Well, the question got answered: The Saudis are willing to invite an Israeli rabbi to the interfaith conference to be held later this month. It would have been better had the conference been held in Saudi Arabia rather than Madrid, but it’s a useful step.
Israeli rabbi invited to Saudi interfaith meeting
MARK LAVIEERUSALEM—Saudi Arabia has invited an Israeli rabbi to an interfaith conference in Spain, potentially the first step in wider contacts between the kingdom and Israel, the rabbi told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Rabbi David Rosen said Saudi Arabia called the conference, set for Madrid from July 16-18, to bring world religions together to confront common challenges. Rosen called the invitation “a historic step for them.”
But he warned that it might be no more than a Saudi attempt to improve its image and that of Islam in the face of criticism over the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and other instances of Islamic extremism.
No comment was available Thursday from the Saudi embassy in Madrid.
…
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
22:57,
More Madrid Conference preliminaries here.
04:10,
A newly devised master hierarchy of virtues and values as described by Ghazali and also at http://www.global-solutions.org emphasizes the moral commonalties across all religious traditions encouraging a new era in religious tolerance. This new ethical system could eminently qualify as the long anticipated foundation for a global system of planetary ethics serving the Abrahamic Faiths - a worthy aid towards the goals of any Interfaith Conference … more at http://www.charactervalues.org