Why does it matter that someone doesn’t have a passport or has never left the country? The US is so big you and spend a lifetime exploring it and never see it all.
"Why does it matter that someone doesn’t have a passport or has never left the country? The US is so big you and spend a lifetime exploring it and never see it all."
I think he was speaking from the idea of foreign travel broadening our horizons. That is, overseas travel can bring us out of ourselves and exposes us to places and cultures heretofore unknown except for reading about them in books. We might discover not only how various peoples are different from us, but also how they are in some ways the same.
His particular passport inference, it seems to me, was that do to a lack of first hand knowledge of how the other half lives, most Americans are rather naive and almost completely in the dark as far as Arabs, their beliefs, and their approach to governing are concerned. In other words people in the East do not think like those in the West and as such, will very likely not conform to Western ideas as it pertains to, among others things, their government.
It is a VERY big world and many, many different places and things to see. It is extremely important to get a feel and understanding of other folks.