American Jews & Arabs Agree on Everything

When Americans are left alone to make their minds up on issues, and they don't refer to actual facts or experts, it's amazing how wrong are their "assumptions." Of course we all know the aphorism about "ass u me" assumption assumings--but we forget about the truth when it's more convenient to have a biased ill-informed opinion.

Americans don't like immigrants on the whole--this is an irrational bigotry based on unfocused fear of the unknown. In real life, immigrants help American society.

Many people have "learned" a mistaken "fact" about African Americans--that they tend to have hypertension in higher numbers than the general population because of a special gene that got favoritism through the passage of blacks taken from Africa to be slaves in the New World 400 years ago. The Africans who survived the journey had a "special gene" that helped them retain fluid better, which also causes hypertension in their descendants to this day.

This "special gene" theory has been debunked thoroughly over and over, but when it is "convenient" to keep repeating it, in order to avoid the real problem of dealing with hypertension due to black-skinned people having to live daily through the tirade of fear of racial hatred from the white majority around them them, then the theory lives on even in well-educated smart people.

Now let's take recent polls about American Jews and American Palestinians. When each group was asked if they thought the other group agreed with them on certain issues, they both "assumed" that the other group did not agree.

Both communities strongly support the statement “Israelis have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own” (98 percent of American Jews and 88 percent of Arab Americans); and the statement “Palestinians have the right to live in a secure and independent state of their own” (90 percent of American Jews, 96 percent of Arab Americans). But they don’t think that about each other. Only 34 percent of American Jews believe that Arab Americans support the Israeli right noted above, while a significantly higher 60 percent of Arab Americans believe American Jews support the Palestinian right.

Next time, look it up before you just react. Sometimes the truth is harder to believe than what we think.

Meanwhile, here's a bumper sticker for your xenophobic friends: