Most Westerners know very little about the Middle East and the people that live there. This lack of knowledge hurts our ability to understand, and engage in intelligent discussion about, current events.
Arabs are part of an ethnic group, not a religion. Not all Arabs are Muslim Islam is a religion. A Muslim (roughly pronounced MOOSE-lihm) is someone who follows the religion. Shia Muslims are similar to Roman Catholics in Christianity People from Iran are also known as Persians, and they are not Arabs.
Arabs are Semites. According to the Bible, Jews and Arabs are related What’s depressing is the fact that this only took me 30 minutes to write, and you 2 minutes to read. Yet most people in the West (and especially in the United States) lack even this cursory level of knowledge about the region.:
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note the conclusion in this clip -- well said and sadly true. More sad is the fact that too many people would prefer to remain uninformed than the challenge their preconceptions.
