Germany

A meeting with Iranian President Ahmadinejad is not going to be without controversy. Detractors say: to give this person a platform means to accept all of his opinions, or perhaps even to kneel in front of him. They call for isolating him, and for marking him as an outcast.

I can understand some of these concerns, but ultimately this kind of attitude is the problem. Not to talk with each other means not to know each other, and this leads to a point where people blindly follow their ideologies.

Perhaps this is a comfortable way to think, offering black-and-white clichés about problems, but unfortunately the world is too complicated to divide it in good and bad states. As a German, I know what it means to follow an ideology. More or less the whole 20th century, Germany was involved in one war after another; we even built up walls between our own people. Of course, this was all done in the name of the "right ideology.“