G. I see once again the tendency to create false parallels. Baruch Goldstein, Kach and so on are extreme fringes of Israeli/Jewish society. This can be easily shown by looking at the votes for Baruch Marzel's party in the last elections. Although they did a precarious balance act to avoid getting the party banned, they did not pass the treshhold of about 1.5% of the vote and therefore are not represented in the Knesseth. On the other hand we had last year the clear electoral victory of Hamas in the PA and we can still see broad support for their positions in Palestinian polls. I personally believe that Western culture is not "the right one", which would assume an absolute value but the better one compared to contemporary Arab/Muslim culture which is a relative position. Since cultures are visibly different, no one can claim that they are the same. You can only pretend that there are no criteria to evaluate the differences. I disagree: The criteria to evaluate different cultures and societies are the human rights. The society which allows for more human rights for more of their members is in my opinion necessarily better. This perception seems to be shared by large parts of the Arab/Muslim populations who would prefer to live in Western democracies if only they could get the Green Card. On the other hand there are no lines in front of Syrian or Iranian embassies in the West. I have read once a study on Arab immigrants to the USA who seem to be doing even better than the US average. The honor concept is probably related to the East Asian concept of "face", however, I would have to look more deeply to find out in what ways it is similiar and where it is different. I suggest that you start looking at Palestinian polls to get a picture. My impression is that they are rather less manipulated or manipulating than you would expect, maybe because of the fragmentation in the PA.