Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe.

AEN -(AFP) - Islamophobia is on the rise in Europe and governments should do more to protect the continent's 15 million Muslims from discrimination, experts meeting in Spain said Monday.

"The situation is very serious," said Mustapha Cherif, an expert on Islam at the University of Algiers who is known for his commitment to battling religious hatred.

"Islamophobia is a rising phenomena," added Jasser Auda of Britain's Forum Against Racism and Islamophobia, which is made up of representatives of the British Muslim community.

The two were speaking at a meeting in the southern Spanish city of Jaen of some 30 non-governmental organisations from across Europe.The gathering was held ahead of the start on Tuesday in the nearby city of Cordoba of a two-day conference on the issue organised by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

Spain currently holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE, which promotes human rights, democracy and conflict prevention in Europe, North America and Central Asia.

"It is good to attract the attention of governments on the issue, to increase their level of awareness," said Aydin Suer, the spokesman for Femyso, a confederation of Muslim youth groups from 22 European nations.

Participants said there was no easy solution to fighting Islamophobia.

"The problems are complex, the solutions themselves are complex," said Suer. Muslims could not just blame media stereotypes for the problem, he added.

"We Muslims need to question ourselves," he said.

The non-governmental organisations will present a list of recommendations on how to tackle the problem to delegations from the 56 nations that make up the OSCE, and that are set to take part in the Cordoba conference.

"This will be the message from civil society" to the government representatives gathered in Cordoba, said Spain's special ambassador for relations with Muslim communities, Jose Maria Ferre.

Cordoba was chosen as the host for the event because for centuries the city was a symbolic centre of coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims.

The city hosted an OSCE conference on anti-Semitism in 2005.

**However on the flip side of the coin...By Riazat Butt in The Guardian:

Muslims must respect people of all faiths and not exclude them on the grounds of religion, race or any other personal characteristic, a senior Vatican official said this week. In a message to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, the Pope's interfaith expert has called for a "culture of peace and solidarity" between different religious communities and to spread a teaching "which honours all human creatures".

Jean-Louis Cardinal Tauran, the newly-appointed president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, the Vatican's main liaison agency with the Muslim world, has previously expressed concern about the treatment of Christians in Muslim-majority countries.In one interview he highlighted the "extreme" case of Saudi Arabia where freedom of religion was "violated absolutely" with "no Christian churches and a ban on celebrating Mass, even in a private home".

The cardinal's Eid greeting does not single out Muslims for criticism - his appeals are aimed at "religious believers" - nor does he make a direct link between Islam and violence.

Instead, he described it as the duty of believers to "reject, denounce and refuse every recourse to violence, which can never be motivated by religion, since it wounds the very image of God in man.

"Violence, especially terrorism which strikes blindly and claims countless innocent victims, is incapable of resolving conflicts and leads only to a deadly chain of destructive hatred," he said.

Relations soured between the Vatican and Muslims after Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor and triggered a wave of condemnation and violence. At least two people - an Iraqi priest and a Somali nun - were killed in the ensuing unrest.

**Guess that must be that Islamophobia I keep hearing about.

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