NEW Yorkers and Americans this week opened their hearts and pocketbooks to the families that lost 10 members, including nine kids, in that ghastly Bronx inferno. Folks of every religious and ethnic stripe paid respects and offered solace as the Muslim victims’ families said farewell.

Set that outpouring of sympathy against some of the week’s other headlines, and you see a pretty vivid contrast: Western values – tolerance, compassion and, especially, reverence for life – vs. the brutish, hateful, death-loving dementia of Muslim radicals.

Sure, 5½ years after 9/11 and amid ongoing, senseless slaughter in Iraq, few deny the barbarity of Islam’s jihadists.

But some insist on focusing on post-9/11 America as the bad guy – at best insensitive to Muslims, and often unjust and oppressive. Americans’ fears today, they argue, stem from irrational bias – if not outright hate.

In one form or another, the claim is repeated endlessly by media outlets like The New York Times, leftist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and terror apologists like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

On Tuesday, the six “flying imams” sued U.S. Airways, alleging discrimination for kicking them off a flight after other passengers grew suspicious. But would the largest city in a nation that is truly set on persecuting Islamic worshipers allow (let alone encourage) hundreds of them to gather, kneel and praise Allah, as New York did Monday?

Even though the murderers who crashed jets into the city’s premier icon, the Twin Towers, and killed nearly 3,000 people, were also Muslim?

In fact, Brooklyn’s fiery Rev. Herbert Daughtry told the Times that he sensed more unity among races and religions Monday than he had in decades.

A Malian immigrant effusively praised New York for its hospitality. “I saw humanity here,” he said. “You don’t see that often.”

Financial contributions and other aid (for which the bereaved families were quite grateful) underscored the moral support.

The fact is, Americans cherish life. The young lives lost in that blaze simply could not have been more precious, regardless of the families’ background.

Respect for life transcends our behavior on our shores. Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched four years ago Tuesday in part to end Saddam Hussein’s killings and torture. Today, one chief reason we’re not pulling out troops from Iraq yet is our desire to avert massive Middle East bloodshed.

Meanwhile, Muslim jihadists and terrorists, it almost goes without saying, glorify the precise opposite: death.

* Sunni Arabs murdered 220 people last week in Iraq, as Shiites gathered in Karbala to commemorate the death of Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein.

* Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of 9/11, took credit for more than 30 terror plots designed to kill innocents, including the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl.

* Palestinian mothers have actually encouraged their own kids to “martyr” themselves.

Yes, comparing cultures has limited value, considering how diametrically opposed are the things each considers dear.

But critics never cease to complain about Washington’s abuse of individual rights – its “profiling” and “spying” and “flouting of laws.”

Last week, it was the FBI’s improper paperwork in pursuing private information. This week, it’s the military’s failure to allow the press full access to the proceedings of Khalid Mohammed and other terror captives and “discrimination” against the flying imams.

And since even before the Iraq war, the left has painted America as an international pariah. They seek to define us by citing Abu Ghraib and “abuses” at Guantanamo.

New Yorkers this week gave the world a taste of what we’re really like.

Would that other cultures were half as commendable.

abrodsky@nypost.com