"Root causes" of root rot.

While most of the world is focused on what President Bush has done in Iraq, his resurrection of the dreaded "road map" to peace in the Middle East bears some attention. The best thing that Bush should have done would have been to forget about what the Saudis proposed as yet another draft for a two-state solution to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, Bush still doesn't get it, and his solution, and all other such solutions that do not address the underlying problem are doomed to failure.

The road to peace in the Middle East is filled with the potholes of racial hatred, blood libel, and distortions of reality that paint Jews as "brothers of pigs and monkeys," "Zionist Nazis," "blood suckers," "usurpers of Arab lands," and other epithets too terrible to print.

How can the world expect the seeds of peace to take root in the toxic soil of anti-Semitism?

If the quartet is serious about wanting peace, then they must do the following:

1. Insist that all countries and entities stop fomenting hatred towards Jews and stop spreading lies, distortions, and blood libels about Israel and the Jewish people.

2. Remove weapons and explosives from all Palestinian refugee camps (which have become armed fortresses). Remove all materials from these camps that promote hatred and violence against Jews (especially those given to Palestinian children), and remove any U.N. relief workers who have ties to terrorist groups.

3. Insist that the U.N. abide by its own resolutions which call for the cessation of hostilities towards Israel and which also identify the West Bank and Gaza as "disputed territories," not "Palestinian lands under Israeli occupation."

4. Insist that the U.N. and other countries of the world stop referring to the "1967 borders." These are armistice lines, not recognized borders of Israel because Arab countries have never recognized Israel. The U.N. resolutions called for the establishment of "secure and defensible borders," and the withdrawal from "some" of the disputed territories acquired by Israel in 1967 -- not "all" territories as so many claim.

5. Finally, the true agenda of Yasser Arafat's Fatah, Hezbollah, Al-Aksa, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and others has to be revealed and repudiated which is, and has always been, the destruction of Israel and the creation of a unified Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. Arafat nor anyone of the aforementioned groups will ever be satisfied with any plan that allows Jews to exist anywhere in the Middle East.

Peace cannot be achieved when the death and destruction of Jews are preached as the solution to all the ills of the world. The road map to peace will be a dead-end as long as hatred for Jews continues to be the driving force in the Middle East.