"Most Americans are Christian, and most don't have much direct exposure to Muslims. A quarter of Americans say they know 'nothing at all' about Islam, the Pew Research Center found earlier this month, and of non-Muslims polled, 58 percent said they don't know any Muslims.  It's natural for people who don't know Muslims to draw strong stereotypes from Sept. 11 and feel them reinforced by recent scares such as the Fort Hood, Texas, shootings and the Times Square bomb plot, said Leonie Huddy, the president of the International Society for Political Psychology and a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  'One of the things we know about cross-relationships of any kind is they become more positive as people have more personal contact with each other,' Huddy said.  A Gallup survey last year found that Americans who don't personally know any Muslims were twice as likely to acknowledge "a great deal" of anti-Muslim prejudice. Republicans and those without college educations tend to be less favorable toward Islam."

 "Xenophobia continues to rise at an alarming rate. I would hope that someone would do the research to show that out of the past 20 similar events, none of the gunslingers were Muslims. We might be shocked to find out that many of these murderers claimed Jesus Christ as their Savior."
Random Roving, "The Man Under The Hood", November 6, 2009