MICHÈLE MARR:

Not all Muslims are Arabs. Not all Arabs are Muslims.

Worldwide, only 12% of Muslims are Arabs. In the United States, 42% of Arab Americans are Catholic, 23% are Orthodox, and 12% are Protestant Christians. Only 23% are Muslim.

Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all terrorists are Muslims.

In fact, many Muslims assert that the terms “Muslim terrorist” or “Islamic terrorist” are paradoxes, that a true Muslim cannot be a terrorist anymore than a terrorist can be a Muslim.

Just as putting a pony in a garage and calling it a Pontiac will never make it one, for a terrorist to lay claim to being a Muslim won’t make him a Muslim, either.

Ah, but why am I telling you these things?

I’m telling you these things because of an e-mail I got a few days ago; it reminded me that since Sept. 11, 2001 — if not before — these things couldn’t be said often enough.

I’m telling you this because, when it comes to Arabs and Muslims and the Middle East, we in this nation tend to be, well, a bit ignorant.

We stubbornly hang on to the stereotypes we’ve absorbed from storybooks, television, movies and God knows where else, maybe from e-mails similar to the one someone sent me earlier this week.

With more than 700,000 Arab Americans living in 56 of 58 California counties, we need to loosen our grip on the fictions and get acquainted with the facts.

The e-mail I got professed to be a true story, the story of a small measure of justice. It’s a story you may have heard before, but it was new to me.

On Sept. 11, 2001, a Budweiser deliveryman stopped at a convenience store on his central Californian route. There he discovered the store’s two Arab owners cheering as though their team was winning the Super Bowl — whooping it up as they watched the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center felled.

Stunned and upset, the deliveryman called his office. He described to his boss what he’d seen. He simply could not go through with the delivery, he explained.

But the boss had a better idea. Could the deliveryman steel himself against his disgust and revulsion long enough to go inside the store to clear all the company’s products from its shelves?

Yes, indeed. That he did, leaving the store’s owners with a grin and an admonishment: Never expect another delivery from Budweiser again.

As providence would have it, the Budweiser deliveryman’s neighbor was a deliveryman for Pepsi. So the Bud guy called the Pepsi guy and the Pepsi guy called his boss who told him to go to the store and pull out all of Pepsi’s products.

But that’s not the end, either. As the story got around to all the store’s vendors, they too pulled their products and stopped delivery, forcing the store’s owners to close their doors.

The story is pure invention and invective. The person who sent it could have discovered that with a quick Internet search.

It ends with an appeal to the reader to pass it on: “America needs reminders that we’re all working together,” it says. Unless you’re an Arab American, that is. Or a Muslim.

A true story from California about an Arab convenience store owner is much different. After receiving a death threat, Abdo Ali Ahmed was shot and killed Sept. 29, 2001.

At about the same time, a Coptic Christian Egyptian was killed in Los Angeles.

In July, a Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans think the religious views of Muslims are too extreme. Thirty-nine percent harbor some prejudice against Muslims and just as many would like Muslims to carry special identification.

Perhaps a crescent and star pinned to their chests would do.

Roughly a third of us believe Muslims living in the United States back al-Qaeda. Half doubt their loyalty to our country. Nearly a fourth wouldn’t want a Muslim neighbor.

More than two decades ago, I worked for a man who had emigrated from Egypt to the United States. He was a small man with a thick head of dark hair and a heavy mustache. A petite, somewhat darker Omar Sharif circa “Doctor Zhivago.”

Among most of his subordinates, the combination of his size and his origin had won him the moniker “camel jockey.” They seemed to think it quite clever.

At about the same time, an opinion poll was published in the “Middle East Journal.” As recounted in an essay, “Viewing the Arab,” by journalist and author David Lamb, when Americans were asked to describe an Arab, they used words and phrases such as “barbaric and cruel,” “treacherous,” “warlike” and “rich.”

“In short, the West sees the Arab as being a millionaire, a terrorist, a camel herder or a refugee, but not as a real human being,” Lamb wrote.

Twenty-plus years later, I’m not sure much has changed.

I remember my surprise when, newly back from a year in the Middle East, a new acquaintance divulged her relief at having found that the ice cream man who hawked his wares in her neighborhood was not “an Arab or a Muslim” but a “Palestinian Christian.”

In her mind, Arabs and Muslims were potentially dangerous. Now that she knew the man was a Christian, she didn’t have to guard her children as closely when he made his rounds. That was more than a decade before Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s proverbial that we fear what we don’t know. The most hopeful aspect of the Gallup poll was this: When someone knows one, that person holds fewer misconceptions about Muslims, but there is no excuse for our misconceptions — much less our prejudices.