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For a journalist who covers the Muslim world, we have responsibilities to be familiar with that culture and to know how to respond to that.

I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.

We've got to find ways of confronting the issues that divide - and at the heart of cultural issues, you often find religions.

In most cases, my visits to the West are for promotion of human values and religious harmony.

I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins.

In the Middle East, the conflict today is a matter of generations and not of cultures.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

I have for some time now been deeply troubled by the growing difficulties faced by Christian communities in various parts of the Middle East. It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are increasingly being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants.

I am a Westerner. We're not going to change the West by going East. The East has a lot to teach us, but essentially it's like a mirror, saying, hey, can't you see what's here in your own religion, what are you, stupid?