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Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama greets Andrew Young as Irshad Manji, left, looks on before the start of the symposium on The Rise of Democracy in the Middle East as part of the Common Ground forPeace two-day forum in Syracuse, N.Y., Monday, Oct. 8, 2012. (AP Photo/Kevin Rivoli)

Against a backdrop of escalating violence in the Middle East, the Dalai Lama said Monday at a peace conference at Syracuse University that "genuine peace must come through inner peace, taking care of others."

Two days of panel discussions began Monday with a symposium on the Middle East. The 77-year-old Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist spiritual leader of Tibet, is the centrepiece of the "Common Ground for Peace" gatherings.

"What's peace? Absence of violence is not peace," the Buddhist leader said. "Peace is something positive. Genuine, lasting peace is true, inner peace. You have to take care of others. Peace will not come from the sky. Peace must come through our actions."

Panelists included former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, Martin Luther King III, Nobel laureates Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei and Shirin Ebadi, and author Irshad Manji.

More than 1,000 people, many of them students, filled Goldstein Auditorium at the Schine Student Center on Monday morning to listen to a discussion of the rise of democracy in the Middle East. The symposium got under way even as Turkey and Syria continued firing artillery and mortars across their volatile border, stoking fears that Syria's civil war might escalate into a regional conflagration.

Woolsey offered a simple solution: "Get off oil."

"It's happened to other commodities in history, but this business of power going with a commodity that has a huge amount of economic rent is a very serious problem," Woolsey said. "I honestly believe that we cannot deal with this simply by drilling more for oil in the United States. We've got to get off oil and break the cartel (OPEC), which has 78 per cent of the world's conventional oil."

Young offered an even simpler way to peace.

"If everybody had water, that is justice. That's the simplest justice," Young said. "Peace for the poorest of the poor is bread and water. We have to have a right to water, food, to health."

Manji, founder and director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, said the aftermath of the recent assassination in Libya of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans has been riveting.

"For the first time, we have seen images of moderate Muslims stepping up, holding homemade signs: "Please forgive us. This is not who we are. They don't represent us," said Manji, who was born in Uganda but moved to Canada with her family after Idi Amin gained dictatorial power in the early 1970s. "We've not seen this before. We now have clear evidence of a struggle, in many cases a nonviolent struggle, within my faith of Islam for independent thinking, for reinterpretation, for liberty and love."