By Stefan Theil 

Each year the World Economic Forum inundates participants with a
deluge of reports -- from "Bahrain and the World - Scenarios to 2025"
to "The Potential for Public Private Partnerships in Water."
Especially popular these days are country rankings - simple to
understand, easily digestible for journalists, which is why their
number has inflated in recent years. When done well, like the WEF's
Global Competitiveness Report or the OECD's PISA education rankings,
they can condense crucial information, jump-start public debate, and
provide useful benchmarks for shaping policy.

It's not clear whether that holds for the WEF's newest product, the
"Annual Report on the State of Dialog between Islam and the West."
The ranking shows Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia coming out on top of a
"dialog index" based on surveys by Gallup. Brazil and Russia are at
the bottom. It's not clear how the degree of dialog readiness in
Bangladesh according to Gallup is going to serve as a benchmark for
Muslim-Western policy issues such as Iraq and the Middle East, the
role of Islam in Europe or the tolerance of non-Muslims in Turkish and
Arab lands. The report reaches the somewhat hopeful yet completely
unactionable conclusion that "majorities in populations around the
world believe that violent conflict between the West and the Muslim
world can be avoided, but they also share a great deal of pessimism."

Still, there were some really interesting bits buried inside the 156-page
report. In a section on media and attitudes, research conducted by
Bonn, Germany-based Media Tenor found that countries with the most
negative attitudes (Westerners toward Muslims, and vice versa) were
also the ones with the most negative media coverage. Whether reporting
reflects attitudes or creates them is of course another question, but
Media Tenor chief Roland Schatz says the most negative reporting of
"the other" was found in Iran, the Palestinian Territories, Denmark
and Germany - and those countries showed a high degree of pessimism
and distrust as well. In Germany, for example, Schatz says the
majority of TV and other coverage of Muslims was about crime, with
Muslim immigrants either the victims ("honor killings") or the
perpetrators. Then there was reporting on terrorism, and beyond that very
little else. Generally, media in Muslim-majority countries reported
more negatively about the West than vice-versa. Another finding of the
report was that greater interaction with the Muslim world is seen as a
threat by 60% of the citizens in many European countries--but not in
America or Israel. That suggests that some of the most divisive issues
are between Islam and Europe, not Islam and "the West." That ought to
set off some fruitful debate.