This piece prompted an invitation to the Japanese Center for Conflict Prevention's 3rd Annual Symposium on World Conflict

In France a newly released best-selling novel, Rever la Palestine (Dream of Palestine), compassionately portrays a young Palestinian who becomes a suicide bomber. The author, a fifteen-year-old Egyptian named Randa Ghazi, who lives with her family in Italy, writes about a young Palestinian who fights 'bloodthirsty Jews, who assassinate children and old people, profane mosques, and rape Arab women.' Dream of Palestine is being touted as 'surprisingly mature' and 'a great text of suffering and hope.' One of the book's heroines calls for Jihad against the Jewish people who are 'a doomed people' and to 'kill all Israelis.' The main character is mentally hijacked and programmed 'to kill hundreds in his suicide bombing' and later does, along with five Israelis. Released to greet the world along with the Christmas season, and priced inexpensively, Dream of Palestine has been a quick sell in major bookstores in Paris. It is published by Flammarion, the third largest publishing house in France, and a subsidiary of the Italian media giant, Rizzoli Corriere della Sera, which also owns one of the largest Italian daily newspapers and Rizzoli bookstores in the United States.

And with this we see how committed the Palestinian people are to the peace process and how accommodating the French are to world peace.

The Palestinian’s leader, Yassar Arafat, has claimed for years that the Palestinian people want to embrace peace within their region yet year and year, week after week their secretly created suicide bombers wreak havoc on the civilians of Israel. Please note that I said civilians, not the Israeli military. The would-be Palestinian suicide bomber knows that the Israeli military would extinguish any threat posed to them by such an act resulting in the loss of only one human life, the suicide bomber’s. Instead, the cowardice of the Palestinian cause defines itself with self-anointed clerics who advocate violence and martyrdom, the killing of the innocents and the terrorizing of the common man all under the guise of religion.

Very simply stated, the Koran does not condone the killing of innocents in the name of Allah. It’s a fact and it is indisputable. It does not direct all of the followers of Islam to slaughter those that do not believe in the Islamic faith. Quite to the contrary, it philosophizes the conversion of people to the religion not unlike the Catholic faith. What is happening today to the Islamic faith, at the hands of these "clerics” is a bastardization of the intent of its scriptures not unlike the bastardization of the Catholic faith during The Crusades. Looking back at history we now see how amazingly wrong The Crusades were. It is easier to disseminate the truth with the passing of time. I also believe those who come after us will understand the true desire of these so-called "clerics” to be a lust for power by those who would be too weak to lead in the modern world. They lead their people into the past because they are afraid their status would decline if they walked into the future and what better way to maintain their power than to keep their people from growing as human beings using fright tactics, religion and rhetoric to scare their people into living in the past?

Then we have the French and the Italian companies who would allow this venom to be published all in the name of business. It boggles the mind. As we listen to the United Nations plead for sanity in the Middle East we see France, one of the UN Security Counsel members, hosting an Italian-held company that would publish, distribute and profit from a piece of literature that is being used to insight violence, to promote terrorism and to justify what can only be described as an attempt at ethnic cleansing. Are we seeing these two countries aid the world community in the quest for peace or are we seeing these two countries hide behind the American principle of freedom of speech, something that their constitution-like documents chartering their existences do not even address, for the sake of profit and corporate gain; for greed’s sake? While these two governments spout their opposition to the atrocities that are happening in the Middle East they silently condone their own people’s evolving hatred toward cultures other than their own. While one voice of the two-headed beast cries for peace the other is condoning the violence that creates the turmoil. As has been displayed in the past, these two countries will do anything and say anything to make sure that their best interests are secured before the security of the rest of the world. We saw it as late as World War II* and we are seeing it again.

It is clear that in order to eliminate the tensions in the Middle East at least two things have to happen. First, the world has to expose the self-anointed Islamic clerics as the false prophets they really are. The world community must rescue those who have been mentally hijacked by those who are propagating hate and violence in the name of the very religion that they are bastardizing. And two, the world community must shun completely countries who would turn a blind eye to those who would profiteer from the misery and the murdering of others. It is only then that we, the citizens of the world will be able to start to correct the wrong that is happening at this very moment to the people of the Middle East, on both sides.

* This excludes those affiliated with the French Resistance who fought valiantly and bravely alongside those who conquered the Axis powers during World War II.

Frank Salvato is a political media consultant and the managing editor for The New Media Journal.us. He is a contributing writer for The Washington Dispatch, GOPUSA, OpinionEditorials, Men’s News Daily, Canada Free Press & AmericanDaily. His pieces are regularly featured in Townhall.com. He has appeared as a guest on The O’Reilly Factor, The Kevin Matthews Radio Show (Chicago) and The Brad Messer Radio Show (San Antonio). His pieces have been recognized by the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention and are occasionally featured in The Washington Times and The London Morning Paper as well as other national and international publications.