no one is listening

So a friend of my current flatmate came over last night. He happens to be Israeli. He and the flatmate started talking about the current conflict in Israel and Lebanon. I tried to not say anything but at some point, I couldn't hold it in anymore and said 'sorry, but that's just bullshit'. Granted, this wasn't the best way to enter the conversation but he was in my home giving a highly biased view to someone who isn't following the conflict and is absolutely clueless when it comes to the skepticism and media. What really irked me was that his entire argument rested on his (incorrect) assumptions about how I viewed the conflict and how uneducated I was about the entire thing. He said I should 'read more' about what 'we are dealing with'. So, because I don't agree with the actions of the Israeli government, I am uneducated? Wow. Brilliant. And what 'we' the 'Israelis'? Isn't that the problem, this 'we' against 'them' attitude? It scared me to think that more and more ascribe to the Bush administration dogma that emerged from the war on terrorism: if you're not for us, you're against us.

I knew going into the convo we would have different, biased, strong views but the hilarious thing was that after about 2 minutes, I was mentally laughing at how far we were from the same wavelength, so quickly. While I tried to gain consensus that neither of us really knows jack because we are both simply products of inherently biased media (any documentation/hearsay of the conflict, not simply the 'official' media) he could only bang on about how I didn't know anything about Hezbollah, that Israel was the victim, that Israel had lost the media war. We kept talking but it went absolutely nowhere. Really, where can any dialogue go if one party cannot even fathom that another viewpoint has an iota of merit?