For anyone aside from the most rabidly blind supporter of President Obama’s Apology Tour this truth is painfully evident. But now I’m going to dump another bucket of cold water on this whole mess. The sorts of extreme fundamental differences I outlined a few paragraphs ago is not strictly true with most Muslim-dominated Middle-Eastern and Pacific rim countries, but it does color their thoughts about religious purity (extremism and purity are, sadly, often confused with one another) and strikes at the core differences between America and those theocratic Muslim nations.
For us to have any true discourse on democracy and liberty, nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia would need to truly embrace these concepts. So far, the results have been less than stellar. While the United States is no Platonically pure shining beacon of libertarian freedom, we are light years ahead of most everyone else in the world. Our intense, neigh on fanatical obsession with personal freedom flies in the face of not only the religion of Islam, it directly assails the theocratically-reinforced authoritarian regimes of many conservative Middle-Eastern states.
Many of the freedoms we enjoy in the United States also fly in the face of conservative Christian values as well. Our great advantage here is the founding fathers, in a grand display of foresight, purposely divided the offices of church and state at the very conception of our nation. While opinions on the matter vary, and transgressions on both sides of the church/state coin have happened repeatedly in our history, this mighty bulwark included in the opening line of the First Amendment has saved us time and time again.
