A history question I am wondering about?

when the people who control the media told them they weren't

Interesting question. Europe controlled much of the Muslim world from the early 1900s through the post-WW2 era. So at least the governments were aware of Islam. Of course, political Islam wasn't as radicalized as it is today. Probably hard to put an exact year on it, but probably in the 1990s when political correctness started to outweigh any legitimate discussion about facts.

Define "Europe" and define "Islam". European countries have been at war with Islamic countries at various times throughout all history, and it wasn't until 1908 the last majority Christian nations, Bulgaria and Crete, got independent of the Ottoman empire. I'd call 1923, the year Atatürk became president of Turkey, a major breaking point when Turkey ceased to be a threat to islamize the Balkan.

On the reverse, European countries kept a strong grip on majority muslim North Africa into the middle of the 20th century, with Britain in Egypt, Italy in Libya and France in the rest of the Maghreb. I'd say that Algeria's independence in 1962 was the breaking point for that line of conflict.

So, discounting the Yugoslavian wars in the 1990s, you look back at roughly 50-100 years, dependent on if your country has been rather faced with the Turks or with the North African muslims.

Honestly, my knowledge of Islamic history is woefully inadequate to answer this question. Sorry I couldn't be of more help here :(

Well, if you take it back far enough, Europe was at war with Islamic countries for centuries. As a result of our interaction with the Muslim world, we actually gained quite a lot. Technology and medicine that had been forgotten during the dark ages became available to Europe again after our interaction with Islamic countries, because they had it and we didn't. This played a part in several very important inventions over the next few centuries, like the printing press, which ultimately began to remove power from the church because it was the first time people could read religious texts for themselves instead of hearing it from the church. We also established trade with Islamic countries after the wars had begun to die down, which helped to catapult us into the renaissance.

So after all of this time, the situation on our side has become skewed. In this period of history, we broke through and the kebab didn't. It isn't a question of religion in Europe anymore, it isn't even a question of nationalism anymore. But it is in the Islamic world. It isn't that people don't recognise that there is a certain level of hostility that exists in Islamic countries, it's just that we have progressed beyond the point where that hostility is valid in any way to us, it is alien. In my opinion, this will work itself out over time. The problems that Europe has at the moment is nothing even remotely close to the ones we had in the past, so it is better to just carry on with business as usual and let it all play out.