Editor’s Note – I’m not usually one to talk about politics. I prefer to keep this blog to topics like starting a business or finding jobs, but after a few recent events in my life, I thought this had to be written. And yes, it does represent the opinion of Equally Happy and it’s employees 
When I was 10 years old, my parents uprooted our family from Israel and brought us to the United States. We settled in a town called Lafayette, on the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area. This was in the early 80’s and Lafayette wasn’t used to immigrants. It was a predominantly white and Christian community, where most kids were born to American parents. To me, this was hell.
We came from a small, relatively agrarian community in Israel where kids were very open to newcomers. There were no cliques, no jocks, no nerds and no bullies. By comparison to that little slice of heaven, Springfield elementary was a warzone and I never knew where the next shot would come from. As a foreigner, especially one with an odd name and a strange accent, I was the outcast, the one to make fun of. Even worse, I came from the Middle East, an area that back then meant little more than wars and terrorism. I’ll spare you the details because that’s not the point of this post, but I will mention the two people who rose above the rest; the ones who made room in their lives for the foreign kid with the odd way of talking.
Good Kids Are Hard To Find
The first was Mike V. and he was just a good kid. Mike was friendly to everyone and made an effort to help me out with my adjustment to the new school. He was popular without trying, friendly without effort, but he also is not the point of this story. The one I would like to talk to you about was Jeff D. Like Mike, Jeff was American born, but unlike most of the kids at Springfield, Jeff’s parents were not. The first time I went to Jeff’s house I met his parents and found out, to my great dismay, that Jeff’s parents were Muslim, Palestinian and from the West Bank.
Remember, I was born and raised in Israel. To me, Palestinians were dirty menial laborers at best and potential terrorists at worst. They were the people I was warned to watch out for, not the ones I should befriend. Except I was in the US now and Jeff was one of the two people I thought of as a friend. So I stayed for dinner and I got to know Jeff’s parents.
Not So Different After All
I didn’t understand much of what they told me that day, but it stuck in my head forever after. They knew I was Israeli, Jeff had told them, but they still invited me to their home because they were determined to shed the old hatreds and move past the old fears. They too were taught to distrust and fear the other side, but they came to the US because they wanted a fresh start, a place to raise their kids without fear and hatred. I want you to consider that for a moment dear reader, a lonely Jewish kid from Israel and one of the few families to open their homes to me was Palestinian, people who 7,000 miles away would have been considered the enemy.
A dozen years later the scene would repeat itself as I sat in a crowded lunch room with two Israeli friends discussing where they had been during the Yom Kippur war. A man from the table next to us heard our conversation and walked over. He said “hey, I was there too” to which my friends replied “with which unit?” and the man said “Oh, I was with the Syrian army, I was shooting at you.” What followed was a lengthy and very friendly conversation from three people who decades before had literally tried to kill each other over a small strip of land.
People Are Just People
What both of these encounters, and others along the way, taught me was that people are just that, people. Their origin, race, religion and so on were just small aspects of what made them the person they were. Judging them based on nothing more than preconceived notions was not just wrong, but counter productive. Instead of leading to new friends it would lead to old arguments, and that’s a lesson I’ve kept in mind ever since and one which I (Once a Jewish Israeli and now an Atheist American) apply to everyone I meet.
Which leads me to today, to our modern times, where hating and distrusting Muslims and Arabs (and the two are not the same by the way) has become somewhat accepted and sometimes even encouraged. I see people calling Muslims untrustworthy and quoting archaic passages out of the Koran and it reminds me of the ones who used the Talmud to justify pogroms against Jews. I see members of my family expressing joy or happiness when civilians in Afghanistan are killed and justify their actions as “better them than us”. I see friends referring to Arabs as ragheads and talking about how middle easterners (and foreigners in general) should stay out of the US but then reassure me that they don’t mean me. Because yes, hearing that I’m their “safe negro” that they can boast of befriending and use to excuse their bigotry would make me feel happy.
When did this become ok?
Actually, I take that question back. I don’t care when this became ok nor do I want to know if you think it’s ok. I’m a firm believer that morality is subjective so who am I to preach right from wrong. I think this is abhorrent and I have no desire to associate with people who think this way, but that’s my morality, not yours. So let me ask a different question.
Can’t you see that this is a part of the problem?
This whole mess we’re in is because we’ve put ourselves into a situation of us versus them. We’ve convinced ourselves that, not only are they the enemy, but they’re some other breed of people, some strange animal that’s not quite human. We’ve convinced ourselves that there’s no reasoning with anyone of Muslim or Aram descent and that they’re all fanatics bent on killing us because they hate our life style.
And before you begin the cries of “oh yes, just another bleeding heart liberal saying we should forgive the terrorists”, let me clarify a few things. First, I’m a libertarian. Second, I believe in a strong army. Third, I believe that violence can and does solve many problems (one need only talk to the city fathers of Carthage to see the truth of that). However, I also believe that, as long as we retain this attitude of us vs. them, the only two possibilities are an endless war or escalating the level of violence to levels like we saw in WWII, where whole cities are wiped out and millions of people die. There’s no way to make peace with a people that we see as less than human, there’s no way to negotiate with a people we see as unreasonable. Which is why we need to remind ourselves of the truth and not sink further into these lies.
The truth is that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arabs. The truth is that the biggest Muslim country is not even in the middle east, it’s Indonesia. The truth is that Jews and Muslims did not always hate each other, there were thriving communities of Jews in most Arab countries up until the creation of the state of Israel. The truth is that Iran is the only predominantly Muslim country that still retains a large Jewish community. The truth is that what we call Palestinian terrorists, they called freedom fighters. The truth is that what we call liberating Iraq, they call an invasion. The truth is that what we call “supporting our friends in the middle east”, they call “propping up dictators who oppress us”. The truth is that they are a people, just like any other people.
There are poor Muslims and rich ones. There are educated Arabs and ignorant ones. There are fanatic Palestinians and reasonable ones. There are middle eastern politicians who will do anything for power and there are idealists, who see themselves as something akin to George Washington. They are no different than us, no better and no worse.
The sooner we can see that, the sooner we can stop this madness.
