DETROIT (AP) -- It could have been any small shop in any inner city. A customer of one race, store owners of another, a disagreement, harsh words, a burst of fatal violence. ``The crisis is the same in every city. It's a crisis of the inner city, not enough employment, not enough hope,'' James Zogby, head of the Arab American Institute, said Thursday. ``They're ripe for victimization.'' Community leaders met Thursday to try to quell tension raised by the arrest of two Arab-American store clerks in the beating death of a black man. Authorities say the clerks attacked 34-year-old electrician Kalvin Porter with a tire iron after he argued with them about comments they supposedly made to his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Since the beating one week ago, protests outside the Sunoco station in a poor neighborhood on the city's east side have forced it to remain closed. Fadhel Mazeb, 46, and Adel Altam, 26, both immigrants from Yemen, were arraigned Monday on second-degree murder charges. They were held pending a May 28 hearing. Arab-Americans first began to dominate the grocery store, liquor store and gas station business in Detroit in the late 1960s and early 1970s as many white business owners fled the city in the wake of the 1967 riots. There are about 200,000 people of Arab descent -- one of the largest Arab populations outside the Middle East -- among the 4 million who live in metropolitan Detroit. Of the 1 million who live in the city, about 80 percent are black. About 100 people attended Thursday's peace summit, sponsored by Arab store owners, the NAACP, and other community and religious groups. Ed Deeb, president of the Michigan Food and Beverage Association, which represents 3,100 Arab-American merchants in metropolitan Detroit, said it ``is not a racial incident but a crime issue.'' ``This situation was tragic, to say the least,'' Deeb said. But Ruth Williams said she has witnessed a pattern of racism by Arab store owners against black customers. ``We need to boycott these businesses,'' she said. ``There's racism involved. There's prejudice involved,'' said Mary McClendon. ``An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It's been going on for 400 years.'' Others at the meeting called for reconciliation and understanding. ``To the Arab-Americans, we are not trying to make a racial issue out of this,'' said the victim's brother-in-law, Donald Wright, who brought three of Porter's children with him. ``We feel like the law will do its job.'' Ethnic tensions between inner-city residents and store owners of different ethnic groups are nothing new in America. In Cleveland, tensions between Arab-American shopkeepers and blacks ran high earlier this decade after several inner-city merchants were killed and a store clerk was arrested for killing a black teen. In Los Angeles, violent incidents occurred as Korean-American merchants opened stores in black neighborhoods in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Pastors of black and Korean-American churches formed an alliance to promote understanding between the cultures, but the rift climaxed with the 1992 riot. More than 2,500 Korean-American businesses were destroyed citywide. A 1995 study done by the Arab American Institute, based in Washington, blamed tensions on a combination of crime, poverty and the presence in poor neighborhoods of recent immigrants with successful businesses. ``The situation here is where we have victims pitted against victims,'' Zogby said. -=-=- 