Charles Groenhuijsen: Chris Yalonis, this sounds familiar, I guess? What, in your view, is the lesson for us, as media people, and particularly as TV people, because that has the biggest impact, of course.

Chris Yalonis : Because there is such a high level of ignorance about Islam in general, I think the media has an obligation to present a balanced and objective look at the diversity of Islam. Dr. Ahmed mentioned the 1.4 billion, the 55 majority-Muslim countries - so, a wide range of diversity and nationalities. The media needs to not look at Islam as a monolith, to be able to then dive in to a story's nuances, to separate an individual's story - that may be horrific, may be immoral - from a monolithic view of Islam.

Elizabeth Palmer (correspondent, CBS News): I'd like to know from Abdel, or anyone else who wants to address the issue: Since the acts of terrorism have begun to kill Muslims, and I'm thinking of the London bombings and the Jordanian bombings just recently, do you think that that has changed? Because it has forced people to realise that in fact the Muslim world is not one, that Muslims have great and violent debates among themselves?

Abdel Bari Atwan: I agree with you. For example, I was in touch with our colleagues in Jordan, and they told me there was a huge shift after this bombing, which was directed at innocent people. Some people had actually been sympathetic to Al Qaeda or Abu Mussab al-Zakawi, because he is fighting the Americans in Iraq. But after they witnessed the carnage, the atrocities that took place at these hotels, people started to wonder: We are also the victims of terrorism, the victims of those radicals.

The problem is that we are the victims of the Americans' and the Israelis' state terrorism, and also, right now, Islamic radical groups who are practising the same thing. That's the dilemma that we are facing. We have to work together. But how do we work together once we are at the receiving end as Arabs and Muslims. We have two wars now - a war in Afghanistan and war in Iraq; and a permanent war in Palestine. So let us have more understanding, more dialogue, more talking. In that case, we can actually fight against and reduce the damage of this terrorism.

Akbar Ahmed: I can see that this discussion is projecting a rather gloomy and pessimistic picture. I would characterise this phase - the post-9/11 era - in Charles Dickens's words: "the best of times and the worst of times." You may be surprised and say, where is the "best of times"? Let me give you an example. Your group there would be very interested to know that the No. 1 best-selling poet in the United States of America is Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi. A lot of you may say, who's Rumi? This is the great mystic poet of the 13 th century, and he actually is the No. 1 best-selling poet in the United States.

So there is a great deal of interest right now in America about Islam. Yes, there's a lot of nonsense and rubbish also - some very prominent people talking complete gibberish at times about Islam. It's a time of opportunity, of challenge, for Muslim scholars and Muslim spokesmen and women to be able to communicate and explain Islam.

For example, our distinguished moderator just made an innocent remark where, in an exchange earlier, you said that Islam is the one religion that is violent. The fact of the matter is that Islam did not start the suicide-bombing trend, nor has it killed the maximum number of people. The Tamil Tigers have killed about 60,000 people, including a prime minister of India and a president of Sri Lanka. We know about the Buddhists who set themselves alight and kill themselves to protest politically. We know about the kamikaze pilots.

So suicide is the final act of despair, of anger, of violence. It is not an Islamic phenomenon. What fascinates me, as an anthropologist, is why it is occurring now, and who are these young men and women, this unending stream that seems to be supplying the violence in the world that we see now. It is very recent, and it is something that is spreading, and alarming me, certainly.

Unidentified speaker: (Abu Dhabi TV): To be practical, we in the Arab world can't expect that the West is going to come and learn everything about us, and give us the time of day. So we also have to be practical on our side, and I would like to ask: What is it that we can do? Because we have to meet halfway; nobody is going to come 60 per cent to my side. What are we supposed to do to help cross the barrier over to the other side, explain ourselves, clear up all the misunderstandings and hopefully, in a couple of generations, have a dialogue?

Samira Kawar (Middle East Reports, Reuters Television): One of the things we've started doing recently at Reuters Television is Middle East Reports, which looks at many facets of life in the Middle East, North Africa, what is essentially the Muslim world. We're not out to cover Islam as such. We're covering parts of the world where Islam is the dominant religion and culture.

Most of our subscribers, very tellingly, are in the Middle East. I'd like to know why we don't have more subscribers among the big Western broadcasters. If there is a genuine interest in finding out more about the part of the world where Islam is the dominant religion and culture, then one would hope that you would start to see Western broadcasters getting interested in a product like Middle East Reports. Most European and North American broadcasters, I would say, at the moment do not have a subscription.

Unidentified: The BBC does. [Applause]

Samira Kawar: This is the sort of service that tells people about everyday life in the Middle East, about artists, doctors, cultural life, economics. It's not about the stereotypes.

Charles Groenhuijsen : Is CNN a subscriber?

Samira Kawar: Not to my knowledge.

Unidentified: CNN has its own program, called Inside the Middle East, which does exactly the same thing.

Margaret Ward (RTE News, Ireland): I'm from RTE. We don't have a subscription. But moving on from that, having seen that video - and obviously the statistics speak for themselves - I felt that in the tenor of the video there was an implication that Western broadcasters were "fuelling the fire." I know that at RTE, we're very careful about the way we use language. We don't talk about Islam as a monolithic institution. We watch all the British channels in Ireland, and I think in the wake of the London bombing, they handled that issue extremely well. There are a lot of efforts being made by people in this room to tackle this issue - in talking to moderates and making features about moderates; in the wake of the Pakistani earthquake, in talking to people portraying the Muslim world in other ways. So I think the video has extrapolated a bit more out of the statistics than is maybe fair.