But things have not gone according to plan.

Only one-fifth of the 60 students at the Khalil Gibran International Academy are Arab American. Some have been suspended for carrying weapons, while others have repeatedly gotten into fights and taunted an Arabic teacher by calling her a 'terrorist', staff members and students say in interviews.

Ms Almontaser, a teacher and an activist, was forced to resign as the founding principal just weeks before classes began last September following a campaign by critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda.

In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, she had been branded a 'radical', a 'jihadist' and a '9/11 denier'.

Her downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighbourhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organised movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life.

The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, is only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle.

'It is a battle that has really just begun,' said Mr Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms Almontaser and the school.

Critics of radical Islam in the United States have shifted their attention from asserting links between Muslim organisations and violent groups such as Hamas to what they describe as 'lawful Islamists', the law-abiding American Muslims who are imposing their religious values in the public domain.

Mr Pipes and others reel off a list of examples: Muslim taxi drivers in Minneapolis who have refused to take passengers carrying liquor; municipal pools and a gym at Harvard that have adopted female-only hours to accommodate Muslim women as well as banks that are offering financial products compliant with the Islamic syariah code of law.

The danger, Mr Pipes said, is that the US stands to become another England or France, a place where Muslims are 'balkanised' and ultimately threaten to impose syariah law.

'It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of syariah,' Mr Pipes said.

'It is much easier to see how, working through the system - the school system, the media, the religious organisations, the government, businesses and the like - you can promote radical Islam.'

Mr Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a trustee of the City University of New York and a vocal opponent of the Khalil Gibran school, said they are carrying out 'a soft jihad'.

Muslim leaders, academics and others see the drive against the school as the latest in a series of discriminatory attacks intended to distort the truth and play on Americans' fear of terrorism.

They say the campaign is also part of a wider effort to silence critics of Washington's policy on Israel and the Middle East.

'This is a political, ideological agenda,' said Mr John Esposito, a professor of international affairs and Islamic studies at Georgetown University.

'It is an agenda to paint Islam, not just extremists, as a major problem.'

That portrait, Muslim and Arab advocates contend, is rife with a bias that would never be tolerated were it directed at other ethnic or religious groups.

NEW YORK TIMES