This week our saintly President Carter met with the leader of Hamas, the elected and ever more supported militant cum administrative branch of the Palestinian refugee population. In response, the Isreali prime minister Ehud “shoot now and ask questions never” Olmert has snubbed Carter. He said, “Were Jimmy Carter to have met with me, and two days later with Khaled Meshaal, it could have created a facade of negotiations between us and Hamas”

The message: We will not negotiate. They are not humans they are terrorists, and everybody knows you can’t talk to a terrorist, they have no humanity within them. Sounds like something Hamas would say only worded a tiny bit differently? Well it’s a muddy battle people and guess what: both sides are equally filthy and corrupt as hell at this point.

So when will these “leaders” grow up? When will they stop acting like insolent children who can shirk their responsibilities to negotiate a peace between themselves and their de-facto eternal rivals? When will they stop sending their young people to die for no purpose, when no progress is made.

Does Israel have a right to exist? Yes. And they’re not going anywhere, and any cause that thinks it can undermine that state is barking mad. They must be acknowledged and dealt with as any other nation.

Do the Palestinians who once lived in the land that is now Israel have a right to a state free of encroachment by lawless Israeli settlers who seem to believe them subhuman in some way? Yes. They’re not going anywhere either, and somebody must permit them to restore some dignity to their shattered society.

Both sides need to learn to police themselves to stop offending the other, and that starts with dialog.

So remember this, when you hear “we will not negotiate;” you just got more of the same. The whole thing isn’t going to blow up in our faces, it will just keep on festering as long as these foreign-money drenched, corrupted governments on both sides find it in their personal interest to keep not negotiating, and their people are convinced of racist ideas that the other side is somehow less human than they are.