Firefox vs. Explorer: the power of free will

During the past 2 days, I've been struggling with someone on one of the web development forums i am participating in. Swords were drown when someone else asked 'why should someone choose not to use IE?'.

First i have to clear the background. In Israel, like every other place in the world, IE still rules. The problem in Israel is that there is not enough exposure for other browsers, and even to other OS besides windows. People are not familiar with Ubuntu (almost) at all, and the Macs are pretty expensive in Israel, relatively a lot more than it is elsewhere.
This causes some serious problems in the Israeli online experience, government and other public service provider websites can not be viewed in other browsers except IE, and the web developer community is in a consistant battle to explain to some low-level yet common development firms, why you should implement web standards and support other browsers.
Courses and training programs are more than often don't approach standards and semantic HTML issues, but there are numerous which hold ActiveX in their syllabuses

Back to business, that guy explained that
"People who don't use IE are a minority and if they choose to handicap themselves, it's not my or the government responsibility to enable the support for other browsers".
What can you say about that?

Putting a side everything i have against Microsoft as a corporation, i think that IE is the handicaped browser, not Firefox/Opera/every other browser.
Handicap is not a plugin and extenstion enabled browser, it's the browser that can't support 40% of the W3C Standard for example.
You can find too many hits on why you should dump IE(#2, #3 so on..) and i don't think it's the Firefox hype talking, it's simply the people who had enough with their browser doing stuff he shouldn't do, and not what they want or asked it to do.

BTW, i ended that discussion with that guy... you can't argue with someone that can't understand the meaning of the things you say, just like one of the other forum users said: "Arguing the benefits of Firefox over IE with an iE user is like arguing the advantages of a flashlight with a caveman carrying a torch."