I was in the Air Force. The assignment to Oman was voluntary, but the trip to Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't so much. But it had to be done, and I was the guy to do it, so I went.
What I learned from the Omanis, and from an Iranian kid whom I met there (he desperately wanted to get an American visa so he could go the the US and study) was that they're just like us -- only saddled with political and religious leaders who force hatred of Jews upon them.
Mr. Abdullah, an Omani national whom I worked with in the US Embassy in Muscat, once said to me in a discussion about Israel, "Mr. David, why can't people just get along?"
Mr. Abdullah is a wise man.
Wow, that really is awesome stuff.
And it also mirrors my own experience.
I will always remember sitting on a balcony in Damascus with a Syrian family. They were all speaking English to be polite to their guests, but they got into a big argument which got very heated - was it about Israel? No. The US? No. They were arguing about why the kids school had such poor teachers.
It was the mirror image of discussions I hear in Finland every week!
Sometimes we tend to forget that most of us are regular people who gain nothing of wars.
That reminds me, that my father and mother traveled abroad few years back, they were on the train, and when getting down from it, my father noticed a woman with a stroller, having hard time managing it from the train down to the station. Always the gentleman, my father asked if she needed help with the little one. She thanked him kindly and said "yes". After carrying the stroller down, she could hear his foreign accent, and asked curiously, after admitting she was Iranian, where did he came from. Natually, without thinking much, he said he was Israeli. The woman was all

. She couldn't believe a Zionist will help a Muslim woman (she was with Hijab). my father felt embarrassed and walked away.