  The Paris terrorist attacks occurred on November 13, 2015 prompted a massive
response on social media including Twitter, with millions of posted tweets in
the first few hours after the attacks. Most of the tweets were condemning the
attacks and showing support to Parisians. One of the trending debates related
to the attacks concerned possible association between terrorism and Islam and
Muslims in general. This created a global discussion between those attacking
and those defending Islam and Muslims. In this paper, we provide quantitative
and qualitative analysis of data collection we streamed from Twitter starting 7
hours after the Paris attacks and for 50 subsequent hours that are related to
blaming Islam and Muslims and to defending them. We collected a set of 8.36
million tweets in this epoch consisting of tweets in many different of
languages. We could identify a subset consisting of 900K tweets relating to
Islam and Muslims. Using sampling methods and crowd-sourcing annotation, we
managed to estimate the public response of these tweets. Our findings show that
the majority of the tweets were in fact defending Muslims and absolving them
from responsibility for the attacks. However, a considerable number of tweets
were blaming Muslims, with most of these tweets coming from western countries
such as the Netherlands, France, and the US.
