Europeans, Rose suggested in the interview, do not know how to deal with Islam because of its "strangeness" to them and because of their own "self-hatred stemming from our colonial past and things like that." Even though Europeans "have been criticizing, challenging, and ridiculing Christianity for decades if not centuries," they "do not do the same with Islam because we have lost our sense of religiosity and are afraid of insulting or being accused of insulting a minority. In my mind, this is not a question of insult but of equal treatment." He said that people now showed "a lot more understanding of my position than a year ago."