text: Part of the problem is the 1,000 years of European Christian propaganda aimed at stirring up the peasant masses to defend European kingdoms from invasions from Islamic countries.  Everything from the Crusades, the Reconquista of Spain in 1490, the battles for Malta in 1565,  the defense of Vienna in 1683 to the Barbary Pirates in North Africa up until 1830  (the U.S. Marines still sing about it, "to the shores of Tripoli").  Then what about those French Foreign Legion movies painting the Islamic tribes as barbaric animals, "Beau Geste" in 1966 or "The Mummy" in 1999.  It is inherent in our European based culture to be Islamophobic.  I was taught it in Sunday School, really. (You should hear some of the people in my family... think of Marlon Brando at the end of "Apocalypse Now"... the ignorance, the ignorance, the ignorance.)
  
  And do not pretend for a nanosecond that it doesn't go the other way.