Editor’s Note: Liz Peek is a financial columnist and the author of wOw’s Wall Street Weekly and SHEconomics.

Here is the problem: people in the Middle East feel they are misunderstood. I dare say they are correct. Barring cataclysmic events like world wars, Americans have rarely paid much attention to what goes on beyond our shores. We haven’t had to. We have always had plenty of opportunity right here at home. Unlike Great Britain, we do not have a colonial history which pulls our young people and our hearts to distant lands and, unlike Japan, we have not needed to venture far for the raw materials of industrialization. This is not a criticism, it is a fact. Think how impressed we are with those multiculturalists who are as at home in Boise as they are in Bangkok, who speak several languages and can instantly tell you the exchange rate of the yuan. Few are American.

As someone who worked on Wall Street throughout the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that interest in OPEC oil pricing or in the Nikkei Index developed only as those benchmarks became matters of importance to investors. Previously, we were content to feast off our own land, which long provided ample opportunity.

In short, Americans are understandably ignorant about the Middle East. It is a complicated place; few of us have historically traveled broadly in the region (riding a camel around the pyramids doesn’t count) and I know no one who graduated from any of the Middle Eastern universities. Actually, other than Cairo University, what are the schools of the Middle East? I have no idea. 

Just as Americans are doubtless shocked and offended to discover that 76% of Egyptians think our country is a force of evil in the world, so are Egyptians horrified that Americans are suspicious and hostile toward their country. How do I know? Because I attended two sessions with many of Egypt’s leading businessmen last week in Cairo and they told me so.

Shafik Gabr, chairman of the important ARTOC Group for Investment and Development, has long championed better understanding between East and West. He has traveled around the United States, visited with innumerable members of Congress (such is his dedication) and entertained many Americans in his beautiful home in Cairo, providing the kind of personal diplomacy that he hopes might overcome stereotypes. Last week he asked several media people to travel to Cairo to cover President Obama’s speech, and the next day he sponsored a meeting of the Egyptian Business Council to discuss the address. In English.

Those gathered to review Obama’s message to Muslims were uniformly upbeat about the speech. They were optimistic that it might indeed open the door to a new kind of relationship between the United States and the Arab world. (Though the outreach was to the Muslim community in general, those in Egypt were almost entirely focused on Middle East issues.) They were pressed by Gabr to consider "next steps." He asked, "Where do we go from here?" Should someone from the Arab world travel to the U.S. and respond to Obama’s overture? Who should it be? Who can speak for the Middle East, or for Muslims generally? One member of the audience rose to his feet to laud the president’s outreach, but also to lament the current level of hostility between our two countries.

"Why do they hate us," he wailed. (It actually was sort of a wail.)  He honestly did not seem to grasp the impact on Americans of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. How could he not? Are Middle Easterners so inured to violence that they dismiss the destruction of the World Trade Towers as just another terrible incident?