American Perceptions

The project that I'm working on for my internship is on Islamic extremism in the US.  As part of the project, Stevie sent me a paper on extremism in Italy to help me through it.  Reading through it, I was amazed (why I don't know) about the similarities between the situations in the US and Europe.  I have also been looking at the UK and it is the same.  People from other countries are always talking about how Americans think the world revolves around us and nothing happens outside our borders.  This is certainly an overstatement, but it is true to a degree.  Why other developed countries wouldn't have a problem with terrorism is beyond me.  When one thinks about it, it makes sense that they would actually have more of a problem considering that they have a higher population of Muslims than the US (relative to total population) and movement in and out of the EU is easier than the US.  In fact, having looked into the US situation, we seem to have it pretty good. Muslims integrate much more easily into our society than in Europe, mostly because of the heterogeneous makeup of our country.  We care less about maintaining a homogenous society and more about working together.  Sure, racism is still a problem.  Poor Dearborn, MI gets the brunt of anti-Muslim behavior in the US, but for the most part, I like to think that we accept foreigners better than most countries.  The Muslim minority population in the US is more affluent than in any other developed country.  I think that says something about accepting religious differences as far as workweeks and non-discriminatory employment.  There is also the perception of the American dream.  When all second generation immigrants are automatically American citizens as opposed to countries like Germany who have massive populations of immigrants and are not allowed citizenship, they are able to view themselves as American rather than as Chinese or Mexican or Arabs working in America.  This produces a greater feeling of solidarity with the US than it does in European countries.  On the whole, we definitely have the better situation.  However, I think we are also a bigger target in the eyes of the international community because we are more actively involved in world politics and economics than most European countries.  Hence, we think we are the center of the world because, to a degree, much of the world does revolve around what the US does.  It's a shame we don't get better international news on our standard news channels so that the population in general can be better informed about the situations in other countries, but I guess that's why people like us read a lot of news on the internet.