Anti-Muslim Fervor in Jersey City Grows in Sign of Frustration : Protests: Worshipers at radical cleric’s mosque and crowd outside push, shove. Escalating violence feared.

The angry white man marched up and down the sidewalk in front of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman’s apartment, his fist clinched, his white T-shirt stained in sweat. “They ought to send the whole bunch of them back,” he yelled.

A short walk away, outside the storefront Al-Salam mosque here, a crowd of 50 Jersey City shoppers was massed in equal anger, demanding that the sheik and his followers abandon their Friday afternoon prayers and leave this old working-class community.

Police arrived as the services ended and officers attempted to disperse the crowd as Muslims and onlookers pushed and shoved.

At one point, a Hudson County bus drove by, its occupants yelling: “Death to the sheik!” When one mosque member protested that even Joseph Buttafuoco got better treatment, a delivery man shot back: “Yeah, but Joey Buttafuoco didn’t blow up the World Trade Center.”

They were referring to the celebrated case of a New York City man whose wife was shot by his alleged teen-age lover.

Anti-Muslim fervor in this multicultural city is running high, a clear sign of the growing frustrations among Americans as international terrorism seems to have reached U.S. shores.

In the last four months, FBI agents and police have rounded up and arrested a dozen Muslim immigrants--many of whom worshiped in Abdul Rahman’s mosque. The U.S. government now is attempting to deport the sheik, a blind cleric who advocates the overthrow of the Hosni Mubarak government in Egypt.

He also has denied any connection with the World Trade Center bombing.

Several of the group are now awaiting trial in the bombing last February that left six dead and more than a thousand injured at the trade center. Several others arrested in raids early Thursday morning are charged with conspiring to plant bombs in the United Nations and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, as well as plotting the murders of several political leaders.

Jersey City police are wary of the heightened tensions surrounding the bearded sheik and his group. Tempers have remained relatively calm since the trade center bombing, although someone who tossed rocks at the mosque broke two upstairs windows.

Many mosque members elbowing their way to Friday services said that they worry deeply about the heightened anger. Before the trade center bombing, about 500 worshipers filled the mosque. Then, the number dropped to 300. On Friday, only two dozen worshipers showed up.

One worshiper said that, while most Muslim immigrants only want to work and provide for their families, they now are being caught up in what he described as a dispute “between the sheik and the Egyptian government.”

“It has nothing to do with us who worship here,” said the man, who asked for anonymity. “We go up to the mosque, and there is just one room. We are squeezed in up there and we come down sweating. But we don’t have a bomb-making room or bomb-making equipment in the basement.

“We are not a terrorist cell,” he added.

A 16-year-old Muslim youth wearing a yellow “Jersey City Recreation” shirt, who also asked for anonymity, described the troubles he has seen since moving here two years ago from Egypt and enrolling at Dickinson High School.

“The kids make stupid jokes,” he said. “They say, ‘Oh, don’t blow up this or don’t blow up that.’ ”

This town of 280,000 is home to about 12,000 Muslims--many of whom settled here after coming to New York. They work primarily as cabbies and delivery truck drivers, police said, and for the most part are no more trouble than the rest of the citizenry.

After the trade center incident, the Muslims rallied around the mosque to demonstrate that not all of their people are evil. And since the new arrests Thursday, the Islamic Public Affairs Council here issued a statement further distancing itself from those taken to jail.

“We hope this incident is not used as an excuse for Islam or Muslim bashing,” the statement said, “or that it does not initiate a witch hunt by law enforcement agencies.”

But along the crowded Journal Square that forms the heart of Jersey City, many people were losing their patience for the followers of Abdul Rahman.

A Latina teen-ager displayed burn marks on her arm that she said were from the trade center bombing. “I want to get back at these people,” she said. “I hate them.”

And a young African-American man grew angry when he saw a Sudanese man slap a TV cameraman in the head.

“Go home,” he screamed, chasing the man to the door of the mosque. “Get the hell out of our country.”