I don’t think it’s just Anti-Islam, but anti-organized religion sentiment in general. These sentiments aren’t unfounded, either.
Look deep within the pages of the Quran, the Bible or the Torah and you’ll find many examples of horrible and abusive human behavior. Behavior that would certainly not meet the HN Guidelines.
These sentiments are generally without an understanding of the historical context and from taking sloppily translated texts to skew the meaning. Just search in HN for Islam, Christianity, Quran, Torah or Bible and you will find people copypasting these mistranslated and misunderstood texts in comments feeling like they're the biggest scholars of the century.
Sure, actual academic discussions are fine with substance and evidences to support them where the author has put some effort in and has an actual understanding of the subject matter. But instead there is an attitude of oh I'll Google for something and copy paste it.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar on top of religious flamewar.
I do not believe that your assumption that such comments come more from the US than from other countries is true. I just checked a bunch of examples of comments that I've scolded over the years for this reason, and roughly 50% were from the US (maybe less—I lost count at one point). This is similar to the distribution of HN users overall.
