AWARE to SCREEN this DURING racial HARMONY WEEK for Malays only ?!! ... to appeal to the Children of Singapore on the greater meaing of acceptance and inclusiveness? -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJC0BzBzat8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LuBJ4HuOwk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JZ8c0_Duvg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGO9KmwQ6WU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSjm6y4alQU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQSN3m9dLs

Issues: `Islamophobia undermines RI-US ties'

Mon, 05/18/2009 1:43 PM | Opinion

The persistent Islamophobia among Americans and anti-Americanism among Indonesian Muslims are still undermining diplomatic relations between Indonesia and the United States, a lawmaker told a seminar. Sidharto Danusubroto, deputy chairman of the House of Representatives' international relations commission, said Indonesia was still perceived by some Americans as a haven for Islamic radicalism, while the US was still "cynically perceived as an imperialist country" by Indonesian Muslims.

Your comments:
I agree that Islamophobia makes problems everywhere, while anti-Americanism is - in my opinion - just reaction to this. Dual-standards that are used by the US administration must be abolished to convince the Islamic world that the US has good faith in its relations with other countries.

From my observations, the US administration in fact knows much about the Indonesian Muslim community's basic characteristics from its communications with NU, Muhammadiyah and even individually with potential Indonesian Muslim leaders. This communication is facilitated through the US ambassador to Indonesia.

Indonesian people are very tolerant, welcoming and understanding as long as others do not intend to do anything to hurt them. So, better and more communication is preferable.

And again, from my own observations, Obama has started to direct his administration to build better understandings that must be followed by others.

Obama's administration also must make efforts to reform American perceptions (among politicians, economists, journalists and the common people) on Islam and Muslims, by providing more information about Islam.

I saw a good little effort that was conducted by the Muslim community in the UK this month to provide better information and communication with others about Islamic values by organizing an "open day" mosque program.

This program was very interesting and I saw it was really appreciated by more than 200 non-Muslim visitors during the two-day program. So, I absolutely agree that a wider intensive communication can be promoted not only under official missions, but also social and cultural ones.

Taukhid

Islamophobia still occurs because of many recent new laws popping up from local to national levels of government - laws that are clearly sharia-based that show a blatant disregard for any other people's personal beliefs and religious inclinations.

In addition, since the fall of Soeharto, every subsequent president has allowed increased controls to be established by extremist Muslim parties and groups, further degrading the religious harmony in Indonesia.

In a country where other religions find it extremely difficult to build places of faith, yet every three blocks a mosque is either being built or blaring out Islamic prayers, is it any wonder that the international community views Indonesia as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism?

On the other hand, this so-called view of American Imperialism is a view fostered by all the Islamic radicals in our country which is a view they commonly share with terrorist groups throughout the world. Where is the support for the US to change under the Obama administration that we saw during the US elections?

I wonder if people here remember Hillary Clinton coming to Indonesia and asking certain members of the Indonesian radical groups to come and meet for dinner, yet they (I forget who or which one) flatly rejected the invitation, stating "It's a waste of time."

It sort of amuses me that a lot of Islamic groups have a lack of sensitivity for creating relationships with other religions and government bodies.

David
Jakarta

hahaha....

If Arabs are brothers of Jews, are you saying that Jews are related to pigs and apes???

You should read this article to understand what halal means.

Thursday, May. 14, 2009
Halal: Buying Muslim
By CARLA POWER

Khalfan Mohammed has long been buffeted by culture shock while staying in five-star hotels. As a devout Muslim he has learned to ask staff to remove the minibar's alcohol. He loathes lobbies with loud discos and drunken guests. When traveling with his parents, it is the bikinis that rankle most. "It was quite shocking for my mother to sit in a restaurant with undressed people," the Abu Dhabi-based businessman says. "My mom and dad are not used to seeing people in public wearing their underwear." To avoid such embarrassment, the Mohammeds took to renting furnished apartments.

No longer. On a trip to Dubai last year, Mohammed stayed in the Villa Rotana, one of a growing number of hotels catering to Muslim travelers. In the lobby — all white leather, brick and glass, with a small waterfall — quiet reigns. Men in dishdashas and veiled women glide by Westerners who are sometimes discreetly reminded to respect local customs. Minibars are stocked not with alcohol, but with Red Bull, Pepsi and the malt drink Barbican. (See pictures of migrant workers in the Gulf.)

Time was, buying Muslim meant avoiding pork and alcohol and getting your meat from a halal butcher, who slaughtered in accordance with Islamic principles. But the halal food market has exploded in the past decade and is now worth an estimated $632 billion annually, according to the Halal Journal, a Kuala Lumpur-based magazine. That's about 16% of the entire global food industry. Throw in the fast-growing Islam-friendly finance sector and the myriad other products and services — cosmetics, real estate, hotels, fashion, insurance — that comply with Islamic law and the teachings of the Koran, and the sector is worth well over $1 trillion a year.

One reason for the rise of the halal economy is that the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are younger and, in some places at least, richer than ever. Seeking to tap that huge market, non-Muslim multinationals like Tesco, McDonald's and Nestlé have expanded their Muslim-friendly offerings and now control an estimated 90% of the global halal market.

At the same time, governments in Asia and the Middle East are pouring millions into efforts to become regional "halal hubs," providing tailor-made manufacturing centers and "halal logistics" — systems to maintain product purity during shipping and storage. The increased competition is changing manufacturing and supply chains in some unusual places. Most of Saudi Arabia's chicken is raised in Brazil, which means Brazilian suppliers have built elaborate halal slaughtering facilities. Abattoirs in New Zealand, the world's biggest exporter of halal lamb, have hosted delegations from Iran and Malaysia. And the Netherlands, keen to maximize Rotterdam's role as Europe's biggest port, has built halal warehouses so that imported halal goods aren't stored next to pork or alcohol.

Such arrangements cost, of course, but since the industry's anchor is food, business is booming, even in the economic crisis. "What downturn?" asks Nordin Abdullah, executive director of the Halal Journal. "You don't need your Gucci handbag, but you do need your hamburger."

Not just hamburgers. Drug companies such as the U.K.'s Principle Healthcare and Canada's Duchesnay now sell halal vitamins free of the gelatins and other animal derivatives that some Islamic scholars say make mainstream products haram, or unlawful. The Malaysia-based company Granulab produces synthetic bone graft material to avoid using animal bone, while Malaysian and Cuban scientists are collaborating on a halal meningitis vaccine.

In the Gulf, the Burooj real estate company is carving out a niche, not just because it deals exclusively with Islamic banks, but because it designs spas and swimming pools that segregate the sexes. For Muslim women concerned about skin-care products containing alcohol or lipsticks that use animal fats, a few cosmetics firms are creating halal makeup lines.

The burgeoning Islamic finance industry is using the global economic crisis to win new non-Muslim customers. Investors are attracted by Islamic banking's more conservative approach: Islamic law forbids banks from charging interest (though customers pay fees) and many scholars discourage investment in excessively leveraged companies. Though it currently accounts for just 1% of the global market, the Islamic finance industry's value is growing at around 15% a year, and could reach $4 trillion in five years, up from $500 billion today, according to a 2008 report from Moody's Investors Service.

Those who define the halal market in the traditional sense — as a matter of meat, and no more — see the industry stopping at Islamic food standards. But the movement's more bullish advocates envisage Muslim cars and halal furniture built in accordance with Muslim finance, labor and ethical principles. Citing the kosher and organic industries as successful examples of doing well by doing good, some entrepreneurs even see halal products moving into the mainstream and appealing to consumers looking for high-quality, ethical products. A few firms that comply with the Shari'a code — the religious laws that observant Muslims follow — point out that already many of their customers are non-Muslim. At the Jawhara Hotels, an alcohol-free Arabian Gulf chain run by the Islam-compliant Al Lotah conglomerate, 60% of the clientele are non-Muslims, drawn by the hotels' serenity and family-friendly atmosphere. Dutch-based company Marhaba, which sells cookies and chocolate, says a quarter of its customers are non-Muslims, mostly people concerned not about religious edicts but about food safety. "People are always looking for the next purity thing," says Mah Hussain-Gambles, founder of Saaf Pure Skincare, which markets halal makeup.

Read: "Should a Pious Muslim Practice Yoga?"

See pictures of the end of Ramadan

Going Mainstream
Today, though, the big business is in working out how to serve the increasingly sophisticated Muslim consumer. "The question now for companies is: What products and services are you going to provide to help Muslims lead the lifestyle they want to lead?" asks the Halal Journal's Abdullah. It's a code worth cracking. A 2007 report from the global ad agency JWT describes the Muslim market thus: "It's young, it's big, and it's getting bigger." Parts of it are well-educated and wealthy. The buying power of American Muslims alone is estimated at a hefty $170 billion annually. But with few exceptions, American marketers ignore them, says Ann Mack, JWT's director of trendspotting. "Muslims don't feel that brands are speaking to them," she says. "When we did the study, it was very difficult to find mainstream companies that were making significant programs geared toward the Muslim population."

That's less of a problem elsewhere. Indeed, the most innovative new halal products and services often come out of Europe and Southeast Asia, places where your average food supplier or bank may know little, if anything, about halal. In Europe — the biggest growth region according to the Halal Journal — young devout Muslims are hungry for Islamic versions of mainstream pleasures such as fast food. "The second- and third-generation Muslims are fed up with having rice and lentils every day," observes Darhim Hashim, CEO of the Malaysia-based International Halal Integrity Alliance. "They're saying, 'We want pizzas, we want Big Macs.' " Domino's now sources halal pepperoni from a Malaysian company for the pizzas it sells from Kuala Lumpur to Birmingham; KFC is testing halal-only stores in Muslim areas of the U.K., and the Subway sandwich chain has halal franchises across Britain and Ireland. (See pictures: "The Hajj Goes High-Tech".)

Swiss food giant Nestlé is a pioneer in the field. It set up its halal committee way back in the 1980s, and has long had facilities to keep its halal and non-halal products separated. Turnover in halal products was $3.6 billion last year, and 75 of the company's 456 factories are geared for halal production.

For non-food companies like South Korea's LG and Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia, targeting Muslims is also big business. LG offers an application to help users find the direction of Mecca, while Nokia has free downloadable recitations from the Koran and maps showing the locations of major mosques in the Middle East. Such offerings increase brand loyalty, according to market research by the Finland-based Muslim lifestyle portal Muxlim.com. "There's a lot of room out there for mainstream brands to appeal to Muslims without making changes to their products," says Muxlim.com's CEO Mohamed El-Fatatry. "It's just about their marketing messages, about showing that this brand is interested in them as consumers."

It's also about understanding the nuances. The hypermarket run by French supermarket giant Carrefour at the Mid Valley Megamall in Kuala Lumpur is overwhelmingly halal, with an elaborate system to keep halal foods separate from the haram ones. Goods that divide scholars on whether they're halal or haram because they could have trace elements of wine — Balsamic vinegar, say, or Kikkoman Marinade — get slapped with little green stickers to alert customers. More blatantly haram items are confined to La Cave, a glassed-in room at the back of the store for goods containing alcohol, pork or tobacco. Wearing special blue gloves, La Cave's staff handle haram goods and seal them in airtight pink plastic wrapping after purchase, so as not to contaminate the main store. "I'm so scared," said Norini Razak, a 23-year-old regular Carrefour shopper in a grey-and-white hijab. "It's difficult for one to know what is halal and what is not, so I'd prefer to go to a shop with labels [to help me]."

Read: "Should a Pious Muslim Practice Yoga?"

See pictures of the end of Ramadan

It's Not Just Business
The rising concerns of consumers like Razak herald not just a global economic trend, but a cultural one. During the 1980s and '90s, many Muslims in Egypt, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries expressed their religious principles by voting Islamic. Today, a growing number are doing so by buying Islamic, connecting to their Muslim roots by what they eat, wear and play on their iPods. Rising Muslim consumerism undermines the specious argument often heard after 9/11: that Muslims hate the Western way of life, with its emphasis on choice and consumerism. The growing Muslim market is a sign of a newly confident Islamic identity — one based not on politics but on personal lifestyles. "Muslims will spend their money more readily on halal food and products than on political causes," says Zahed Amanullah, European managing director of the California-based Zabihah.com, an online guide to the global halal marketplace.

Like many Muslim Americans, Amanullah grew up eating Jewish kosher food in order to conform to Muslim strictures on animal slaughter. But increasingly, there's no need for Muslims to go kosher. Zabihah offers tens of thousands of reviews of halal restaurants, from fried chicken joints in Dallas to pan-Asian restaurants in Singapore. Says Amanullah: "We can't keep up."

The dazzling range of new products and services also reflects the seismic social changes under way in the Muslim world. One of the reasons why halal frozen food, lunch-box treats and quick-fix dinners are growing in popularity is that many more Muslim women, from Egypt to Malaysia, have full-time jobs.

Western Muslims, whose minority status sharpens their sense of identity, are also helping refine the notion of a Muslim lifestyle. In Britain, advertisers are increasingly embracing the power of the "green" pound (that's Islamic green, not environmental green), says Sarah Joseph, editor of Emel, a glossy lifestyle monthly for British Muslims. When Emel launched in 2003, the notion of a Muslim lifestyle barely existed. "People were confused that we could present everything from food, fashion, travel and gardening, all from a Muslim perspective," says Joseph. But Muslims are the fastest-growing segment of the middle class in Britain; they have big families — an average of 3.4 children against the national average of 1.9 — so they buy big cars; they spend money on home decoration and twice-yearly vacations — "not just going back to Pakistan or Bangladesh, like their [immigrant] parents did," says Joseph. Bucking the current publishing trend, Emel is hiring extra staff and planning new magazines to cater to Muslim readers. Advertisers include British Airways and banking giant HSBC.

To keep growing, halal firms know they can't simply rely on religion. "Ideology does not fit within a consumer mindset," observes Amanullah of Zabihah.com. "At the end of the day, people will not buy halal simply because it's halal. They're going to buy quality food. Ideology doesn't make a better-tasting burger, a better car, or a better computer." But it sure makes a powerful marketing pitch.
With reporting by Shadiah Abdullah / Dubai

By the numbers ...
16% — Halal's share of global food industry
$632 billion— Annual halal food market
1.6 billion— Worldwide Muslim population

A Halal Shopping Cart
From fast food to fashion, the sector is thriving

Food
Non-Muslim multi-nationals such as KFC and Nestlé dominate the halal food market. But Muslim-
owned manufacturers such as Dubai-based Al Islami — which sells everything 
 from chicken burgers to packaged ingredients — are growing fast.

Lifestyle
Muslims — many of them young and increasingly middle-class — are buying more magazines, such as U.K.-based Emel, and halal cosmetics made, like these Saaf products, without alcohol or animal fats, which Islam considers haram, or forbidden.

Services
Hotels run along Islamic lines, such as Dubai's Villa Rotana, offer quieter and more family-friendly places to stay. Banks that operate according to Shari'a law 
 are doing well during 
 the global downturn because they tend to be 
 more conservative.

Cultural Identity in the Islamic World
by Navid Kermani

A colleague of mine who now works as an editor at a large German daily newspaper told me about an experience he had while enroling in Jewish Studies. Since the main currents of Judaism and Islam both flow through the same cultural space with a strong Arab influence, he thought it would be wise to pursue a minor in Islamic Studies. When he informed his academic adviser of his plans, she quizzically replied: "You want to study both? Well, you'll just have to decide if you're for the Arabs or the Jews." Although she was a young university lecturer, and this example is not typical, it does say a lot about how Europe projects its own, modern categories on the history of the Orient -- which you must admit also includes Judaism and Christianity.

Many large universities have departments for Islamic, Jewish and Christian Oriental Studies. However, as a rule these are almost never interconnected. Only very few students in Islamic Studies take any note of the relevant works of non-Muslim authors -- even though these texts may have been written at the same time, in the same city, possibly even in the very same street, as the treatise or poem they are currently reading. For example, students in Christian Oriental Studies often know little more about the great poems of Jewish Arabs than that they exist -- despite the fact that, like much of Muslim poetry, their motifs and ideas are often enough not specifically Jewish, but rather secular. These works grew out of the immediate context of Arab poetry and its various genres, and out of a shared tradition that is Islamic in character. Similarly, only very few students in Jewish Studies learn Arabic, despite the fact that the authors of significant works of Jewish philosophy, poetry and mysticism spoke Arabic, and wrote their works in Arabic for an Arabic-speaking audience.

The various artistic and religious traditions, and the literature and cuisine of the Arab cultural space are historically so tightly interwoven -- often to the point of being indistinguishable from one another -- that they must be portrayed and studied together. Thus Islamic theology consists to a considerable extent of answers to questions that emerged from Judaism and Christianity, either through their respective religious traditions, or through direct, person-to-person contact at the courts and intellectual centres of Baghdad, Kufa or Cordoba. One needs to know the questions to be able to understand the answers. Much the same holds true for Judaism: recent research suggests that the way not only Europe, but also rabbinic thought, absorbed the heritage of antiquity was strongly influenced by Islamic culture. Without knowledge of Islamic culture, it is almost impossible to realize the effect that Judaism had on Islam and, at a later date, Islam on Judaism -- in the area of theology and, even more noticeably, in literature and mysticism.

In the formative phases of Judaism and Islam -- and of Christianity -- identities were barely as clear-cut as it appears today. For example, the "we" in Arab philosophy and poetry often enough does not mean "we Muslims" or "we Jews", but rather "we philosophers", and is thereby opposed to the "you" of Islamic or Jewish mysticism and legal science. Reading these texts from an exclusively Jewish or Islamic Studies perspective automatically limits the depth of their meaning and places too strong an emphasis on religious-confessional aspects in their interpretation. As a result, texts, authors and historical developments that originally by no means referred to any specific religious identity, are today read in a confessional light. In a fashion that bears astounding resemblance to Islamist views, early Oriental Studies hypothesized a primordial state of Islam and aimed to determine to what extent the history and culture of Islam conforms to, or diverges from, it. As a result, any non-religious phenomena, discourses or schools of thought were almost automatically judged by these scholars to be unorthodox, instead of being viewed as autonomous subjects -- as would be the case, for the sake of argument, with Shakespeare, World War II or the Phenomenology of Mind, which all have a religious dimension but cannot possibly be reduced to it. Despite the fact that this essentialist view has long been questioned in Islamic Studies, it still dominates much of public discourse. Islamic scholar Aziz Al-Azmeh goes so far as to say that there exists "almost a complicity between Western commentators and Islamist ideologues", since both portray every phenomenon in the Islamic world as being rooted in the religious source texts of Islam (Die Islamisierung des Islam, Frankfurt am Main 1996). Such a normative approach to the history and present-day situation of the "Christian world" would automatically discredit itself. The West's secular worldview excludes the Orient, which it considers to be the typical example of a religious region where all cultural and political developments and events must be viewed from the perspective of religious faith.

This development is more than just another deplorable, yet given low student enrolment figures, negligible consequence of the German and European education system which has grown out of a hundred years of ossification in academia, it is a veritable scandal which endlessly reproduces historic falsification. Not only have the outlined views become a generally accepted, even exaggerated, part of Western perception, the much greater problem is that Jewish and Arab-Muslim societies have long since internalized the Western principles that separate Islamic, Jewish and Christian Oriental Studies from one another -- with catastrophic political consequences. The past decades have seen traditions in the Middle East retroactively nationalized and confessionalized, whereby a common -- not peaceful, but certainly intellectually open -- space was subdivided into many individual cells. Thus over the course of the modern age, Jewish philosophy, mysticism and literature were taken out of their Arab context and placed within a newly-fabricated national Jewish tradition; many Israeli philosophy books barely mention the fact that Maimonides, for example, spoke Arabic, constantly referred to his Muslim fellow philosophers, and engaged in inter-religious philosophical debate. In turn, Arab cultural history has been retroactively "Islamicized", that is, purged of its multi-religious dimension. In much the same way that Judaism has cut off the great Jewish-Arab poets and philosophers from their cultural and linguistic background in order to incorporate them into a national Jewish history, thereby negating the fact that they are deeply rooted in the Arab cultural space, the Arab world has chosen to ignore the fact that its identity was by no means shaped exclusively by Islam, and that its Jewish (and Christian) roots and branches have borne ample cultural fruit. It is important to recall that in a city like Baghdad, the ancient cultural centre of the Arab world, up until well into the 1940s Jews made up the largest segment of the population. A disproportionately large number of them were members of the intellectual elite, leaving their mark on the culture, the country and the renaissance of Arab literature in the modern age. Quite a few were even leaders in the Arab nationalism movement.

The reason why all of this has nearly completely vanished from our collective consciousness is obvious: it is due to the political conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, in which Arab nationalism is pitted against Zionism. To make the other side the enemy, the notion of "the other" had to be invented. With the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, this process is increasingly threatening the identity of Arab Christians, who have no place in a conflict with religious overtones between Jews and Arabs. Political in the beginning, the conflict has acquired a mythical dimension due to its being increasingly laden with religious meaning -- a primordial battle of sorts between peoples that one or two hundred years ago did not even view themselves as being distinct from one another. This supposedly age-old struggle urges people to profess ethnic loyalties that are themselves a product of modernity. The pressure to choose between Jewish and Arab identities becomes most painfully clear when one examines the situation of the Oriental Jews as illustrated by Samir's film "Forget Baghdad" and the writings of the Israeli intellectuals Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and Ella Shohat.

Europe's cultural exchange with the Middle East reproduces the political fault lines rather than helping to close them. By engaging in cultural dialogue with either Israel or the Islamic world, Europe is once again tearing Judaism out of its current geographic and cultural context -- and incorporating it into the West. This is another reason why to all appearances Israel is today nothing more than a Western colony in the Middle East, thus fanning the fire of both Israeli and Arab resentment, and certainly not promoting prospects for the peaceful coexistence of Muslims, Christians and Jews. Peace will come to the Middle East only when Israel no longer behaves like an "implanted" Western colony in the Arab world and, in turn, when the Middle East is "Israelized", that is, when the Arab world moves beyond reluctantly accepting a Jewish state in the region because it is too weak to change this fact, to once and for all professing Israel's right to exist, also by recalling its own Jewish history.

German theories, in particular, on what shape a cultural dialogue should take almost never envision the Middle East as a common, multireligious area -- or as one day possibly even becoming a transnational unit. If anything, Germany views itself as a "moderator" between enemies. Viewing the parties to the conflict as fixed entities, not only in a political, but also in a cultural sense, merely reinforces the very same mind-sets of Jewish-Muslim confrontation that were originally brought about by anti- Semitism, followed by the Holocaust, and which led to the founding of the State of Israel and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. By the same token, anyone in Germany or Europe who harbours resentment against either Jews or Muslims is most happy to express solidarity with their respective declared "enemies". Anti-Semitism always likes to point out the suffering that Israel imposes on the Palestinians, just as almost all radical critics of Islam in the West emphasize the special responsibility they feel for Israel.

The political conflict has continuously escalated since the Camp David and Taba peace talks broke down. At the same time, however, and to a great extent unbeknownst to the European public, a significant and increasingly vocal countermovement is emerging in the Muslim and Jewish world, and among Oriental Christians. It is a movement in literature, art and music -- and above all among theologians and historians -- that is striving to overcome national boundaries and religious barriers and to once again jointly think in terms of a common culture and history. However, these intellectuals must first free their own tradition from the fundamentalist stranglehold of both Western and their respective own ideologies, and subsequently develop a new, secular hermeneutics in the areas of religion, art and the humanities. This way of thinking champions religion, and precisely for this reason seeks to protect religion from being usurped by politics and nationalism. Although it is a budding movement within Judaism and Islam, there is no space for it to put down roots in the Middle East: no seminars exist in which the Torah and the Qur'an, or midrash and tafsir, can jointly be read by Jewish and Muslim scholars. There is no academy at which the threads of Jewish, Christian and Islamic Middle Eastern art and culture could be woven together, and even Arabic-Hebrew literary exchange has shrunk to a bare minimum. Some dialogues do exist, however these presuppose separate entities that are attempting to communicate with one another. Middle Eastern Jews, Muslims and Christians viewing and studying their cultures as a common heritage -- as opposed to each assuming a supposedly unique role -- remains a utopia. Festivals that provide a forum for Arab and Israeli art and culture, and universities and academies that offer joint courses in the Qur'an and the Bible, midrash and tafsir, cabbalah and Sufism, thereby placing them in their original relation to one another, are today only feasible in exile -- in the West, of all places, which bears part of the blame for the present-day impossible situation.

I therefore call for the entire region with a Mediterranean influence (in the broadest sense, the region between Berlin and Tehran, including Jerusalem, Haifa, Istanbul, Cairo/Alexandria, Beirut, Palermo, Sarajevo, Seville, Barcelona, Marrakesh and many other centres) to be viewed as constituting a common cultural space. There would then no longer be any point in speaking of a dialogue, because "we" would be one "of them". It is not sufficient to simply reject America's neoconservative vision for the future that hypothesizes a New Europe and an Americanized Middle East --as was the case during the debate on the war in Iraq. Instead, Europe must develop its own cultural vision for its relations with the Middle East, a vision not based on dichotomy. By doing so, Germany and Europe would underscore their historical responsibility for the entire Middle East, not only for Israel. Rather than viewing the literatures, performing and visual arts of the Middle East as being opposed to European art, they should be understood and presented as an integral aspect of a culture that has jointly shaped the history of the Middle East and Europe. Emphasizing the intellectual and artistic significance of Jewish-Islamic cultural heritage for Europe is important in particular with regard to the current discussion on European identity. Europe is a secular project that owes its present-day shape and power of attraction not least to the historic catastrophes it brought on itself. As bloody as these experiences were, the humanism that transcended the dark chapters of European history to ultimately prevail in Europe, more than anywhere else in the world, is of inestimable value. In fact, this humanism is so valuable that one is tempted to call upon all people, regardless of their origin, to defend it against the self-appointed so-called "defenders of Europe". They are making Europe a creed, even a race, thereby turning the project of European enlightenment upside down, a project which, after all, is special precisely in that it constitutes a secular community of will that in principle is open to all citizens. Europe only has a future if it embraces the diversity of its religions, nations and languages. Considering its past and present, this also means that Europe only has a future if it embraces Judaism and Islam.