This chapter aims to show the role played by the mass media coverage of Islam in normalising anti-Muslim racial discourse. It claims that the presentation of Islam as a radical ideology and the framing of Muslims as a violent or even terrorist social group causing social problems in Europe reflects and further reinforces the already radicalised mainstream. To reconstruct this process of radicalisation, we assessed empirically (a) how media attention to Islam is distributed and what events trigger the most media attention on Muslims; (b) how such trigger events shape the definition of Islam and Muslims as a problem; and (c) how problem definitions of Islam and Muslims differ according to the type of social actors in the media coverage. For this analysis, all articles on Islam or Muslims published in the quality press of United Kingdom, Germany, and France from 2000 to 2020 with at least 50 words (N = 262,105) were subjected to a content analysis. Outcomes show that (a) not every, but only a few anti-Western terror attacks cause media attention on Islam and Muslims to soar; (b) anti-Western terror attacks lead to Muslims being defined as a problem by homogenising Muslim countries, organisations, and migrants as an undifferentiated whole, which does not happen when media attention is low; and (c) media and experts not only attribute terrorism to Muslims, but also frame it as a matter of a belief system (the “backwardness of Islam”) as opposed to their own. In this way, particularly the media become a trigger for the radicalisation of the mainstream.