While dining with local Arab leaders and visiting Muslim diplomats to break the Ramadan fast on Tuesday, Israeli President Shimon Peres appeared to inadvertently contrast God's loving nature to the violence taught in the name of Allah.
Israel National News reported that Peres told his hosts, who included the Jordanian and Turkish ambassadors, that Jews and Arabs are cousins with a shared father in Abraham, and should be able to coexist peacefully.
Peres seemed to suggest that the problem is that while "the One we pray to in Hebrew does not command us to throw bombs," Muslims praying in Arabic are apparently receiving a different set of instructions.
Muslim clerics across the Middle East, but especially in Israel and the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories, regularly use their pulpits to preach violence against Jews and the "Christian" West.
Nevertheless, Peres, always the diplomat, maintained that the world would be worse off without Islam. He did not elaborate.