France’s geographic proximity to Muslim lands makes its Islamophobia more layered

Evidence

Political elites in America were wary of Islam during the nation’s embryonic stages, while in Europe, the history of Islamic conquest and its vestiges that remain make fear of Islam ever present and the “Islamic extremism” more layered. The anatomy of French Islamophobia is made up of this memory and a distant past that sits at the very doorstep of the present, mirroring a “Muslim world” that sits, intimately and close, across the Mediterranean. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 837