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My name is David Rosen. I'm an Orthodox rabbi. I was chief rabbi of Ireland. Before that, I was rabbi of the largest congregation in South Africa.

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Before that, I was trapped into the Israeli Defense Forces in West Sinai.

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For the last 15 years, I am in charge of all the American Jewish Committee's interfaith work around the world, and I'm based in Jerusalem.

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So basically, I'm employed to be ambassador for Judaism to the religions of the world.

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I'm also the advisor to the chief rabbinate of Israel in terms of its interfaith work as well.

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And we have some formal institutional structures for dialogue.

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Well, of course, education is a critical factor, but there is nothing more educational than the human encounter.

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The more we can enable people to meet with one another, to look in the other's eyes, to see each other as a child of God,

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as a creature of the divine one force behind the cosmos, the less we will be inclined to stigmatize, to generalize,

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to label people, and the more we will be able to understand them.

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And, of course, the one religion that has a specific imperative in this regard is Islam.

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We created you from one couple, male and female, and made you into peoples and nations so that you may know one another.

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In other words, Islam has an imperative of dialogue, and that dialogue should be the essential foundation for all religions.

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The more we get to know one another, the less chance that we will do to one another the terrible things we do.

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People can only do such horrific acts that are done today terribly in the name of religion by dehumanizing the other,

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making the other into purely an object with no human identity, let alone divine soul.

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And every time you pray, you pray for the children of Abraham, therefore you're praying for me.

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And people don't understand that.

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So, of course, education is very fundamental in that regard.

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It's not just a matter of fabricating hadiths.

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It's also a matter of how you interpret certain verses within the scripture.

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And, therefore, you can interpret verses in the Koran.

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So, you can have a passage which talks about the desecraters of the Sabbath being turned into apes and pigs.

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And you can understand that to be the advantage of Judaism, that Jews are meant to be observant, and those were the sinners.

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Or you can take it and generalize that all Jews are apes and pigs.

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And so, there's always a danger of abusing religion when people have violent intent.

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And, therefore, the question we also need to ask is, what is the source of their violence?

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It's not just bad education.

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It is manipulation for various economic, social, political interests, people who are marginalized, looking for some kind of purpose in life, all these factors.

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So, these have to be addressed.

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Education is critical, absolutely, but not alone.

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It has to come in hand with us addressing the sources, if you like, of the swamps that breed these Anopheles mosquitoes.

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And the fundamental teaching of both the Koran and the Torah is that the human being is called to live a righteous and just life.

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And that, first and foremost, means respecting the life and the dignity of each and every human being.

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That latter part, I don't know, is being actually the text of the Koran.

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I know the first part of being the text of the Koran, and I know that there are those who interpret that, which, of course, is not in the Koran,

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that if the people sinned, as a result, they broke God's promise, and, therefore, that promise was no longer theirs.

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But now is the Ummah Khair, which is that Muslims are no longer the Jews.

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But, again, that just proves our point.

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The point is, if you have a political agenda, you will interpret the text to suit your political agenda.

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But, thank God, not amongst all.

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And there are lots of good people and lots of good Palestinians as well.

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And, thank God, the vast majority of Muslims in the world are good people.

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And, thank God, we live in a time where there's more interfaith or cooperation than ever before in a human history.

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So, in fact, interfaith cooperation is an exponentially growing industry.

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I travel maybe 50% of the time, and I turn down 10 times as much as I take on.

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We do not have the resources to meet the demand.

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So, it's already a sign that we're living in a very blessed, wonderful age.

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The problem, of course, is that what gets into the media, into the newspapers and television, by definition, is the sensational and the negative.

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The problem is to do with something in the human heart.

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We enjoy the sensational more than the good pedestrian activities.

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So, we want something that's exciting and that's negative.

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And, therefore, as a result, we get to know about all the terrible things in the world.

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But, there are far more good things and wonderful things in the world that we simply don't know about.

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I try my best, as much as God will allow me.

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Inshallah.

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Thank you.

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I come from time to time.

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I was there at different conferences.

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Istanbul is one of the centers of the world.

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So, it's a crossroads, as it always has been.

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Thank you.