"Living together in peace has proved tragically difficult. We must try harder to bring shared values to life," he told heads of state/government and other delegates in the blue-and-gold hall of the assembly. 

Opening his speech with "Asalamu alaykum", the secretary said, "Anti-Semitism remains a scourage. Islamophobia has emerged as a new term for an old and terrible form of prejudice. "And other kinds of faith-based discrimination and racism show a dismaying persistence. Sometimes it seems as if none of history's awful lessons have been learned. 

"With knowledge and and leadership, we can live up to the best of all our traditions, and ensure human dignity for all", Ban added. 

"One of the greatest challenges of our time must now surely be to ensure that our rich cultural diversity makes us more secure-not less." He said globalization could be a great force for progress, but as economies merge, as cultural boundaries disappear, as new media bring our societies closer together than ever before, new fault lines can emerge. As a result, he said, "Communal strife is intensifying. Extremist ideologies are on the rise. Societies are more polarized". 

Traditionally, the secretary-general said peace involves balancing the interests of different States. "But we have learned that lasting peace requires more than a competitive equilibrium. For peace to endure, individuals, groups and nations must come to respect and understand each other. "Interfaith initiatives are addressing this need with ever greater frequency and force. 

Opening the historic meeting, the President of the U.N. General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann hoped that the meeting will hasten action on such global obstacles as hunger and poverty. "We are not gathered here to talk about religion and theology. We are here to pledge to place our reserves of moral strength at the service of the goals of the United Nations." 

"Although social responsibility is a basic law in each of the world's religions and in all ethical and philosophical traditions, we have allowed our selves to become contaminated by the spirit of selfishness and individualism, which are the principal values, or rather, anti-values of the globally dominated culture," he said. "This is the reason why wealthy nations have not been able to muster the political will to comply with even the minimal commitment to give 0.7 percent for their GDP to help eradicate hunger and poverty from the world".