Livre d'Or

actually assume all religions are some variant on right-wing American Protestant Christianity, and reserve the really nasty attacks for Islam and / or Catholicism, which don't fit that mould very well. And happen to be correlated with ethnic groups that are often despised anyway, which is why I don't hesitate to regard Islamophobia and virulent Catholic-hatred as a species of racism.

Yes, I think this is very true. I don't know whether bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Islam are better or worse than bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Atheism, or bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Christianity, but whether they are or not, I think people seize on objections to them because they're unfamiliar. (To be fair, many people also do the complete opposite and spend all their effort objecting to the dominant religion where they are, but that doesn't make either ok.)