I'm curious to learn more about the crusades, due to their influence on the history of medieval Europe. Unfortunately, this topic in particular is basically a proverbial landmine of Islamophobia and white supremacy. How do I navigate this topic without being duped by the propaganda that festers around it?
Unfortunately the best thing to do is avoid popular books that you can find easily in a book store...but then that means the best books are more like textbooks, published by university presses or academic publishers, and are either hard to find, or stupidly expensive, or both.
Avoid things like the Complete Idiot's Guide to the Crusades, or for example God's Battalions by Rodney Stark; I often see those in stores. Anything that presents the crusades as an eternal struggle between two incompatible cultures will be useless. Another warning sign is if it specifically ties the crusades into modern terrorism. Oh and of course...anything about the Templars is probably junk.
Authors who write prolifically about lots of subjects might be alright even if they aren't really experts and their information might be out of date. James Reston Jr., or John Man for example...they're probably fine for popular historians, not overtly Islamophobic.
I can give you some suggestions for books by proper historians, that are nevertheless affordable and typically available in a regular store (at least in my experience). For the crusades from an Islamic point of view:
Brian Catlos, Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014)
Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity's Wars in the Middle East, 1095-1382, from the Islamic Sources (Routledge, 2014)
Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: an Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Shocken Books, 1984) (although Maalouf isn't actually an historian)
A couple of things that might be harder to find are Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Routledge, 1999), and Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. E. J. Costello, (University of California Press, 1969), which is a better version of Maalouf's book.
Some good general histories of the crusades are:
Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005)
Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (Random House, 2010)
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 3rd ed. (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Susanna A. Throop, The Crusades: An Epitome (Kismet Press, 2018)
Hopefully that helps!
Well, if you are historically interested you should always take a critical view on any source. Also, emphasise as much on contemporary sources as is possible and try to get access to more than one side. In example about the crusades there are primary sources of Islamic and Christian writers. If you are looking at secondary sources analyse who the wrote it and what focus his writings seem to have and especially where he focuses on.
Please also note that the crusades as a religious conflict (even though there’s more to that than pure religion) also tends to have many forms of biases (not only islamophobic ones).
Since your main interest lies with the influence the crusades had on medieval Europe (and not on the Byzantine empire or the Islamic region or the holy land) you can also access writings of a socio-historic and politically cantered focus. As they only deal with Europe as a region biases won’t be much of an issue.
I would recommend Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, as a starting point.