This week Saudi Arabia is at the center of two important conferences that focus on promoting peace and addressing the issue of religious extremism now plaguing most of the world.

The first event in Vienna, Austria, at the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue focuses on the misuse of religion to justify political violence and to create divisions between religious communities. The second event in Prague is sponsored by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). It addresses intercultural dialogue to create lasting stability and peace.

Don’t expect a lot of media coverage of either event because the topics don’t fit in the current theme among western governments and in the press. If anything, the western media is consistent in presenting one side of a very complex picture of geopolitics.

Muslims and non-Muslims alike are faced with an interesting dilemma in 2016: Promote peace and unity or demonize a specific religious and cultural group and create divisions. The latter is much easier to pursue than the former because it requires little effort other than to find a platform to deliver a message. Promoting peace is hard work and requires specific skills that today — as displayed daily in the Republican presidential primaries in the United States —is sadly lacking in political leaders.

Promoting peace is unfashionable, naive and dangerous if political pundits and conservative political party leaders are to be believed. Peace is seen as complacency, weakness and capitulation to terrorists. Peace is a concept that is abused by governments who pay lip service to it while closing the door on civil liberties. There’s an attitude that peace activists are part of the lunatic fringe.

The work of Palestinian peace activist Ali Abu Awwad or former US President Jimmy Carter is dismissed. They receive considerably less coverage than Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio or Donald Trump who urge violence to solve global ills. Advocating war, using violent rhetoric and urging governments to marginalize ethnic and religious groups are mistaken for projecting strength when in reality such an approach increases the threat of terrorism and prolongs the wars in Syria and Iraq.

So from a western perspective what authority does a Saudi possess to speak about peace and the rejection of war? First, Saudis reject any suggestion that Saudi Arabia is the “exporter of terrorism.”

Saudi Arabia is a member of the international community and as such shares collective responsibility for the state of affairs today. The United States must step up and acknowledge that Daesh was born from the ashes of the Iraq war, perhaps the biggest military blunder in the last 100 years that served as a breeding ground for extremism. Europe should accept responsibility for marginalizing ethnic and religious minorities by practicing housing and employment discrimination.

Restrictions on building mosques and wearing the hijab further marginalizes Muslims and fuels the bloodlust of Daesh.

We know the standard operating procedure of Saudi Arabia’s critics is to lay blame on “Wahhabi” Islam, a convenient explanation without really understanding what Wahhabi means or where it fits in Islamic history and Saudi culture. But let’s take a moment to explore the allegation that Saudi Arabia exports Wahhabi Islam that has led “to the creation of Daesh.”

Saudi Arabia does indeed export textbooks worldwide for the purposes of Dawah (preaching). Teaching materials focus on the strict word of God. Muhammad bin Abdul Al-Wahhab, who is given brief attention in Saudi textbooks, was influential in returning Muslims to the original teachings of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), the word of God and eliminating pagan rituals and the worship of false idols. No more, no less.

One of the problems in teaching Islam to impressionable young students is the lack of supervision, both on the local level and through organizations that perform Dawah, of Muslims unqualified to teach Islamic studies and to run madrassas.

What makes Saudi Arabia stand apart from most other nations that we balance the show of military strength to crush extremism with programs on interfaith dialogue through the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue and government support of the OIC. Certainly few western governments can lay claim that they have established government institutions created solely to promote peace.

But why would they? Military aggression is a good sell to the public. Peace centers are not.