This paper analyzes a corpus of online readers’ comments about islamophobia, a social problem that holds an important place in French media. The aim of our research is to bring out the discursive strategies the readers use to defend their viewpoint regarding this phenomenon. The corpus analysis reveals that the word islamophobia has two main meanings, namely “anti-Muslim racism” and “criticism of religion”. Those readers advocating that islamophobia equals racism take the word for granted and avoid discussing the signifier, whereas the ones that focus on the second meaning produce a great amount of metalinguistic comments in order to create a debate on the signifier as well as on the referent.