I lived in Oman for almost two years, 2001-2003, while I was assigned to the Embassy in Muscat. Lived and shopped among the locals. They're great people. They, too, knew I was an American; we took no pains to hide it. Omani grandmothers would pick our 1-year-old daughter out of the shopping cart at Al-Fair and smother her with kisses. They loved her blond hair and blue eyes. It was so sweet, and it never occurred to us to fear for her safety. Oman was a great assignment for me and my family.
We had a retired Royal Air Force of Oman officer in our section, working customs for us. One day, after a terrorist attack in Israel, he said, "Mr. David, why can't people get along?" "I don't know, Mr. Abdullah. I just don't know." He was heartbroken that such things were happening in the world.
See, you and I both lived and worked among reasonable Muslims. They're concerned with the same things everyone is -- working, supporting their families, eating great food, and having fun with friends. Great folks.
So, I think we can discard as worthless your claim that I'm uneducated and ignorant.
The problem comes when the extremists take over and oppress the reasonable ones. It's the extremists who cause all the problems. And when they've had absolute control long enough, they purposefully infect the reasonable Muslims with their extremism. That's why so many Palestinians support Hamas. I have no idea how to deprogram them. I'm not even sure if they'd want to be deprogrammed anyway.
How is Israel supposed to deal with people who will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel, to which Jews have a three-thousand-year-old claim? They're not going to leave their ancestral homeland. They're not going to just roll over and die. When the Jews said "Never again", they meant it.
Do you have any reasonable ideas? Ones that don't involve the genocide of the Jews, that is?