The twelve stars on the flag of the European Union do not symbolize the twelve founding members of the union. They symbolize the Twelve Apostles.

But originally the significance of the bindi is to symbolize the third eye between the spiritual world and the religious world.

On the contrary, the Islamic world left the Palestinians without real support for decades. In reality, for them the conflict has come to symbolize the anachronistic perpetuation of an unfair colonial order, to represent their political malaise, and to embody the perceived impossibility of their being masters of their destiny.

I was the first Western foreign minister to travel to Libya since the crisis began. What I saw reminded me of my country 20 years ago, just after Poland s first free elections, which, together with the fall of the Berlin Wall barely six months later, came to symbolize the Cold War s end.

The settlements intensify Palestinian hatred toward Israel. In addition to occupying Palestinians land, using their water, and imposing limits on their freedom of movement, the settlements symbolize Israel s intention to remain, and thus its reluctance to concede independence to the Palestinian people, even if they were to recognize Israel s legitimacy and show themselves disposed to peaceful coexistence.

It is against this background that the Iranian nuclear program has come to symbolize the larger geopolitical tensions underlying the confrontation between the US and Iran. Indeed, the nuclear issue has served to rationalize the face off, with Iran s leaders playing to their domestic audience by whipping up nuclear nationalism and the US playing to the international audience by harping on the proliferation threat.

Obama s predecessor, George W. Bush, launched America s so called war on terror to defeat groups that he insisted wanted to establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. But Bush s invasion and occupation of Iraq was so controversial that it fractured the global consensus to fight terror, with the Guantánamo Bay detention center and the rendition and torture of suspects coming to symbolize the war s excesses.