Now granted the US and Israel are products of very different histories. The Jews have been persecuted for centuries in Europe and to a somewhat lesser extent in the Middle East (the grass is always greener to some extent but the Muslims have been slightly better to religious minorities through most of history than the Christians were through the Middle Ages). The constant problems have lead to a very specific way of looking at things and I don't think one can have an historical perspective and say that the Jewish perspective is wrong in the Jewish context. The Jewish paranoia (and I mean paranoia in the security sense) is fully justified by the weight of history.
We in the US have extraordinary protections for free speech. You can stand up in a Neo-Nazi gathering and say that the time will come when people will have to finish what Hitler started and kill all Jews, and this is fully protected speech, but it is protected only because of what we went through in the US following WWII with the use of the Smith Act to prosecute people for sedition when all they did was distribute Marxist literature and try to spread Marxist ideas. So there is no such thing as a false or hateful idea before the law in the US because we don't trust the government or the courts to make that determination (interestingly if I mark bacon as kosher, the courts cannot interpret Jewish law to determine that in fact it can't be). An equal American paranoia --- where the government is the threat --- is also more than justified by the weight of history.
But what terrifies me is that since Oklahoma City, the US Government has been playing the security card all the time, and is taking more and more of our liberties. Freedom of association and the AEDPA? Security! Militarization of law enforcement? Security! Administrative detention? Security! Privacy concerns? Securi- you get the picture. And we are slowly forgetting why we have had our own different perspective.