If you're looking for a classic example of how many Americans probably see the Middle East as a frightening world filled with bloodthirsty killers waiting around every corner, take a look at this piece by award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Bob Davis.

Davis, an international economics reporter in the Journal's Washington bureau, recently made his first real reporting trip to the Gaza Strip and then decided to write a reporter's notebook about the surreal experience of heading into one of the world's most isolated places.

His piece ended up revealing much more about his own misconceptions than it did about Gaza.

The Gaza crossing is definitely worth writing about.

In the past year, I have written about navigating the nearly-deserted high-tech Erez crossing, about the slow dismemberment of the Palestinian side of the crossing after the Hamas takeover, about the way Israel has used Erez to try and turn Palestinians into informants... You get the idea.

Going to Gaza is a trip that reporters who regularly cover the Middle East make all the time. It's even a trip taken plenty of times by the Wall Street Journal's Jerusalem correspondent, Cam Simpson, who produces thoughtful, unique work all the time.

Which is why the Davis piece seems so out-of-place, especially since it was produced by one of the most widely-read newspapers in the United States.

Crossing into Gaza can be unsettling, especially if you've never really been before. (Davis told me in an e-mail that, before this, his first-and-only professional reporting trip to Gaza came in 1998 as part of the White House entourage for President Clinton's historic stay, a visit that probably gave him little real chance to see Gaza outside the presidential security bubble.)

But Davis leaves millions of readers with the misconception that all Palestinians in Gaza are dangerous, conniving would-be terrorists waiting for the right opportunity to snatch Westerners and cut off their heads.

Here's how Davis begins his piece:

"You tell yourself you're not scared. But why are you thinking of Danny Pearl and reminding yourself not to be so melodramatic?"

From the start, Davis conflates Al Qaeda and Hamas, along with Pakistan and Gaza.

That's probably all-too-natural for many Americans who see the Middle East as one vast, ominous landscape. But it shouldn't be the default position for an accomplished reporter with a major American newspaper.

A few facts that Davis either didn't know about, or didn't feel were important enough to note:

First, no Western reporter has ever been kidnapped and executed in Gaza. Daniel Pearl's gruesome case took place in Karachi, not Gaza. They are not the same.

Yes, reporters (including myself) have been briefly abducted in Gaza in recent years.

And the abduction of former BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, held by Gaza militants for 114 days, along with the 13-day, 2006 kidnapping of two journalists from Fox News, certainly made us all more cautious.

But when Hamas took over Gaza last year, one of the first things the new rulers did was secure Alan's freedom. Hamas cracked down on kidnappers and reassured Westerners that Gaza was safe.

Since then, for more than a year, there have been no kidnappings of Westerners in Gaza.

Davis describes the scene as he walks through the Erez terminal (something that is actually far-less imposing than trying to get out) and then gives us a view into his mindset when he meets his first Palestinian from Gaza - one of the porters who ekes out a living helping the small number of people allowed in and out.

"Who is this guy?" Davis writes. "He doesn't smile and doesn't speak English. He takes your bag, as if it's the most natural thing to do, even though it's just light canvas, and you'd rather carry it yourself. But you've been warned to let the guys carry your bag because they want tips."

Davis knew to expect the bag carriers, who are usually quite friendly.

Yes, it is true that they don't speak English, though it is not really clear why Davis would expect a Gaza baggage handler to speak his language (as opposed to the Gaza porter perhaps expecting Davis to know a few words of Arabic, maybe even something as simple as "hello").

Davis writes that he had been "warned" to let the guys carry his bag.

Here Davis implies that some ill-will might come to him if he doesn't allow the porter to do his job - another misconception he should not have carried with him, since he was no doubt briefed on the whole process by Cam Simpson. (I've crossed into Gaza plenty of times without having the guys carry my bags and have lived to tell the tale.)

"As a precaution, before you walked through the metal door, you took anything valuable out of your bag -- wallet, camera, BlackBerry, notebooks, baseball cap -- and stuffed them in your cargo pants, giving you a generally lumpy profile," Davis writes. "(You wonder if he notices.)"

Again, Davis enters Gaza with the unfounded belief that these porters are going to try and rob him. I doubt Cam or anyone who regularly goes into Gaza gave him that impression, since I've never heard about Erez bag handlers stealing from anyone.

First of all, since the Palestinian porters work at the Erez entrance and are the first ones to carry bags into the terminal, they are no doubt well-screened by the Israelis.

And it would be all-but impossible for a bag carrier to run off with anything. He wouldn't have a job - and would probably risk being shot by Israeli soldiers if he tried to take off through the vast wasteland dragging someone's suitcase.

On we go with Davis, pants stuffed with valuables, as he silently walks with the bag carrier through the rubble to the waiting taxis a few hundred yards away.

"Another guy comes over," Davis writes. "He's the size of a wrestler, dressed in a bright orange jacket, the kind you'd wear when you want to be seen at night or on a hunting trip -- or perhaps when you want to signal to Israeli jets, drones and blimps that you're a person, not a target. You wonder if the really big guy has kidnapping on his mind. You think of Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent held in Gaza for four months in 2007 and then let go. Again, you try to keep the melodrama in check."

Davis again raises an unfounded and ominous specter and leaves you with the impression that all Palestinians in Gaza are to be feared, lest they have kidnapping on their minds.

"Will you be taken somewhere to meet your fixer?" Davis writes. "You consider what you could do to resist going in a cab, but come up empty."

In fact, the Journal's Gaza colleague was nearby - something that had no doubt been set up by Cam Simpson.

No taxi drivers or bag carriers at Erez were going to throw a sack over the WSJ reporter's head and toss him into a car.

I asked Davis, who spent part of one day in Gaza, why he wrote the piece.

"My goal was to tell readers what it felt like to go through Erez into Gaza for a person who hadn't been there in years," Davis wrote to me in an e-mail.

I asked Davis what made him think of Daniel Pearl, since there was little reason in Gaza to fear that he was in danger of facing such a fate.

"If you're a long-time WSJ reporter, like me, you often think of him," Davis wrote to me. "I think the piece makes clear that I was worried -- probably overly so -- about what could happen in Gaza. It's not exactly like taking a walk through the Washington DC mall. (And there was always the example of Alan Johnston.)"

Setting aside the differences between Gaza and DC, Davis should have known well that there have been no kidnappings of Westerners in Gaza since Alan's release last year - and that Gaza City is not Karachi.

In fact, the greatest risks to reporters in Gaza of late have come from the Israeli military, which has yet to explain why one of its tanks fired a shell at a Reuters crew a mile a way, a gruesome attack that killed 23-year-old cameraman Fadel Shana.

(Israel's response so far has been to tell reporters that they are basically on their own in a war zone - a view that is at-odds with international law that requires countries to do all they can to protect innocent lives in war zones.)

Davis told me that he'd stuffed his valuables in his pants because he doesn't "like handing over anything to anybody I don't know, particularly in a situation that seemed fraught."

One wonders if Davis would stuff valuables down his pants when catching a taxi in Rio or New Delhi or Bangkok.

If the article wrapped up with some sort of thoughtful reflection about how all his perceptions about Gaza were misguided and ill-founded, perhaps it might have offered some valuable insight for WSJ readers.

As it is, though, readers are left with unfortunate images of Gaza that only serve to reinforce dangerous stereotypes in the West about the Middle East that many reporters here spend years trying to challenge.