May Pak Lah and his misguided, bigoted cohorts learn from his more eminent counterparts at this conference.

“We offer our sincere thanks to the governments of Spain and Turkey for having launched this initiative, and we pledge our full support for the alliance and its objectives,” Abdul Rahman Mohammad Al Owais, Minister of Culture, Youth and Community Development, said in a speech at the conference.
He said the promotion of dialogue between cultures and between faiths “is something to which we must all pay attention, if we are to hope for a peaceful world, where tolerance, rather than bigotry, prevails, and where misunderstandings based on ignorance are removed”.
“For us in the UAE, tolerance of different faiths, different cultures and different races is fundamental to our way of life and the world as a whole. People from nearly 200 countries live and co-exist peacefully and harmoniously together within our borders. People of all religions, … practice their faiths, side-by-side.
Co-existence
“Indeed, in our capital city of Abu Dhabi, one of the largest mosques is immediately adjacent to the Catholic Cathedral, the Coptic Cathedral and the Anglican Church symbolising our respect to all faiths and commitment to inter-faith understanding,” he said. “That is how we wish it to be. That basis of tolerance and dialogue is an essential part of the religion of Islam.”
He said through tolerance and dialogue comes understanding and a recognition that stereotyping of other cultures and other faiths can only lead to misunderstanding and a breakdown in harmony.
“Part of our understanding and of the way in which we practice tolerance in these matters is that we recognise that people of each and every culture, each and every faith, hold certain things dear to their hearts.
“As a corollary, we believe that it is incumbent upon us to ensure that persons who claim to be a part of other cultures and other faiths do not deliberately set out to cause offence, or to poke fun at those aspects of culture and belief that are so important to others, which might inflame public opinion and … [create] distrust and animosity.
“While we recognise, and value, the right to the freedom of expression, it is our view that there is a need for a greater acceptance of responsibility in the way that freedom is used, particularly by the mass media,” he said.
Al Owais said such freedoms should not be used to permit and to justify the publication of inflammatory material that cannot only lead to a deepening of misunderstanding between cultures and faiths, but also to violence and death.
He said the promotion of dialogue and understanding, indeed the promotion of an alliance of civilisations, can only hope to be successful “if we all exert continuous and sincere efforts to build bridges, rather than to divide, to foster friendship, rather than hostility, to explain, rather than to disseminate views designed to deepen misunderstandings”.