[If there were as many Muslims in, say, New York City as there are in London and the politicial climate was a bit less hostile here, have no doubt that there would be a similar forum here.]

Sunday September 15, 10:25 PM London Muslim forum attracts 9,000 By Jason Hopps

LONDON (Reuters) - Radical Muslim speakers have drawn thousands of followers to a London ice-hockey arena, denouncing the West at what organisers have called the largest Islamic gathering in Britain since the September 11 attacks.

The fiery rhetoric, delivered to a crowd of some 9,000 mainly young people, showed the deepening rift in Britain's two-million strong Muslim community over whether Muslims should accept mainstream culture or reject Western values.

Moderate Islamic groups say radicals make up a tiny proportion of their community and accuse the media of giving too much attention to firebrands. But the audience at Sunday's conference was receptive to strong denunciations of the West.

"We are here today to delineate a path for Muslims to follow in the decadent West, where the perilous trap of integration must be avoided," said conference organiser Imran Waheed, a spokesman for small Muslim political party Hizb ut-Tahrir.

"Since September 11 we have been told to choose between accepting capitalism or being labelled terrorists, but our third way is to maintain our Islamic identity," he said.

But he added that he would not tell British Muslims to rise up if Britain joined a possible attack on Iraq, as some radical clerics have done in recent weeks.

Issam Amireh, a Palestinian cleric, said: "They want Muslims to integrate and to accept democracy, which is a one-way ticket to hell fire."

Islamic groups in Britain are broadly divided between those who say they see Muslims becoming part of British society and those who say they reject Western values.

A tiny but vocal minority have shown sympathy with the September 11 hijackers, alarming mainstream groups who say such views discredit the peace-loving majority.

Some of the most radical held a rally at a North London mosque last week on the anniversary of the attacks observing what they called "a towering day in history".

A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, an umbrella group for British Muslim organisations, told Reuters there was nothing un-Islamic about joining the mainstream.

"We don't accept that Islam is being watered down because adherents learn to speak English or integrate into British society," he said.

"Today's meeting was about establishing a worldwide Islamic state and this is not what we are about at all," he added.

But the more radical messages on offer on Sunday appeared to have touched a nerve with some in the crowd, which the venue estimated at more than 9,000-strong.

A teenager wearing a baseball cap that said "Property of Islam", said: "I am tired of my religion being kicked around and I'm ready to fight for it."

-- Anonymous, September 15, 2002