The real demographic balance that should worry liberal, humanist, open and progressive people is the number of xenophobes in our society, rather than the number of people with beards, skullcaps or hijabs. By Dubi Kanengisser When I lived in Toronto, I used to jokingly exclaim "man, I hate those immigrants." Like all jokes, this had a grain of truth in it. It is easy to latch onto the obvious differences of "visible minorities" and extrapolate from one member to the entire group. We all have a little racist inside that we must overcome. But there are Israelis living abroad whose xenophobia…

Over the last few months, I have engaged in a series of conversations with Pakistani writers and academics through mutual friends. These talks have been a rare and fascinating opportunity to see their country through their eyes rather than through Western media sources. We've discovered some surprising common concerns and a mutual desire to stay in touch. We would like to write posts  occasionally for one another so that our audiences can share these understandings as well. The following is an introduction by Abdul, one of the participants, who writes his own blog tackling the stories of Pakistan that are…

How foreign to the Martian soil is the NASA vessel that just landed there? About as foreign as Israel considers itself to be from the Middle East at large. At least this is the sense one gets recently from observing our inner discourse over the events in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. Most of the talk in Israel today is fearful talk. We discuss how the lion in whose den we're trapped is bound to turn on us as soon as it completes its conversion to fundamentalist Islam. Seldom do we take the advice of the Talmudic sages and evaluate where…