I felt that, among all my writing about current (and past and future) events, my actual viewpoint on interfaith relations -- primarily with our Muslim counterparts -- often gets taken for granted. The Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, HaRav Shlomo Amar, wrote to Sheikh Yusuf Kardawi of Qatar, an influential Sunni imam, after the row erupted over anti-Muhammad comments Pope Benedict quoted in his recent speech. In his letter, Rav Amar says:

In a letter in Arabic to Yusuf Kardawi, Amar wrote that "we must respect all faiths and the ways of all peoples and nations, as... [Mohammed] said: 'That each nation will go as instructed by their God. Even when there is a struggle between nations this must not be turned in a struggle of faiths.'"

"Every Jew who studies the writings of our great rabbis ¬ most prominent among them the Rambam [Rabbi Moshe Maimonides], peace be upon him ¬ knows that our great thinkers wrote in Arabic and lived among the Muslim countries and participated with the great thinkers of Islam in the effort to explain the words of God, on the basis of wisdom ..."

What did the Rav do? He quoted Qur'an. I believe wholeheartedly that the Islam that I've read about in the Qur'an and ahadeeth of Muhammad and the "Islam" that I hear about being responsible for what is on al-Jazeera are two drastically different things with two drastically different origins. One was at least built with an ideal of peace, the other is hell bent on nothing but the destruction of kuffar, and most likely humanity as a result of its own infighting.

I believe that the right wing GOP neoconservative platform is hijacking actual Torah hashkafah. There is never a commandment to hate anyone based on ethnicity -- even the seven Cana'anite nations weren't to be hated, even if they were to be killed, but we still, on Mt. Sinai, in the Oral Torah, were given laws of what to do with Cana'anite slaves, etc. -- and unfortunately, the "war on terror" being fought in Iraq gets translated into often ugly Islamophobia here in the West.

In Tikkun magazine, the illustrious writer Jonathan Schorsch writes lamentably about something that I would consider a milestone worthy of reciting a blessing over:

An article in Haaretz last week announced that several ultra-orthodox rabbis will seek to dialogue with their Islamicist Palestinian counterparts, since both face and fear the threat of multicultural liberal democracy.

In context, he is speaking about how "progressivism, for all its flaws, upholds as so few today do, the values of an Enlightenment whose idealism remains the only realistic rhetorical bulwark we have against the corrosive selfishness and cynicism of libertarians and theocrats alike."

I think that anyone who would say such a thing -- if they have a shred of connection to religiosity in their hearts -- must say so selectively.