"It is a reflexive emotional reaction based upon superstition and bordering-on-genetic cultural norms. "
No it isn't - it is the result of decades of Anti western propagandizing by leftist and communist elements in the middle east.
"No it isn't - it is the result of decades of Anti western propagandizing by leftist and communist elements in the middle east"
Listen, Bub; Islam predates the Politburo by quite a few centuries. Desrt nomad culture predates Pravda, Izvestia and the KGB by a few millenia.
The issue is not that Islam is anti-Western. That concept does not register in any real sense, and is a catch-all phrase. The issue is that Islam and the traditional, tribal-nomadic customs within which it grew, are theologically and culturally inimical TO THAT WHICH MAKES WESTSERN CULTURE POSSIBLE! Most specifically the questioning and challenging of authority.
Without this first, and most important premise (challenge of authority), there is no "Western" anything.
Without a few other, but also important "Western" conventions (freedom for women, abolotion of slavery, ability to accept influences from outside our own culture, equality under the law, the concept of private property, separation of church and state, scientific experimentation divorced from religious stigma and dogma, just to begin with) there is no such thing as western culture.
You cannot, therefore, blame "anti-Westernism" in the Middle East on "Communist propaganda"; the real culprit is that the soil in which something akin to "pro-Westernism" would germinate in will not take the seed. All the propaganda did was to reinforce widely-held, centuries-old social, ethnic and political beliefs.