Ugh, DU. The anti-Muslim sentiment here is getting to me.

[Spider Jerusalem]

103. The arrogance is a generally Western and particularly American response

Americans tend to have the idea that American values are or should be universal. There's no recognition or understanding of the fact that those values and ideals are the product of a specific historical and cultural background, nor any recognition or understanding of the fact that the secularism of broader American and Western society is the product of affluence and relative peace.

"We don't react that way" fails to recognise that, upon a time, we did, and our European forebears did as well. There were executions for blasphemy in Colonial America; there were executions of Protestants by a Catholic monarch, and Catholics by a Protestant one, in England, less than half a century before the establishment of the colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts. The whole reason for the USA not having an established church in the first place was the number and variety of persons fleeing one sort of religious persecution or another who came to the Colonies and is directly related to the rather bloody history of 16th and 17th century England. If the West were still religiously monolithic...if the Protestant reformation hadn't happened...and if the West through luck and historical accident hadn't become the richest part of the world, with affluence affording both leisure and education to a majority of people...we'd probably be as "uncivilised" as the Egyptian and Libyan and Afghan Muslims some of us are demonising.