Granted, he was a jerk, but how do you think he should have approached the topic?
Basically, by acknowledging that he's often talking about cultural trends within societies rather than between societies.
For instance... let's take the American "Cold Crusade" against Arabs and Islam. Seen from the perspective of someone who's not a culturally normative white American and also not an Arab Muslim, this looks like a clear case of being Not So Different at all.
In both cases (let's say, the American South and the Persian Gulf), you're talking about cultures of fairly poor people, who display a strong cultural preference for rural communities and disdain cities, who tend to build their economies on natural resources and cheap labor, who have strong traditions of hospitality, who have an intense racism in their culture (especially towards their guest-worker populations), who have a low level of average education but a very well-educated elite, who have and support intense inequality, who tend towards religious fundamentalism, who glorify violence, and who tend to restrict the rights of women well beyond what their religion actually calls for.
(EDIT: Note that this is exactly why the rest of the Middle East has looked down on the Peninsula and the Gulf since forever. The old way of things was that Iraqis, Syrians/Lebanese, and Egyptians were sophisticated and Gulf Arabs were considered backwater folk. This has only really changed with the rise of Saudi-sponsored Islamist movements.)
Yeah, "Murricans" and "Rubiyans" are really fucking similar, actually. Hell, Edward Said the highly-educated left-wing Colombia professor probably had more in common with his highly-educated, left-wing, Colombia professor fellows who were, say, Jewish than he did with the majority of the Arab world.
If we really want to kick the racism habit from our discourse, we need to point out that the major clashes are not between civilizations these days, but within them. Murricans and Rubiyans aren't similar because of some basic similarity in their cultures, theyr'e similar because they live their lives under very similar political, educational, and material conditions, which give rise to common cultural manifestations.