This Christmas I got a great gift from my mom. "Longitudes and Attitudes," by Thomas Friedman. This is a collection of his foreign affairs columns in the New York Times. He debunks the argument that Arab-Muslim hatred of America is the result of our wealth, power, and material success.

He sees anti-Americanism overtaking soccer as the world's most popular sport. The impulse to "blame America first" and say, "yes, 9-11 was terrible, but America deserved it" is a disease in Europe and on many U.S. campuses.

I believe it's important to challenge this culture of moral equivalence. Only fools and minds warped by political correctness espouse such views. The PC disciples who claim America lacks values and who insist that everything is relative have no moral compass or sense of history.

America is powerful because of its values -- freedom of thought, the rule of law, respect for the individual, and religious tolerance. Time has proven these are superior. Only in a system so governed can people achieve their potential. Larry Miller in the Weekly Standard got it right:

"Listen carefully: We're good, they're evil…. [S]aying 'We're good' doesn't mean 'We're perfect.'… The plain fact is that our country has, with all our mistakes and blunders, always been and always will be, the greatest beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity, and affection in history."

Amen. Friedman lays out some more truths.

One. Arab regimes have failed to build a promising future for their people. The combined GDP of the 22 Arab countries is less than Spain's, which is about 1/20th of ours. Internet and satellite TV exacerbate the tensions that follow. They show Arabs and Muslims how far behind the rest of the world they are and how fast they're slipping.

Two. Arab political institutions are utterly unsuited for the 21st century. It's not a coincidence that the Arab-Muslim world has no freely elected governments. The lack of political freedoms means the region's people can't engage in any meaningful political life. Nepotistic dictatorships prolong suffering.

Three. The Protestant Reformation reconciled Christianity and modernity. It occurred when wealthy princes financed and protected the breakaway reformers. In marked contrast, today's wealthy, parasitic Arab princes fund schools (madrasas) from Pakistan to Bosnia. They preach intolerance, and offer only paths back to the 11th century. The entire Arab world translates 330 books annually, one-fifth the number of Greece.

Oxford and Cambridge may have been the "madrasas" of Christendom in the 13th century. They, however, ultimately fostered the Enlightenment -- and the term did not develop by accident. Today these schools are among the leading educational institutions in the world. Islamic universities, in contrast, became reactionary, xenophobic, and rigid.

Many Arabs acknowledge these self-inflicted wounds. A recent report by Arab scholars explains their failures. The Arab Human Development Report by the United Nations found that a lack of resources isn't a barrier to progress. Rather, it's the lack of freedom and knowledge, and the severe constraints on women's opportunities. Any country like Afghanistan (under Taliban rule) that bans women from education and employment condemns itself to poverty.

The effect on economic progress is clear: Despite immense oil wealth, one in five Arabs still lives on less than $2 a day. Over the past 20 years, per-capita income growth in the region was one-half of one percent, lower than anywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his income. In contrast, after liberating its economy, Chile doubled per-capita income in less than ten.

One of Friedman's columns is posted on our fridge. He says: "I turned to my girls one night at dinner and said: 'You can have any views you want, right, left, center. You can come home with someone black, white, or purple. But you will never come in this house and not love your country and not thank God every day that you were born in America.'"

Our enemies are fanatics, beyond reason, logic, or compassion. Their aim is not to reform America, but to destroy it and the entire Judeo-Christian culture and heritage of liberty they find so threatening. They epitomize pathology. They can not be negotiated with, only defeated.