Middle East fundamentalists are really, really bad:

Perhaps the sharpest debate is over the role of Islamic law in the [forthcoming Afghanistan] constitution. All agree that Islam should form the basis for Afghanistan's legal system, but dispute how rigid a standard it will provide....

Fazul Ahmed Shirinagna Manawi, a deputy chief justice, said that those who proposed only 20 percent Islamic law "do not have any understanding of Islam." He warned Westernized Afghans, who he said were a "little estranged" from Afghan society, that "what they propose should not oppose the basics of our culture, or the holy affairs of Islam."

--Amy Waldman in the 3/30/03 New York Times

U.S. fundamentalists, on the other hand, are great patriots, despite suffering the contempt of effete America-haters who write for The New York Times:

Rod Dreher, a senior writer at National Review, says that clergymen who oppose the war are spiritually disarming us and that military chaplains supporting the war should be heeded, not ''bishops in well-appointed chanceries and pastors sitting in suburban middle-class comfort.'' Dreher, a Catholic convert, must think the pope is one of those cushy bishops, as opposed to the hard-bitten military chaplains who know what God and the devil are up to. We should learn from the ''moral realism'' of soldier-priests, who are ''warriors for justice,'' and not heed ''the effete sentimentality you find among so many clergymen today.'' The priests who do not bow to the War God are, in a chaplain's words that Dreher quotes with approval, reinforcers of the notion that ''religion is for wimps, for prissy-pants, for frilly-suited morons.'' This is what used to be called ''muscular Christianity,'' and Dreher thinks it is the only authentic form of his faith.

--Garry Wills in The New York Times Magazine, 3/30/03

Hey, good thing it's so easy to tell them apart, huh?