With a mixture of self-righteousness, ignorance and hatred, many people in the West think Islam is a bloodthirsty religion and that Muslims are potential terrorists who are hostile towards democracy, women, Jews and Christians.
The friend and spiritual advisor of the former U.S. president George W. Bush, Frank Graham, has called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion." Bill O'Reilly, TV idol of American conservatives, has said: "We cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them."
The American television commentator Ann Coulter thinks: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." She also says: "Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the Stone Age and then permanently disarming Iran." The list of such statements could be extended indefinitely.
Just imagine for a moment that Graham, O'Reilly or Coulter had said "Judaism" instead of "Islam" and "Israel" instead of "Muslim countries". There would have been a storm of protest, and quite rightly so. Why may one say fascistic things about Muslims and their religion, while any such comments about Christians or Jews would be rejected as entirely unacceptable, and rightly so?
We must end this demonization of Islam and Muslims. It is not only shameful, it also harms our interests.
The deepening divide between Orient and Occident also endangers the security of Israel. The strongest long-term guarantee for the survival of Israel and its five million Jews is not the enmity, but the friendship of its 300 million immediate and more distant Arab neighbors. To attain this, the West, but also Israel, must make a fair contribution.
The Jewish people did not attain its moral stature because of its military victories or because of the impressive number of its talents. It attained its moral uniqueness through its piety, wisdom, humanism and creativity, as well as through its long, brave and often cunning struggle for justice and against oppression.
It is understandable that after the Holocaust Israel has sought to ensure its military strength - and to defend its legitimate interests with great vigor, even severity. But severity without justice is a strategy that is doomed to failure. If all the creative country of Israel does is destroy, it will destroy itself as well.
Israel - and the entire Western world - must invest at least as much in justice as in weapons. The treatment of the Palestinians is not compatible with the moral stature and uniqueness of the Jewish people. This is the only conclusion one may come to, especially as an admirer of Jewish culture.
The Palestinians must also change their policies. The West is right to demand that they renounce violence against Israel. But should it not also demand that Israel renounces violence against the Palestinians? According to the Israeli human-rights organization B'Tselem, in 2007 13 Israelis were killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while 384 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces.
Reconciliation between Jews and Arabs is just as possible as the miraculous reconciliation between the Germans and the French proved to be. Jews and Arabs have more in common in religious, cultural and historical terms than most people realize. As Israeli president Shimon Peres put it, they "have the same parents, Abraham and Moses."
For centuries both Jews and Arabs were persecuted - and not only during the Crusades and the Reconquista. The Vichy government in France, for example, applied the same racist discriminatory laws to the Jews that had been "successfully" tested on the Algerians (Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison).
We Germans have a historical responsibility towards Israel and its right to exist - in the past, the present and the future. Because of its history and everything it has gone through over the millennia, the Jewish people deserve a secure home in Palestine.
But for the very same reason we also have a historical responsibility towards the Palestinians. They are paying the price for the guilt Germany will always bear because of the Holocaust. The Jewish political scientist Alfred Grosser is surely right when he said: "Whoever wants to shake off Hitler, must (also) defend the Palestinians."
The true lesson of the Holocaust is that we may never just stand by and watch passively as people are oppressed, stripped of their rights and humiliated. We should have stood up for the Jews back then when they were weak, and not only nowadays, when they are strong and influential. Belated courage is the opportunist brother of cowardice.
It is a bizarre spectacle to observe certain Western politicians fight ever more resolutely and courageously year after year against past injustice, while remaining inexcusably silent about present injustice. One can also be guilty of not saying a word.
The challenge of our era is to help heal the wounds in the Mideast - by means of security guarantees for Israel, to which Europe must provide a robust military contribution, but also through helping to establish a viable Palestinian state. We must build bridges, not walls.
A model Palestinian state, that is backed by the West and acknowledges Israel's right to exist within just borders, and that opposes all forms of terrorism really would mark a new start for the Mideast - and for the relationship between the Western world and the Muslim world. We cannot continue on our current path.
The "wars on terror" against the Muslim countries Afghanistan and Iraq have already cost $1.6 trillion, which is more than the Vietnam War cost. The United States spends more than $100 billion on the war in Iraq each year, but less than $5 billion for economic reconstruction there.
In light of these figures, can one seriously ask what a successful alternative to the current "anti-terror" policies might look like? We have to turn the ratio around. We have to treat the Muslim world just as fairly and as generously as we - quite rightly - treat Israel. We must ultimately deprive international terrorism of any arguments in its defense.
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