Miraj,

Try this:

www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/gross-i... 

Habesor

I don't have much to say because i don't know the people I meet whether they are this or that.

For years few of us from the street used to get for BBQ. We all got on togather famously in our beautiful summer weather. See you next week, someone said to the lady next to me.  I am off to Israel for holiday she said. Oh, we didn't know you are Jewish, and everybody wished her good time and that was it. She was just one of us.

Besides that a friend and I went to a Jewish social group for an outing. Hearing we are Chrstians did not go down very well. That was the end of our socialising with them.

I prefer not to know, to get to know people for what they are. People put you in the box and everything is colored with their pre-conceived ideas.

Vra, I tend to agree with your general conclusions.  We have Muslim and Arab neighbors and I haven't noticed them as very much more or less jolly than anyone else. 

We have a mezuzah on our door, I wear a Magain Dovid or a mezuzah frequently, and my neighbors with surnames like 'Khoury' and 'Mohammed' can't have missed those details. If anything, they are more 'neighborly' than some 'townies' have been...... 

I can't speak for other communities, but our very tiny Jewish community in town has for at since 9/11 worked to build ties with our Muslim and Arab neighbors at a very 'grassroots' level.  We never had a 'meeting' or any 'organization:  it was simply the response of individuals - on both 'sides'.

I'm happy to know that those of you with Arab and/or Muslim neighbors are able to see that they are not like those depicted here.  Most people who believe Arabs, Iranians and Muslims are evil have no substantive contact with them.

So, if there is the opportunity to see that we are normal people, too, why is there this constant drumbeat on the negative here?  The insistant peddling of the idea that Arab and Muslim Middle Easterners are bad and that sites, like Memri, that show only the bad, are to be defended, even by those who can't tell for themselves if they're right or not?  

I also realize that, of course, hate sites demeaning Jews are equally upsetting.  I don't like them either, but, at least there are more positive news sources about Jews to contradict them than there are about Muslim Middle Easterners.  Personally, I can't bring myself to demean Jews because most of the Jews I've  known throughout my lifetime are easily likeable people.  Reflecting that, I try to find more neutral sources of information to link to, even preferring Israeli sources, whenever possible.

Speaking generically, whatever your pov, you say a lot about yourself by the sources you rely on.  How do those on either "side" who rely on bigoted, slanted sites distinquish themselves from the hate spreading sites they post from?  Is that even a consideration?

Miraj

The only unhappy Muslims I see are:

1.  the one who post here;

2.  the one's on the News and in other media screaming bloody murder (literally) and who generally call  for death, destruction, and generalized mayhem and spout anti-west, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hate speech;

3.  the one's on College Campuses and street corners screaming bloody murder (literally) and who generally call  for death, destruction, and generalized mayhem and spout anti-west, anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic hate speech;

4.  Middle Eastern Arab politicians who are often also members of #2 and sometimes #3.

All of the regular Muslims I know are more or less as happy and as unhappy as the rest of us.