it was a tragedy for Muslim brothers to kill each other.

Given the range of ethnic and national identities represented in Southern California, it comes as no surprise that every time a storm explodes somewhere in the world, ripples are felt locally.

There are about 150,000 people of Arab origin in Los Angeles County, according to county officials. Arab-American leaders estimate that a similar number live in Orange County.

Many are Palestinians who arrived as refugees after the formation of Israel in 1948. There are many Syrians and Lebanese, some of whom came to California at the turn of the century and now count their second and third generations.

There are smaller numbers of Egyptians, Iraqis, Kuwaitis and others.

Hatem Shaaban, a professor at the Arab and Muslim University in Los Angeles, said many Arabs here are torn by loyalty to their native land and loyalty to their chosen home, the United States, and are dismayed at the possibility of war between the two.

“It is like a knife with a double edge,” said Shaaban, 50, who is Lebanese. “The Arab-American has a double sadness, a double pain.”

In addition to the thousands of Arabs working as professionals, shopkeepers and businessmen, there are many Arab students in Southern California. The Immigration and Naturalization Service counts 139 Iraqi students in the state, the second highest concentration in the country, after Michigan. There are 635 Kuwaiti students in California.

Several Kuwaiti students say they are having a tough time, with contact with home and financial sources cut off. Several are looking for jobs.

Abdul Jamed, 26, a student of aerospace technology at Los Angeles City College, has moved into a friend’s Venice apartment so they can share the rent. He tries to call his parents in Kuwait “every night before I sleep and every morning when I wake,” but has been unable to get through.

Among many Arabs, especially the Iraqis, there is a sense of apprehension should hostilities in the Mideast escalate into full-blown war.

“We are sensitive to the fact that if there is an outbreak of war, we will be the first to be interned,” said Dean Al-hak, a businessman born in the United States to Iraqi parents. He uses a pseudonym, he says, to protect his family in Iraq.

There have been a series of minor but disturbing incidents of harassment directed at people thought to be Arabs, according to Salam al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

A heated argument broke out in the cafeteria of an aerospace firm in Pasadena, with several people shouting that it would be preferable to “just nuke ‘em!”--a comment said loudly enough for a couple of Arabs present to hear. A woman wearing the traditional hijab head scarf was driving down Vermont Avenue and heard shouts of “Go back to Iraq!” She is not Iraqi.

Retired Hollywood television producer Don Bustany, who is of Lebanese descent, says he believes that any anti-Arab backlash will be defused by the fact that many Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have sided with the United States in the conflict.

Mustafa Siam, a part-time journalist who also runs a mail-order video company that specializes in Arabic movies, has sent three telegrams to President Bush since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to protest the deployment of U.S. troops.

“When foreign troops landed in the Holy Land (Saudi Arabia, site of Mecca), for the first time in history there will be the eating of pork, they have women with them, and probably they will be drinking beer,” said Siam, who came to Los Angeles as a Palestinian refugee 36 years ago. “This is against Islam.”

Others object for different reasons.

“We are very concerned about the presence of American troops, but we are concerned as Americans,” said Maher M. Hat-hout, a doctor of Egyptian origin and spokesman for the Islamic Center. “Just like the rest of the peace movement in the United States . . . we have the same ominous feeling.”