(1.47.47) Prince Ghazi of Jordan and King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia have been engaged in an interfaith initiative. I was privileged to speak at a meeting of an offshoot of it at Yale university a couple of years ago. Where there were 68 mullahs, imams, grand mufti, ayatollahs who came and there were 68 evangelicals who were there. And this meeting sought to find some of the commonality of the Abrahamic faiths which is there. I think those are the kinds of things that we need to explore. So that as I said in my opening: we cannot afford to have a diplomacy that is defined by troops or drones or confrontation, we have to find a diplomacy that achieves understanding, rapprochement, whatever you want to call it, through other kinds of fora and initiatives (1.48.56)

(3.39.13 ) I am sure my advisors at the state department would say, stop there senator. But I am going to say something additional which is: I have a lot of friends who are Muslims that I have met and built relationships with over the years in my travels. And leaders in that region will be the first to tell you, me, others that what you see in radical Islam is not Islam, it’s ”radical Islam”. It is an exploitation and hijacking of an old and honoured religion. And what we need to do is find a way, and this is something we have to work at, for people to understand then degree to which that is happening and becoming in some places an excuse for their disenfranchisement. For being deprived of good governance, for being deprived of good economy, of good jobs, of opportunity. And one of our missions is to not let that be an excuse. So I think that carrying the banner of religious tolerance, diversity and religious pluralism is critical. (3.40.28)