Today a friend forwarded me an email with a link to a Youtube video on “Muslim demographics” that appears to be viral at the moment, with over 5 million views so far:

Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims.

It’s a cleverly made piece of propaganda that paints a picture of a Europe in which Muslims become the majority of the population by or before 2050. However it did not clearly reference its sources, which (if you notice them at all) appear too small to be readable. It’s not clear who produced this video either.

Why do I call it propaganda? Because whoever made it, they did play fast and loose with the truth – Goebbels would have been proud of them. I will give you just a few examples.

They claimed that the average fertility of Muslim women in France was 8.1 children per woman, which would be about 4 times the French average. The fact is that most Muslims in France originated from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia or Turkey, countries whose average fertility rates are much lower than claimed for the Muslim immigrants.

Morocco 2.57
Algeria 1.82
Tunisia 1.73
Turkey 1.87

That doesn’t really make sense. It seems likely that fertility amongst immigrants would fall somewhere in between rates in their country of origin and of their new chosen home, but not some four times higher than either of them, as the makers of this propaganda video would have us believe.

Birth rates have been falling with rising living standards and education levels – not only in Europe, North America and Japan but also in Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, most of the Middle East and just about anywhere else. It’s a global trend: These days even the Islamic Republic of Iran, not exactly a bastion of Western liberalism, has a lower fertility rate than France. In fact sub-Saharan Africa is the only region worldwide that has bucked the trend, where fertility rates have remained consistently high. A large percentage of future Christian and Muslim worldwide population growth will come from that continent.

Another example is false claim in the video that Muslims make up 25% of the population of Belgium, when in fact they only reach that proportion in the city of Brussels, while they constitute a mere 4.0% of the population of Wallonia and 3.9% of the population of Flanders, the two major regions of the country. The national average is 6% – only one quarter of what the video claims. The video authors are off in a similar way in a similar claim about the Netherlands.

These and numerous other mistakes and inconsistencies are exposed and thoroughly refuted in an excellent post on the Tiny Frog blog. If anyone sends you a link to the “Muslim demographics” video, send them back a link to the facts!

Demographics and Politics

With falling birth rates in many developed countries and rising immigration that partly compensates for this, many people are afraid of their countries gradually losing their cultural identity. This fear is largely misplaced. When Polish workers came to the Ruhr area of Prussia in large numbers to work in coal mines in the 19th century, there were the same fears, but now their descendants are as German as anyone else and only the numerous Polish surnames in the phone books or local football (soccer) teams remind of the immigration. Likewise, Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Mexico faced a lot of hostility in the US around the turn of the 19th/20th century, but they integrated like Protestant immigrants before them and their descendants speak English like other Americans. With immigration patterns such as in Europe and the US, immigrant populations will largely assimilate within two or three generations, even if they may retain some elements of their parents’ and grandparents’ culture.

Unfortunately most people who have watched this propaganda video will not see the real facts any time soon. There is a good chance this video will have had an effect on them, sowing seeds of fear and mistrust that others will seek to exploit for political gains. Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ would have approved: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result,” he wrote. “It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.” (see Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich).

Whoever made this video does not care about the real numbers or facts, or they would not consistently get their facts wrong by such wide margins. What they are trying to do is to stoke fear. As one person wrote who forwarded the link to my friend: “WATCH THIS AND BE AFRAID – VERY AFRAID.” People who are afraid are easier to manipulate: They will want to give power to whoever is promising to protect them from the perceived danger. In 1933 Hitler assumed total power in Germany after scaring the country of a supposedly imminent communist coup (by having his troopers secretly set fire to the Reichstag). Look what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Co. managed to get away with when Americans got really frightened after 9/11! Fear is a powerful weapon at the hands of those unscrupulous enough to exploit it.

When Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe unleashed a wave of terror on his fellow Zimbabweans after his ZANU-PF party was soundly defeated in the March 29 elections and he himself gained fewer votes than opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, he was calculating that he could still steal another election and add another five years to his 28 years in power.

Mr Tsvangirai’s recent withdrawal from the run-off election to save the lives of his supporters, followed by his advice to MDC supporters to even vote for Mugabe if necessary to avoid paying with their lives for an honest vote, all but ensures that Mugabe will be soon be proclaimed the winner by his own officials. However, it will be a Pyrrhic victory, because the means by which it will have been achieved will have been so extreme that Mugabe has destroyed all chances of being able to claim legitimacy for his government.

For a start, according to the Zimbabwean election law, since officially neither of the candidates gained 50% or more of the votes, a run-off had to be held within 21 days . That did not happen. It took an astounding 5 weeks for the results to even be announced, raising suspicions of last minute ballot-stuffing to push Tsvangirai’s result under the 50% margin. When the government then announced the run-off for June 27, almost another two months later, it clearly violated that law, under which, if no run-off takes place within three weeks, the highest placed candidate from the first election automatically is the winner (see two papers on the website of the South Africa Litigation Centre for details).

Legally, Morgan Tsvangirai, who according to the official count got 47.8% of the vote compared to Mugabe’s 43.2%, became the elected president of Zimbabwe in April, when the 21 days expired without a re-run.

Mugabe used the three months between the two elections for a war on anyone opposed to his rule. Whole villages and neighbourhoods were forcibly marched to public assemblies where known or suspected MDC-supporters were viciously tortured and mutilated in front of the stunned crowds. Some 200,000 Zimbabweans are reported to having fled their homes to escape torture or death.

One of the most recent victims of the terror campaign was the wife of the newly elected mayor of the capital of Harare, who was kidnapped by ZANU-PF supporters along with her four year old son. Her battered dead body was found later, so badly disfigured that her family found it hard to identify her.

The world has finally taken notice of what’s going on. Presidents and well known voices from Africa, ranging from Kenyan Prime Minister, Raila Odinga to ANC leader Jacob Zuma have condemned Mugabe’s campaign of terror in no uncertain terms. An open letter signed by dozens of former heads of states in Africa, including several former close allies of Mugabe, called for an end to the violence.

Mugabe will survive this sham election only as a pariah, unwelcome anywhere in Africa or most of the rest of the world (North Korea might still support him, given that he relied on North Korean instructors for his infamous Fifth Brigade during atrocities in the 1980s). It looks like African leaders have been shocked into breaking any remaining political ties.

One notable exception is still South African president Thabo Mbeki, who finds himself increasingly isolated in his own party for it.

Zimbabwe is at a breaking point. Literally anything could happen now. It is not clear how a government of national unity can come about. Will it take a military intervention by fellow AU or SADC members to convince the hardliners around Mugabe, the JOC, that there is no way for them to hang on to power? There are moderate elements in ZANU-PF who would negotiate a change of power, but they don’t control the army and the thugs. Will it come to a Rwanda-style genocide before regime change?

The person, next to Mugabe himself, who carries the biggest responsibility for the further hellish chaos that Zimbabwe could descend into is Thabo Mbeki. If he recognizes Morgan Tsvangirai’s right to form a new unity government to organise a transfer of power in Zimbabwe, based on the outcome of the legitimate election results in March, there is no way Mugabe could hang on much longer.

Since the 1950 the ANC had struggled against racist violence for the principle of One Man, One Vote. This elementary right has now been stolen from Zimbabweans by Mugabe, who says “only God” could remove him from power. It reminds me of Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith, who stubbornly said that “not in a thousand years” did he believe in majority rule in Zimbabwe. Mugabe has become what he hated most, and worse.

In the 1970s, when the illegitimate minority government of then Rhodesia was fighting a war to maintain its racist system, it relied primarily on South African support. The sudden withdrawal of South African police troops from “Rhodesia” and later a cutback in fuel supplies was the beginning of the end for the white regime. Mugabe can not go it alone any more than Smith could before him. If anything, Zimbabwe is in a much weaker situation economically than Rhodesia was then.

I am hoping that the second liberation of Zimbabwe will become a watershed event for democracy and human rights in Africa, a continent that has suffered so much already.

• Zimbabwe: Mugabe trying to torture his way to victory
• Zimbabwe: Is Mugabe Blackmailing Mbeki? (The Reporter/Botswana)
• Free Zimbabwe on WorldTV.com
• Robert Mugabe’s militia burn opponent’s wife alive

A recently released report by Human Rights Watch about the situation in Zimbabwe before the second round of a presidential election makes for grim reading. The eyewitness reports of brutal beatings, torture and mutilations of suspected supporters of the oppositional Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) show in sickening detail how president Robert Mugabe is unleashing a campaign of terror on his own people to scare them into re-electing him, especially in rural areas that used to be bastions of support for the ruling ZANU-PF party.

28 years after Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain under black majority rule, Mugabe has squandered the respect and admiration that he had earned as a fighter against Apartheid during the 1960s and 70s. Now he is only fighting to preserve power and privileges for himself and his cronies in the army and police. His wife is known as “Gucci Grace” or the “First Shopper”. Many farms taken from commercial farmers were distributed to senior members of ZANU-PF.

It all could have been so different. At Independence, Zimbabwe had one of the best infrastructures in the region and had a well-developed agricultural and mining industry. There was racial reconciliation and many whites stayed on after Apartheid ended. Now one quarter of the population has fled abroad (mostly to South Africa), inflation is sky-high and people are starving.

Already a few years after Independence a brutal counter-insurrection campaign in the southern region of Matabeleland known as Gukurahundi was a first ominous sign how unscrupulous Mugabe could act if he saw a challenge to his power. At least ten thousand people were killed when former members of the ZIPRA guerilla force of rival nationalist party ZAPU and other members of the southern Ndebele tribe were hunted down by the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe Army, given carte blanche to violate human rights on a massive scale with impunity. The campaign ended in 1987, when ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo agreed to his party effectively being swallowed up by ZANU.

What I find most disheartening about the situation in Southern Africa is the hands-off attitude of fellow African leaders such as South African president Thabo Mbeki. When black democracy activists were persecuted by the white Apartheid regime in South Africa, all of Africa provided support to their brothers and sisters in need, often at great cost to themselves (such as in Angola and Mozambique, where South Africa supported rebel groups to destabilize these countries). Now that Africans are being tortured, beaten and killed by fellow Africans, many of these African leaders are turning a blind eye.

The victims of torture and violence at the hand of Mugabe’s gangs of thugs deserve solidarity every bit as much as the victims of the South African police and army did before Liberation. By betraying powerless Zimbabwean victims, the current leadership in South Africa and other nations in the region is betraying the ideals of the generations who fought and eventually brought down Apartheid.

What you can do: Find the address of the embassy of the Republic of South Africa in your country and write a letter or a fax to the Ambassador to urge President Thabo Mbeki to use his influence with the government of Zimbabwe to get them to halt the violence now!

Further reading:

• “Bullets for Each of You”
  State-Sponsored Violence since Zimbabwe’s March 29 Elections (HRW)
• Confessions of a Zimbabwe torturer (BBC)
• Mandela Envy (Slate)

For months there has been talk about an Obama-Clinton or Clinton-Obama “dream ticket” (in the words of its proponents), that supposedly would draw in strong support from all the electoral groups that supported either Democratic candidate. It now looks unlikely to happen, for a number of good reasons.

As former President Jimmy Carter points out, it would be more likely to combine the perceived weaknesses of both candidates than their strengths:

“That would just accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates,” Carter told the Guardian, saying that both candidates’ vulnerabilities could overshadow that the ticket if the two team up together.

“If you take that 50 percent who just don’t want to vote for Clinton and add it to whatever element there might be who don’t think Obama is white enough or old enough or experienced enough or because he’s got a middle name that sounds Arab, you could have the worst of both worlds,” he said.

In late 2007 Hillary Clinton was widely seen as by far the most likely choice of the Democrats for the presidential election. Then came the primaries and she stumbled. Clinton would have us believe that she was ready for the highest office in the US “from day one”, but she wasn’t ready when Super Tuesday didn’t deliver a knockout blow to Obama as she had expected.

Despite being accused of lacking in political experience, Obama had managed to recruit and build an effective organisation that delivered a string of 11 victories in a row and he out-fundraised Clinton.

After she hit her drought, Clinton kept reinventing herself until she finally managed to find an image that resonated with enough voters. Meanwhile Obama remained himself.

What’s more, he showed class and character thoughout those months, from when he addressed racial issues after the Pastor Jeremiah Wright controversy to partially accomodating Clinton in her unreasonable demands about the disputed primaries in Florida and Michigan. I shook my head in disbelief when Clinton claimed all the Michigan votes for herself, even though voters in Michigan had not even been able to vote for Obama, as he had not been on the ballot, following rules agreed upon by all candidates beforehand.

She was fighting to win at all costs, prepared to take no prisoners. Even when Obama had reached the majority of pledged delegates and super delegates, she did not have the grace to concede his victory and join hands for November. She had to be pushed by senior party leaders.

If there is one thing Barack Obama is good at, it is listening to advice from experienced people. I trust he will listen to those who understand it’s time to turn a new page for a Democratic party no longer under the spell of the Clintons and their political and personal baggage.

Links:

• Carter says unity ticket would be ‘worst mistake’
• Even In Defeat, It’s All About Her

When Japanese suicide pilots (known as kamikaze in Western countries or tokkōtai in Japanese) bid farewell to their comrades before their final missions, they would say: “See you at Yasukuni!”

A bronze statue of a tokkōtai pilot at Yasukuni commemorates the numerous young men who died this way during the final months of the already lost war.

For close to 140 years, Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo has been a place where the souls of dead soldiers were venerated. Neither a secular war memorial like numerous tombs of the unknown soldier or national cemeteries, nor a Shinto shrine like any other, it is a place of hero worship and historical white-wash. A museum on the shrine grounds promotes a revisionist version of history, claiming that Japan was not an aggressor but was fighting in self-defence and to liberate Asia from Western colonialism. In the parallel universe of that museum, the rape of Nanjing in China that cost 100,000-300,000 lives never happened. The more than 2.4 million souls whose names on the shrine’s books also include the names of 14 class A war criminals sentenced to death in the Tokyo trials after World War 2. These criminals were originally excluded, but then enshrined decades later. It was at that point that Emperor Hirohito (referred to as “the late Emperor Showa” by the Japanese) stopped visiting the shrine. His son, the present emperor has not visited it either.

In 1945 the Occupation administration issued a ban against the Japanese government forcing citizens to attend state -sponsored Shinto rituals and against promoting militarism. Four years later the Japanese government then issued a ban against school excursions by public schools to Yasukuni and other Shinto shrines for the purpose of worship.

On May 23, 2008 the Japanese government declared this ban null and void, explaining that the original occupation ban had expired when Japan regained its sovereignty in the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty and that it was now OK for schools to organize trips to Yasukuni.

In other words, because an American prohibition against violating the separation of church and state and against militaristic propaganda was no longer in force, both were now apparently acceptable as far as the Japanese government was concerned.

On occasion of some spring cleaning in my office I stumbled across an old copy of The Economist (April 5-11, 2003) published as the US forces were marching on Bagdad during the invasion that eventually swept Saddam Hussein from power.

I was opposed to that war at the time (it’s not hindsight, you can ask my wife!) and still am, but with the benefit of five years of experience of how things actually turned out it is interesting what the editors had to say then. I still respect the Economist as (overall) a relatively unbiased source of information though I’m no longer a subscriber.

The defect of these comparisons [with Vietnam and Palestine] is that Iraq is nothing like Vietnam, not much like Palestine or Afghanistan, and, on present evidence, no quagmire. (…) In Vietnam the Americans fought for ten years. The Soviet army spent ten years in Afghanistan. This war entered its third week with the Americans battering through Iraq’s Republican Guard divisions to the gates of Bagdad. At this rate, it will be a surprise if the Americans have to fight for ten weeks, let alone ten years. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has lasted for 36 years. If America has its way, its occupation of Iraq is more likely to last for fewer than 36 months. And there is no reason why America should not have its way: unlike Israel and the Palestinians, America and Iraq have no territorial quarrel. America’s stated aim is to remove the regime and its mass-killing weapons, allow the Iraqis to replace their dictatorship with a representative government, and then depart.

Well, those 36 months (3 years) already expired more than two years ago and no departure is in sight yet. Even someone who would (if elected to the highest office in the country) withdraw the troops after roughly twice that time has to face accusations of wanting to “cut and run”, while John McCain is talking about staying in Iraq for a hundred years.

Not only the time scales have shifted: Before President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his country was the only remaining superpower, having lost the Vietnam war but won the cold war. Following September 11 his people and country had an enormous amount of good will on its side from people and governments all over the world. Now the country is bleeding hundreds of billions of tax dollars and hundreds of lives every year in an undeclared war it can’t win. The Iraq war is deeply unpopular at home and abroad, not to speak of Iraq, where tens of thousands have died in the resulting civil war and “ethnic cleansing”.

The biggest winner of the US effort in Iraq so far has been the unfriendly regime in next door Iran, which saw one of its biggest enemies destroyed at the hands of the US, allowing its closest friends and allies to take over in Iraq.

I am looking forward to a new leadership in the White House that will have the courage to face reality: When you’ve taken a wrong turn you don’t then “stay the course”, especially when you’re heading into a dead end.

Recommended reading:

• Cut and Run? You Bet. (Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, Foreign Policy, May/June 2006)

“You have shown yourself unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women.” These are the words with which murdered former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko accused Russian president Vladimir Putin in a letter dictated on his deathbed. “You succeeded in silencing one man but the whole of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”

Like the murder of Litvinenko’s friend, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the poison murder of the former agent is unlikely to be solved any time soon. Though the Russian authorities, which probably hold the key to the mystery, have declared their cooperation with the British police, they also emphasized that only they will be able to interrogate any suspects on Russian soil, or make arrests. They categorically stated that no suspects will be extradited to Britain, where the murder took place and of which Litvinenko had become a citizen. The only place any Russian suspects could be tried, according to the Russians, is in Russia. Already there are signs that the Russian authorities are not fully cooperating with British law enforcement, for example by refusing to question some parties the British were interested in talking to.

Putin denied any involvement in the two murders. That was to be expected, whether it was the truth or not.

Disingenuously Putin suggested, Politkovskaya’s death could have been the work of his political opponents in next-door Ukraine, to smear his name. The suggestion is somewhat ironic. Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko himself fell seriously ill after being poisoned with hard-to-detect but highly toxic dioxin by pro-Russian members of the Ukrainian security forces. If Litvinenko and Politkovskaya were indeed killed on behalf of Putin’s enemies, one would expect Russian authorities to be most keen and cooperative to track down their murderers. Yet so far there is no indication of that.

The nature of the poison used against Litvinenko, Polonium-210, makes anything but a state-sponsored assassination attempt unlikely. It is sold by commercial suppliers only in tiny quantities and the dose used would have cost $10 million. Arguably the question is not if Litvinenko was poisoned by current or former members of a state secret service, but whether Putin authorized the murder or not.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks against the USA Putin won praise as an ally in the so-called “War on Terror”. He let the US use airbases in former Soviet republics in Central Asia during the war against the Afghan Taliban regime. He maintains personal friendships with George W. Bush, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former Italian premier Berlusconi.

His political friends in the West and also largely the Western media chose to turn a blind eye to Russian atrocities and massive human rights violations in Chechnya. Torture, arbitrary detention and “disappearances” (extrajudicial killings) are widespread. Russian forces act with total impunity. They literally get away with murder. A report by Human Rights Watch wrote in 2004:

Unchecked patterns of abuse by Russia’s forces in Chechnya will eventually affect the rest of Russian society. Tens of thousands of police and security forces have done tours of duty in Chechnya, after which they return to their home regions, bringing with them learned patterns of brutality and impunity. Several Russian human rights groups have begun to note a “Chechen syndrome” among police who served in Chechnya—a particular pattern of physical abuse and other dehumanizing treatment of people in custody. Russians already face serious risk of torture in police custody. The Chechnya experience is thus undermining efforts to promote the rule of law in Russia’s criminal justice system.

Putin ascended to power on the promise of a quick victory in Chechnya, yet despite of (or perhaps because of) ruthless methods Chechens still resist Russian occupation six years later. If anything can be learned from this period it is that Putin has few scruples, as long as he can get away with it. When the Chechen conflict erupted into a war again as Putin rose to power, Russia was gripped by fear from a series of unsolved bombings of apartment blocks which were blamed on Chechens, even though later security forces were caught red handed with explosives in the basement of one building. Anna Politkovskaya was investigating these bombings.

The murder of Litvinenko made a lot more headlines than that of Politkovskaya, not just because of the unusual choice of method but also because it took place in a Western country.

Probably the most famous of all foreign murders of an enemy of a Russian leader was that of Leon Trotsky. Exiled in 1929, the revolutionary and writer continued his opposition to Stalin, denouncing his policies in numerous books and articles. Finally in August 1940 he was slain by Ramon Mercader, an agent of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), at his home in Mexico City using an ice axe. His murderer, a Spanish citizen who used a fake Canadian passport and name, was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Stalin denied any involvement. Mercader’s real identity was not discovered until 1953. Upon his release from prison in 1960 he left Mexico and went to revolutionary Cuba. Until his death in Havana in 1978 he lived in Cuba and the USSR, where he was honoured as a “Hero of the Soviet Union”. His involvement with the KGB was not officially revealed until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

While it took over half a century until written proof became available, Mercader’s hero status in the Soviet block from after his prison release had already made clear that Mercader had murdered Trotsky on Stalin’s orders.

In a similar vain, it may take a long time before all facts about Litvinenko, Politkovskaya and Putin get documented, a lack of cooperation from the Russian authorities will make it clear whose interests were served through these unscrupulous murders.

In February 2004 exiled former Chechen president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was killed by a car bomb explosion in Qatar. His killers, Russian agents Anatoly Belaskhov and Vasily Bogachev were sentenced to life in prison by a court but later transferred to Russia, which had put intense pressure on the small Gulf state while denying any involvement in the crime. At home the murderers were soon released from prison. In the summer of 2006 the Russian parliament passed a law that explicitly permits foreign assassinations if signed off by the Russian president.

It would be far easier to believe in Putin’s protestations of his innocence if it wasn’t for the track record of his regime in the past 6 years. Whether Putin gave direct orders or failed to supervise his security forces, it is he as the commander in chief who bears the responsibility for these deaths, as he does for the suffering and deaths of numerous others in Chechnya and other parts of the Russian sphere of influence. Those who still treat his rogue regime as a valuable friend and ally must share this grave responsibility.

• Articles by Anna Politkovskaya
• Dispatches from a savage war

The Old Testament rule of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” is often quoted to expose someone who is merciless to those he regards as his enemies. It is quite a different kind of justice to the one preached by Jesus when he asked his followers to “turn the other cheek” when someone slaps them in the face.

What is often forgotten is that even this brutal “an eye for an eye” rule was meant to prevent escalating vendettas, where two families would inflict ever increasing punishments on each other to exact revenge for previous misdeeds by members of the other family. Without it the violence could escalate without limits, until one side is wiped out.

I can’t help but think of this ancient concept of justice when I watch the news from Israel and Lebanon in these days of war. As I write this, over 50 Israelis have been killed since the beginning of the war, while numbers in Lebanon are anywhere from 500 to 750 dead, depending if bodies suspected to still be buried under collapsed buildings are counted or not. The vast majority of these victims are civilians, about one third of them are children.

It is obvious in this conflict that Israel has overwhelming firepower, but it can not use that firepower to win itself peace. I believe it is doing exactly what Hezbollah wants it to do, responding to a calculated provocation in way that will fan the flames of hatred against Israel in the Arab and Muslim world. 1 in 7 Lebanese is now a refugee. Billions of dollars in damage to housing, infrastructure and the whole economy will throw back Lebanon by years.

An excessive response that punishes Lebanese civilians, including many children, for the violence of Hezbollah will make it harder for both sides to speak to each other. A durable peace can only be based on a negotiated compromise.