What is the essential requirement for a peacemaker?

Remove the beam out of one’s eye, as Jesus commands

“My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and unifier.”

— President Donald J. Trump[1]

“Dear President Trump,… All the Arab and Islamic countries, as well as the Palestinian Authority, accept the terms of the Arab Peace Initiative to end hostilities and establish relations with Israel. One hundred and forty-nine countries recognise the Palestinian state. Please make your country the 150th. No peace in the Middle East will be realised without addressing this noble issue justly and fairly.

Be remembered as the peacemaker.”

— Prince Turki Al Faisal, former Saudi Arabia ambassador to Washington and London[2]

_________________________

i]

In his inaugural address following taking the oath of office as the 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump expressed his aspiration in being a “peacemaker and unifier” and wished this would be his proudest legacy. Trump’s returning to the White House after being denied his second term by the 2020 rigged election was a feat only the second time in history, the first was that of Grover Cleveland elected to serve two nonconsecutive terms, as the 22nd president after the 1884 election and the 24th president after the 1892 election. No contemporary observer of modern twentieth century American politics and the presidency therefore has any reference by which to gauge or predict how President Trump intends to rein in and defy the Deep State on the issue of war and peace. It might be noted in passing President-elect Trump did not place his hand on the Bible as customary that Melania Trump, the First Lady, held for him when taking his oath of office presided by the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Whether this was an omission by error or design may likely be debated in future to fathom the president’s deliberations and policy choices, as his tenure in office unfolds.

Be that as it may, Trump’s aspiration expressed during his inaugural address to be remembered as a peacemaker unmistakably recalled, though unstated, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, murdered by government agents of the Deep State – (or as President Eisenhower described the entity as Military-Industrial Complex in his farewell address of 17 January 1961) – for his efforts in laying the foundations of peaceful coexistence with the former Soviet Union following the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and, among other issues, requiring Israel to come clean on its hidden efforts to become a nuclear weapon state.[3] And it is this unstated reference to Kennedy that, I believe, needs examining to assess if Trump has the requisite character for truly belonging in the company of peacemakers, of whom Jesus said they would be called children of God. It might be too early to conclude his aspiration is merely rhetorical and yet, though his most loyal supporters and most people, Americans and non-Americans, wish him success in the world afflicted with wars, his record as the 45th and in beginning his term as the 47th president offers sufficient insight to recognize he is ethically, intellectually, and temperamentally deficient in being a pale shadow of Kennedy. Nevertheless, there is always that remote possibility he might surprise everyone, including himself, if he rises to be the second coming of Kennedy. Here I offer a perspective of a Canadian of Muslim faith and a student of American politics and history a comparative assessment of the 47th and the 35th presidents, since what is at stake is the ebb and flow of Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians with more wars of America’s choice in West Asia/Middle East at the behest of Israel and the Israeli lobby in the United States.

ii]

In his inaugural address President Trump mentioned the failed attempt in assassinating him last summer. He said, “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again (emphasis added).” And he went on to state, “[W]e will again build the strongest military the world has ever seen. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end—and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

It is clearly indicated by the president’s words that he believes the hands of providence protected him for a purpose, and the fulfilment of that purpose requires of him to rebuild America’s formidable military power to pursue peace with strength. Trump further stated that under his leadership there will be no “forever wars,” in other words boutique wars or wars of choice that America has engaged in since 1945. And that he will end the wars in which America is presently involved, in Ukraine against Russia and in West Asia in support of Israel against Palestinians in Israeli occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

As the 47th president, Trump has only one term in office and the clock began to wind down the remaining number of days of his allotted four years in the White House following his inauguration. President Putin of Russia stated soon after Trump began his second term, “I’ve always had a businesslike, pragmatic and even trusting relationship with the current president. And I can’t help but agree that if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, the crisis in Ukraine might not have emerged in 2022.”[4] Trump often said during his predecessor’s term in office that he would immediately terminate the war in Ukraine on his return. What Trump did not say was he would be prepared to accommodate the terms Putin had laid forth for ending the war, but not a negotiated ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine freezing the conflict as in the Korean peninsula. Regardless of how the Ukraine war ends, whether Trump recognizes the abject situation of the Ukrainian forces on the battlefields and accepts Putin’s terms to end it, or walks away leaving it to the European members of NATO pick up the wages of a lost war, or driven to collapse Ukraine surrenders to Russia, this war has reached its terminal phase. Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and retired Major in the U.S. Marine Corps, recently noted, “either Trump has a viable strategy for bringing the conflict in Ukraine to an end that addresses Russian reality and sensibilities, or Russia will finish the war on its own terms.”[5]

The Ukraine war will end sooner than later, if not it will greatly impede Trump’s “Make America Great Again” domestic agenda. But this is not the case with the Gaza genocide of Palestinians by Israelis and, consequently, there is no end on the horizon for the conflict in West Asia. The wars of the Middle East in the post-Cold War era have been driven by Neocons as “Israel First” ideologues in Washington. Wesley Clark, retired U.S. Army General who served as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe from 1997 to 2000, in an interview in 2019 spoke about how some weeks after 9/11 when visiting the Pentagon after his retirement to see Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, and Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary, was told of the decision made that America would be going to war against seven countries of the greater Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran) and force regime change.[6]

These wars, except the war planned against Iran that is still awaited according to the Pentagon memo Clark mentioned in his interview, were wars of choice or so-called pre-emptive wars sought by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, and pushed by Neocons holding key national security positions in the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barrack Hussein Obama. During his first administration Trump denounced these wars of choice in the Middle East as “wasteful”, citing figures in the range of $7 trillion without bringing any benefit for America.[7]

Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, an astute observer of American foreign policy while maintaining extensive contacts with UN member states through his advisory role on matters of UN sustainable development agenda, was invited by Cambridge Union Society in October 2024 to speak about global affairs and during Q&A with students spoke about these American wars of choice prodded by Netanyahu.[8] Sachs called out Netanyahu a warmonger and someone who is “a dark, deep son of a bitch.”[9] The clip of this remark was posted by President-elect Trump in his social media platform Truth Social, which went viral around the world.[10] The Truth Social post suggested that Trump agreed with Sachs’s view of Netanyahu and, it seemed pointedly, the Israeli prime minister was not invited to attend the president’s second inauguration on January 20.

Yet two weeks later on February 4 Netanyahu, despite being indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza genocide, became the first foreign leader invited to meet with Trump in the White House. This invitation for Netanyahu, a fugitive with an arrest warrant for him from the ICC, and accompanying pictures from the White House such as the one with the president holding the chair for “a dark, deep son of a bitch” to take his seat, sent a message around the world leaving no doubt there was no daylight between the Trump administration and the Biden administration in their complicity with the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians by Israelis in the occupied territories.

In meeting with the press in the White House, Netanyahu by his side, Trump announced his plans for Gaza. He spoke of Gaza as “a demolition site. This is just a demolition site.”[11] His plans are for turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”[12] over mass graves of children without pausing or blinking that the man responsible for making Gaza a demolition site was standing besides him. Here is a partial report of the meeting taken from the American daily online journal Zero Hedge:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was all smiles as he visited the White House and met with President Trump in the Oval Office Tuesday afternoon, especially given Trump said many things in terms of the future of Gaza that the Israeli leader would welcome.

Trump in an exchange with reporters while sitting next to ‘Bibi’ continued pressing the idea that Palestinians should be relocated out of Gaza. “There’s hardly a building standing, and the ones that are are going to collapse. You can’t live in Gaza right now. And I think we need another location,” Trump said, echoing prior comments.

Trump stoked further controversy by claiming Palestinians would “love to leave” Gaza – comments which have already been condemned by many pundits as tantamount to an ethnic cleansing campaign. Arab leaders too have blasted any plan which would see a mass exodus or removal of Palestinians to neighboring countries.

“Who would want to go back?” Trump posited during the sit-down with Netanyahu. Indeed the place has been leveled, but as the ceasefire has held there’s been evidence of a mass return of tens of thousands of Palestinians to their largely destroyed communities in the northern Gaza Strip.

“It would be my hope that we could do something really nice where they would not want to return,” Trump reasoned, despite the current Israel-Hamas truce calling for future reconstruction of the Strip.

“It doesn't have to be one area, but you take certain areas and you build really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like someplace where they can live and not die,” Trump said.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Mr. Trump said. “We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job. Do something different.”

“Just can't go back,” he continued. “If you go back, it's gonna end up the same way it has for a hundred years.” – CBS (emphases given).[13]

A reporter asked, “Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, you are talking tonight about the United States taking over a sovereign territory. What authority would allow you to do that?” And Trump’s answer was a non-answer, “I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East. And everybody I’ve spoken to – this was not a decision made lightly. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent in a really magnificent area that nobody would know.”[14] But by what authority – would it be that of the UN or unilaterally based on American might – could such a scheme be proposed and implemented? And to this question there was no answer given. The President was also disingenuous about Arab leaders in the region who, without exception, had declined any part in enabling him to implement this preposterous unlawful scheme. The Saudi foreign ministry swiftly responded rejecting any attempts on displacing Palestinians from Gaza, and reiterated the kingdom’s long-standing policy that there would be no normalization without the establishment of a Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel.[15]

President Trump was asked, “How many people are you thinking need to leave Gaza?”, and he replied, “All of them. Probably a million seven, maybe a million eight.”[16] The figure cited, likely provided by Israeli sources, was an admission by Trump that the genocidal beast of the Jewish state, the IDF, ethnically cleansed or massacred an estimated 500,000 children, women and men in less than fifteen months in Gaza. This figure of half million Palestinians missing and/or dead is derived when “all of them” amounting to between 1.7 and 1.8 million Gazans, is deducted from the 2023 population figure of 2,226,544 for Gaza provided by the internationally acknowledged Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.[17]

The announcements by President Trump of taking over Gaza and removing the population followed by joint press conference with Netanyahu were an astounding display of callous disregard for victims of Israeli massacre. It was a grisly performance by an American president, either lacking in self-awareness or with the intention to shock, as he unveiled his plans accompanied by the leader of a genocidal state indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity to remove a people brutalized and under occupation from their land without consulting them or seeking their consent and in violation of international law. Moreover, such a policy of forceful removal by American soldiers of Palestinians from their land, if this comes to pass, would be further proof, in addition to the inventory of armaments, munitions and diplomatic support given to Netanyahu, of American complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

iii]

The world witnessed, as President Trump announced that America would take ownership and complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, what many have known for past many decades that the United States of America has morphed into a Pharaonic leviathan and acts with total disregard of anyone standing in its way. America is a gargantuan cyclop self-absorbed in its own egomania in terms of American exceptionalism. Trump wilfully declined to mask America’s complicity in Israeli genocide in Gaza with any gloss of moral hypocrisy except for the discredited ritual reference to the outbreak on October 7, and that Hamas “kidnapped, tortured, raped and slaughtered innocent men, women, children and even little babies.”[18] Yoav Gallant, former Israeli defence minister and indicted war criminal with arrest warrant for him issued by the ICC contrary to Trump repeating the debunked Israeli narrative, acknowledged “ordering the army to use the Hannibal Doctrine to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers during the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023.”[19] American presidents, and this is not a breaking news, have lied to their people as most politicians do, but Trump lying is in a category of its own of a Niagara of lies and platitudes he spouts and bombastic superlatives of all things he does.

Hamas outbreak on October 7 neither came as a bolt from the blue, nor took Netanyahu and his ministers by surprise. Netanyahu was warned by his intelligence people, as he was warned by Egyptian intelligence monitoring activities inside the vast open air prison for Gazans, that “something big” was to unfold.[20] The warnings were ignored so that the anticipated attack would provide the pretext for ethnic cleansing of Gaza. The breakout by Hamas on the fiftieth anniversary of the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war – also known as the Yom Kippur war and the Ramadan war – was tactically and strategically akin to the spring raid, known as the Tet Offensive, by North Vietnamese forces and Vietcong guerrillas inside South Vietnam’s capital city, Saigon, which took the local forces and Americans by surprise on 30-31 January 1968. The Tet Offensive was defeated, but it changed the trajectory of the American war in Vietnam and southeast Asia eventually forcing America’s total withdrawal from South Vietnam at the end of April 1975. Hamas breakout of Gaza gave the cover to Netanyahu’s government in unleashing the IDF’s genocidal assault on the Gaza population. In the special session of the Security Council on Gaza on 24 October 2023 UN Secretary-General António Guterres, candidly pointed out,

It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing (emphases added).[21]

At the White House press conference on February 4, Trump was asked, “Mr. President, you just said that you think all the Palestinians should be relocated to other countries. Does that mean that you do not support the two-state solution?” Trump replied, “It doesn’t mean anything about a two-state or a one-state or any other state.”[22] An ambiguous response to a straight-forward question, as Trump gave, is the art of omission. His signature policy for “normalization” of Arab-Israeli conflict, instead of bringing about the “final settlement” that had been the stated objective of previous American administrations since the aftermath of the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and of which he remains most proud was “Abraham Accords” of 2020. It was a policy set for “normalization” of politics through achieving mutual understanding and coexistence among states by “establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and its neighbours in the region under the principles of the Abraham Accords.”[23] The Arab states that signed the Accords with Israel before Trump left office in January 2021 were Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Morocco and Sudan. But the most sought Arab state that declined to sign the Accords was Saudi Arabia.

The Accords was designed to finesse the two-state solution by deliberate omission of any reference to Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority; if Saudi Arabia signed Abraham Accords setting the stage for other non-Arab Muslim states to follow as signatories in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel, the two-state solution would have become moot and erased as irrelevant in any further discussion/negotiation in the region or at the UN. Trump’s remarks at the White House press conference with Netanyahu could only be viewed in West Asia and across the Global South that his policy of “normalization” conceived within the framework of Abraham Accords meant “normalization” of Israeli genocide in Gaza followed very likely by the same two-steps, ethnic cleansing and genocide, in the occupied territories of the West Bank. And the announced manifest threat of severely sanctioning UN related institutions and their personnel investigating and indicting Israelis for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which Trump imposed on the ICC and its chief prosecutor Karim Khan.[24]

Saudi Arabia did not sign Abraham Accords, since it is bound by the Arab Peace Initiative (API) adopted in the Arab League Summit of 27-28 March 2002 at the initiative of the then Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia who became the Saudi monarch (2005-15) on the death of his predecessor King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz. The API set the terms for a full and final settlement of relations between Israel and Arab states of the Arab League on the basis of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973), including related UN General Assembly resolutions in reference to the settlement of Palestinian refugee problem and establishment of independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

Egypt was the first Arab state under the leadership of president Anwar Sadat to establish diplomatic relations and sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 on the basis of UN resolutions, as did Jordan in 1994, and as did Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1993 in signing the Oslo Accord negotiated on the basis of the same UN resolutions cited in the API. It is also very significant to recall the United States throughout this period has shielded Israel by using its veto in the Security Council and thereby, instead of bringing the Arab-Israeli conflict to a closure on the basis of international law represented by pertinent UN resolutions – endorsed by the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Countries, more than two-third of UN member-states plus the five permanent members of the Security Council – has aided and abetted Israel in ethnic cleansing and genocide in the occupied territories of Palestine.

Saudi Prince Turki Al Faisal, son of former Saudi monarch King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz and former ambassador to Washington and London, wrote a personal letter on February 3 to President Trump published in the Saudi media.[25] From this letter I quote in part:

The Palestinian people are not illegal immigrants to be deported to other lands. The lands are their lands and the houses that Israel destroyed are their homes, and they will rebuild them as they have done after previous Israeli onslaughts on them…

If they are to be moved from Gaza, they should be allowed to return to their homes and to their orange and olive groves in Haifa, Jaffa and other towns and villages from which they fled or were forcibly driven out by the Israelis…

America and the UK did not want to receive the victims of Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust, so they were content with sending them to Palestine. In the book Eight Days at Yalta, the author Diana Preston refers to a conversation between then US president Franklin Roosevelt and his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin. Preston writes: “Conversation turned to the subject of Jewish homelands. Roosevelt said he was a Zionist… When Stalin asked Roosevelt what present he planned to make [Saudi king] Ibn Saud, he replied his only concession might be to give him six million Jews”…

Fortunately, when Mr Roosevelt did meet Ibn Saud, the king disabused him of that offer and suggested that the Jews should be offered the best lands in Germany as compensation for the Holocaust…

Mr President, your declared intent to bring peace to Palestine is much lauded in our part of the world. I respectfully suggest that the way to do that is to give the Palestinians their inalienable right to self-determination and a state with capital in East Jerusalem, as envisaged in UN General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194 and Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and the Arab Peace Initiative.

Prince Turki Al Faisal’s letter expresses the sentiments of most Arab and non-Arab Muslims. The meeting of his grandfather and founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, with President Franklin Roosevelt on his homeward bound journey from Yalta conference in February 1945, while widely known among Christians and Muslims of the Middle East is likely limited to those few somewhat familiar with the Second World War’s history among Americans. I imagine, however, that none apart from perhaps a very small number of individuals around Trump, and unlikely the president himself, is familiar with the story of Roosevelt-Ibn Saud meeting on board USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lakes at the southern portion of the Suez Canal. The authors of The House Of Saud wrote,

Colonel Eddy, who was interpreting between the two men, described Ibn Saud’s reply as prompt and laconic: ‘Give the Jews and their descendants the choicest lands and homes of the Germans who had oppressed them.’ When the President said the Jews would prefer to go to Palestine, Ibn Saud replied with unassailable logic, ‘Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander.’ It was, he observed, the Arab custom to distribute the survivors and victims of war among the victorious tribes in proportion to their capacity to support this extra burden. In the Allied camp, he noted, there were now fifty countries. Compared to most of them, Palestine was small and poor, yet it had already been assigned more than its quota of European refugees; why should it now be asked to take still more?

Roosevelt was impressed in spite of himself, remarking afterwards that he had learned more about Palestine in five minutes with Ibn Saud than in all the arguments and memoranda he had ever had from his staff. With a politician’s instinct for the soothing promise, he gave the King two personal undertakings which were soon to become notorious for their apparent betrayal. He, President Roosevelt, would never do anything which might prove hostile to the Arabs, and the U.S. Government would make no change in its basic policy in Palestine without full and prior consultation with both Jews and Arabs. On that the two men parted, satisfied that they not only liked but understood each other. That there was, in fact, a fundamental misunderstanding still between them, with Roosevelt speaking only for himself while the King supposed that the President was committing the honour of the United States Government, was only to be revealed after the President was dead.[26]

In that “fundamental misunderstanding” lay sown the seeds of doublespeak and untrustworthiness about Anglo-America in the Global South with Britain as perfidious Albion, and America cut from the same cloth; and, according to President Putin, both countries being “agreement incapable” or in abiding by agreements made. We may only speculate what might have been Palestine’s fate, and that of the Middle East, if Roosevelt had lived a few more years. It is known, however, that his successor, Truman, took money from Jewish donors as disclosed by Seymour Hersh in The Samson Option during the 1948 campaign, which hastened America’s vote in the UN for the recognition of Israel a few minutes after Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence on May 15, 1948.[27] Sheldon Adelson, a casino owner in Las Vegas, gave Trump in his 2016 campaign $25 million that got him to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem;[28] and in the 2024 campaign Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s widow, provided $100 million to Trump’s campaign that, at least in part explains, under his administration America’s continuing complicity in Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza and the expansionist scheme for Greater Israel.[29]

There is another side to King Ibn Saud’s response to President Roosevelt that is to be found in the memoir of an Austrian-Hungarian Jew, Leopold Weiss, a grandson of a rabbi who converted to Islam and took the name of Muhammad Asad. Leopold Weiss (1900-92) was born in Lemberg in Galicia, presently known as Lviv in Ukraine, and after First World War went to Palestine in 1922 on an invitation by his maternal uncle Dorian Feigenbaum, a psychoanalyst residing in Jerusalem. Before leaving Europe, Weiss became a reporter for a news agency that would take him from Jerusalem eventually into the heart of the Muslim world and regions surrounding it. He returned to Europe for study and new contacts for reporting from the Middle East when in Berlin in 1926 he formally embraced Islam with Elsa, his wife. On return to Arabia he met with Prince Faisal, a few years younger than him, who introduced him to his father King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud. The King took him into his inner circle of courtiers and Weiss, now Muhammad Asad, spent several years in the company of Ibn Saud providing him with news and knowledge about Europe and its politics and culture.

It was in 1922 that Leopold Weiss met with Chaim Weizmann in Jerusalem at a gathering of Zionists addressing them about his dream of a Jewish National Home and the financial difficulties surrounding its realization. Weiss was unimpressed by Weizmann’s remarks and broke the deferential silence around him by asking, “And what about the Arabs?” Weizmann taken aback turned towards Weiss and repeated the question, “What about the Arabs?” In his memoir, The Road To Mecca, Muhammad Asad recalled their exchange.

‘Well – how can you ever hope to make Palestine your homeland in the face of the vehement opposition of the Arabs who, after all, are in the majority in this country?’

The Zionist leader shrugged his shoulders and answered drily: ‘We expect they won’t be in a majority after a few years.’

‘Perhaps so. You have been dealing with this problem for years and must know the situation better than I do. But quite apart from the political difficulties which Arab opposition may or may not put in your way – does not the moral aspect of the question ever bother you? Don’t you think that it is wrong on your part to displace the people who have always lived in this country?’

‘But it is our country,’ replied Dr. Weizmann, raising his eyebrows. ‘We are doing no more than taking back what we have been wrongly deprived of.’

‘But you have been away from Palestine for nearly two thousand years! Before that you had ruled this country, and hardly ever the whole of it, for less than five hundred years. Don’t you think that the Arabs could, with equal justification, demand Spain for themselves – for, after all, they held sway in Spain for nearly seven hundred years and lost it entirely only five hundred years ago?’

Dr. Weizmann had become visibly impatient: ‘Nonsense. The Arabs had only conquered Spain; it had never been their original homeland, and so it was only right that in the end they were driven out by the Spaniards.’

‘Forgive me,’ I retorted, ‘but it seems to me that there is some historical oversight here. After all, the Hebrews also came as conquerors to Palestine. Long before them were many other Semitic and non-Semitic tribes settled here – the Amorites, the Edomites, the Philistines, the Moabites, the Hittites. Those tribes continued living here even in the days of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. They continued living here after the Romans drove our ancestors away. They are living here today. The Arabs who settled in Syria and Palestine after their conquest in the seventh century were always only a small minority of the population; the rest of what we describe today as Palestinian or Syrian “Arabs” are in reality only the Arabianized, original inhabitants of the country. Some of them became Muslims in the course of centuries, others remained Christians; the Muslims naturally inter-married with their co-religionists from Arabia. But can you deny that the bulk of those people in Palestine, who speak Arabic, whether Muslims or Christians, are direct-line descendants of the original inhabitants: original in the sense of having lived in this country centuries before the Hebrews came to it?’

Dr. Weizmann smiled politely at my outburst and turned the conversation to other topics (emphases added).[30]

In this exchange the young man, Leopold Weiss, undressed the future president of Israel for what he was, an unscrupulous front man for Britain’s imperial project in Palestine. Arthur Balfour of the Balfour Declaration in his memorandum of August 1919 in explaining away the contradictions of the pledges made by Britain to people under enemy rule during First World War, such as those in Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire, stated,

The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land (emphases added).[31]

The Empire, in proceeding on the basis of the well known saying of Queen Victoria’s prime minister Lord Palmerston that nations have no permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests, expressed itself in Balfour’s memorandum dismissing any concern about the 700,000 Arab natives in Palestine as inconsequential to its prerogatives. One hundred and six years later in expounding America’s role and prerogatives as a Pharaonic leviathan, Trump spoke dismissively in the White House on February 4 of unilaterally taking ownership of Gaza and removing the population regardless of Gazans or anyone else objecting, as was the dismissiveness of Balfour’s 1919 memorandum.

During the years Muhammad Asad spent in the company of King Ibn Saud they would have talked about Zionists and their intentions in Palestine. The King might have asked him on what legitimate basis they claim Palestine belonging to them. The Qur’an, the sacred text of Islam, in addressing the “Children of Israel” – (Bani Isra-il / the Israelites) or Jews – does not make any distinction among them as “people of the Book” who deserve respect. But it was a scam perpetrated by European Jews in making claim on Palestine as theirs, as it would be if Muslims from outside of Arabia, for instance India or Indonesia, made claim of a homeland in the native land of the Prophet of Islam on the basis of their religion. This would be absurd as both the King and the Jewish convert to Islam understood, as it was understood by an American academic historian, John Beaty, who retired as Colonel in the Military Intelligence Service of the War Department General Staff after the war ended in December 1946. Colonel Beaty was responsible during the war to prepare the “daily briefing” for President Roosevelt and his senior members of the cabinet and the military staff. In his book The Iron Curtain Over America, first published in 1951, Beaty wrote about the absurdity of the Zionist claim over Palestine.

In the first place the Khazar Zionists from Soviet Russia were not descended from the people of Hebrew religion in Palestine, ancient or modern, and thus not being descended from Old Testament people, they have no Biblical claim to Palestine. Their claim to the country rests solely on their ancestors’ having adopted a form of the religion of a people who ruled there eighteen hundred and more years before. This claim is thus exactly as valid as if the same or some other horde should claim the United States in 3350 A.D. on the basis of having adopted the religion of the American Indians! For another comparison, the 3,500,000 Catholics of China (Time, July 2, 1951) have as much right to the former Papal states in Italy as these Judaized Khazars have to Palestine![32]

Prince Turki Al Faisal refrained out of simple decency in mentioning in his public letter to President Trump that European Jews had no connection with Palestine as descendants of Biblical Hebrews, or Israelites, as his grandfather King Ibn Saud refrained in his exchange with President Roosevelt. Similarly, when President Anwar Sadat addressed the Israeli lawmakers in the Knesset during his historic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, he addressed them, in accordance with the Qur’an, as “people of the Book.” In taking the first step for peace in the region through diplomacy after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war that was followed by others (Palestinian Authority and Jordan) culminating with those who signed Abraham Accords, Sadat opened the pathway for Israel to end its isolation within the Arab-Muslim world recognized as a state of “people of the Book” in the Levant or West Asia. What was required in reciprocity by Israel was recognition of Palestinian rights to self-determination and statehood, instead after the murder of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin by an ultra-orthodox Jew in November 1995 Netanyahu and his Likud party, supported by the extremist bloc of settlers (Gush Emunim) in the Occupied Territories, opted for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. Sadat’s murder in October 1981 by extremist Muslims in Egypt did not derail the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty he negotiated with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, whereas Rabin’s murder wrecked the Oslo Accord he signed with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The pathway to peace that Sadat opened was based on UN resolutions, witnessed by American presidents – Jimmy Carter of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty (1979), and Bill Clinton of the Oslo Accord (1993) and the Israel-Jordan peace treaty (1994) – and carried the goodwill of the international community. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has slammed shut the pathway Sadat opened and has isolated Israel as a pariah state in the region, across the Global South, and within the UN.

iv]

Kennedy was in office for 1,036 days during the peak years of the Cold War decades of confrontation between America and the Soviet Union in the age of nuclear weapons. The chief characteristic of this nuclear face-off in the description by J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during the Second World War, was the metaphor of “two scorpions in a bottle.” They would either learn to live together or kill each other. Theodore Sorensen was Kennedy’s closest special assistant since he joined the staff of the junior Senator from Massachusetts in 1953 and followed him into the White House in 1961. Years later speaking to David Talbot, author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Sorensen reminisced, “John Kennedy was haunted by the specter of cataclysmic war… I think that the principal reason Kennedy ran for the presidency was he thought the Eisenhower-Dulles policy of massive retaliation and all of that was heading the country toward nuclear war.”[33]

In his biography of Kennedy, Sorensen recalled a brief conversation with the junior Senator and an incident that shed light on the future president’s political interest and what sort of a man he was. Sorensen wrote,

Although he came to know and understand from his constituents, as a Congressman and candidate, the problems of poor housing and unemployment he had never experienced as a Kennedy, his chief interests were in foreign affairs. Mine were domestic. He asked me one day in 1953—long before national politics was on our horizon—what Cabinet posts would interest me most, if I ever had a choice; and I replied, “Justice, Labor and Health-Education-Welfare.” “I wouldn’t have any interest in any of those,” he said emphatically, “only Secretary of State or Defense.”

He was not simply a sum of all the elements in his background—a Catholic war veteran from a wealthy Boston family who had graduated from Harvard…

Clearly he was proud of his military service, his Purple Heart and his Navy and Marine Corps Medal… But he was neither a professional warrior nor a professional veteran. He never boasted or even reminisced about his wartime experiences. He never complained about his wounds. When a flippant high school youth asked him, as he walked down a street in Ashland, Wisconsin, in 1959, how he came to be a hero, he gaily replied, “It was easy—they sank my boat.”[34]

Kennedy was briefed soon after his inauguration by Allen Dulles, CIA Director, and the Joint Chiefs that the Eisenhower administration “authorized early in 1960 the training and arming of a Cuban exile army of liberation under the direction of the CIA.”[35] Those who briefed Kennedy also advocated going ahead with it, posing the question as Dulles did, if not would he tell the Cubans assembled for the mission in Guatemala “who asked nothing other than the opportunity to try to restore a free government in their country … ready to risk their lives … that they would get no sympathy, no support, no aid from the United States?”[36] This was a subtle hint of blackmail.

Dulles had been the brain behind the coup, code named “Operation Ajax”, which ousted the Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh in Tehran, Iran, in 1953. Mossadegh was a liberal nationalist educated in France, not a Marxist socialist or communist, who earned the enmity of Washington and London for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company whose principal shareholder was Britain.[37] The ouster of Mossadegh by the CIA in partnership with the MI-6 of Britain in August 1953 had its eventual denouement in the 1979 revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran’s monarch, and launched the Islamic Republic under the religious leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.

The “liberation” of Cuba hatched by the CIA turned into a fiasco. Fidel Castro’s men crushed Dulles’s trained Cuban exiles as mercenaries soon after their 17 April 1961 landing in the Bay of Pigs, and thus was set the path for eventual face-off over Cuba between Kennedy’s Washington and Premier Khrushchev’s Moscow in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Every crisis, as the Chinese saying goes, also offers an opportunity for good. The feared collision between the two nuclear superpowers was skillfully avoided by both leaders through deft handling of their respective war hawks, and a new chapter of engagement for peaceful coexistence through arms limitation agreements beginning with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was given birth.

How the October crisis was peacefully resolved eventually became the textbook example in crisis decision-making, as in Graham Allison’s study of the subject Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis published in 1971, and then updated as new disclosures were made available with co-author Philip Zelikow in 1999. But the essence of how and why the first nuclear confrontation was not only defused, that it led to a promising new relationship between Washington and Moscow cut short by the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 was none other than the slain president himself.

The Commencement Address at American University in Washington that was given by Kennedy on 10 June 1963 remains a testimony of what a fine intellect and a great and courageous heart he possessed. Professor Jeffrey Sachs in preface to the book he authored on the speech wrote, “I have come to believe that Kennedy’s quest for peace is not only the greatest achievement of his presidency, but also one of the greatest acts of world leadership in the modern era.”[38] On the sixtieth anniversary of Kennedy’s speech, I wrote,

Mature realism differs from utopianism in that it is unapologetically reflective and self-critical. Kennedy acknowledged that his initiative would be in vain without Soviet leaders adopting an enlightened attitude. But it was equally, if not more, important, he insisted, that “we must reexamine our own attitude—as individuals and as a Nation—for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward—by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the Cold War and toward freedom and peace here at home.”[39]

The essence of Kennedy’s approach to peacemaking, as set forth in his Commencement Address, was in looking inward, in requiring to critically examine one’s own attitude and predisposition when reaching out to the other and seeking an enlightened response. This is what is meant by removing the beam out of one’s eye, and this is what Jesus commanded. But for America mutating into a Pharaonic leviathan and conducting itself as a gargantuan Cyclop, which Kennedy sensed in the making and Eisenhower, his predecessor, warned Americans that their republic had become a self-serving military-industrial complex, abiding by Jesus’s command was not only improbable, it would be treasonous. James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable, in retrospect summed it up, “To the Pentagon and the CIA, the president’s words of peace at American University seemed to put him on the enemy’s side.”[40]

On July 25, six weeks after he spoke at American University, Kennedy initialed the proposal for Limited Test Ban Treaty with Moscow after consultations with America’s European allies. Senate voted on September 24 with the margin of 80 votes for and 19 votes against in ratifying the first major arms control agreement of the nuclear age. Two months less two days later on November 22 Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.

In the tragic history of Kennedy’s murder for peacemaking what stands out is the inherent quality of the man and the president, for it glows with brightness and warmth as the lodestar of peacemakers, which is empathy needed to understand and relate to the other in shared humanity. Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher and academic, coined the term “global village” in describing the emergent world in the second half of last century. Of this emergent world, Ryszard Kapuściński, a Polish writer of travels and contemporary history, wrote,

My Other is a non-white person. How many of them are there? Today, 80 per cent of the world is non-white.

Occupied with the fight between East and West, between democracy and totalitarianism, not all of us were aware, and not all at once, that the map of the world had changed. In the first half of the twentieth century this map was arranged on the principles of a pyramid. At the top were historical subjects: the great colonial powers, the white man’s states. This arrangement broke down before our eyes and in our lifetime, as more than a hundred new – at least formally independent – states inhabited by three-quarters of humanity appeared on the historical arena almost overnight. And so here is the new map of the world, colourful, multicoloured, very rich and complex. Let us note that if we compare the map of our world from the 1930s with the map from the 1980s, we get two completely different images of it. But in fact, the relationship between these two images is never static – it is undergoing constant change, constant dynamic and unstoppable evolution. In the latest history, the history that is happening right now, our Third World Others are gaining ever greater and ever more meaningful subjectivity…

How prepared are we, the citizens of Europe, for this change? Not very, I’m afraid to say.[41]

Neither are North Americans to the north of Mexico seemingly prepared.

Kennedy’s empathy for the people in the Global South – Africa, Asia, Latin America – and their struggles for independence from colonial rule was not, as it tends to be in present times, virtue signalling by jaded old time progressives and liberals in the Global North. It came from study and experience, as in visiting Vietnam in 1951 when France was engaged in restoring its colonial rule in Indochina after the interregnum of Japanese occupation during the Second World War. In Saigon the young congressman wanted to know from Americans at the embassy why should anyone expect Vietnamese assist in keeping their country part of France. This was greatly upsetting to the French in Vietnam and their commanding officer General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. As a junior Senator, Kennedy came to view the Dulles doctrine against Soviet Union and communism in guiding the Eisenhower administration’s dealings with the emerging third world, as self-defeating. He caused furor in Paris and Washington when speaking in the Senate in July 1957 about the struggle that was consuming France against native Algerians in North Africa and America’s support for France. Kennedy said, “No amount of mutual politeness, wishful thinking, nostalgia, or regret, should blind either France or the United States to the fact that if France and the West at large are to have a continuing influence in North Africa… the essential first step is the independence of Algeria.” He cautioned the Atlantic nations must understand that “this is no longer a French problem alone.”[42] Kennedy’s support for people struggling for their independence from colonial rule was something he related to, as an American of Irish descent, given Ireland’s long and bitter struggle for independence from the long-suffering occupation by Britain. And his 1957 speech in the Senate came to fruition with Algeria’s independence in 1962 when Kennedy was in the White House.

v]

Remove the beam out of one’s eye or, as in Matthew’s version in the New Testament (7:5), “cast out the beam out of thine own eye” that Jesus commands is loaded with meanings and has its analog in the Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam. The verse from the Quran (13:11) reads, “Indeed, Allāh [God] will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in their heart.” The “seeing eye” in religious mysticism, Christian and Muslim, is the heart as the seat of wisdom and truth. Removing or casting out the beam from one’s eye is cleaning the “seeing eye”, as preparatory effort in apprehending truth, or looking inward that Kennedy mentioned as a necessity in reaching out to the other in quest of peaceful coexistence.

Both Trump and Kennedy authored books, The Art Of The Deal and Profiles In Courage that stand out as the respective credo of the two men who became presidents of the United States. No two men are alike, and the two presidents decades apart could not be more different.

Trump wrote in the opening paragraph of his book,

I don’t do it for money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.[43]

Trump’s story in the book is about himself, a New York real-estate tycoon who, he claims, turned deal-making into an art. This was his profession, his proven method of engaging in successful transactions, his bluster as the “shock and awe” part of driving a hard bargain, and his drive to reach “top of the heap” in the lyrics of his city’s unofficial popular anthem New York, New York, which he bundled together as his winning formula all the way into the White House. Politics, in this telling, is ultimately transactional, every aspect of it is negotiable, and the measure of man in politics, as in business, is one who can make a winning transaction for himself, his clients, his bankers and donors, and lastly the people who elected him.

Kennedy believed the most esteemed quality in politics was courage. He borrowed Ernest Hemingway’s definition of courage, “grace under pressure.” And he wrote,

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or reward that quality in its chosen leaders today—and in fact we have forgotten.[44]

Kennedy’s book is the story of eight United States Senators, the pressures and demands they experienced and “the grace with which they endured them.” He was elected to the U.S. Senate for Massachusetts in 1952 after three terms in the House, and he dwelled upon the role of politicians in that exclusive chamber and asked what made each of them in their career distinguished from others with whom they served their people and country. In Kennedy’s view, writing as a sitting Senator, “when party and officeholder differ as to how the national interest is to be served, we must place first the responsibility we owe not to our party or even to our constituents but to our individual consciences.”[45] Why? And he answered, the “voters selected us, in short, because they had confidence in our judgment and our ability to exercise that judgment from a position where we could determine what were their own best interests, as a part of the nation’s interests. This may mean that we must on occasion lead, inform, correct and sometimes even ignore constituent opinion, if we are to exercise fully that judgment for which we are elected.”[46] The eight Senators in Kennedy’s study of courage in politics were, he wrote, “men whose abiding loyalty to their nation triumphed over all personal and political considerations, men who showed the real meaning of courage and a real faith in democracy, men who made the Senate of the United States something more than a mere collection of robots dutifully recording the views of their constituents, or a gathering of time-servers skilled only in predicting and following the tides of public sentiment.”[47] But Kennedy concluded, past stories of courage as those he selected for his “profiles in courage” may teach, may offer hope, may inspire, but they cannot provide for courage. For courage, “each man must look into his own soul”,[48] and, as he mentioned in his Commencement Address at the American University in Washington in June 1963, “should begin by looking inward.” Then, and only then, a politician may find courage paired with empathy to do what is morally right, to be a peacemaker or a warrior in a just war.

Kennedy did not make a public statement, as did Trump, that he wished to leave a legacy of a peacemaker. He had been a warrior in a just war about which he did not talk about in public or dwell upon in private. He had looked inward into his own soul, and followed his own conscience. He was a peacemaker by his calling, and not as a deal-maker.

Trump has more than fourteen hundred days left in the White House and the need, even urgency, to look into his own soul and remove the beam from his eye, to find if he truly has the stuff for making of a legacy as peacemaker. Ending the war in Ukraine is the easy part, for it is acknowledging the reality that Russia has won the war in the field of contest. The hard part is Trump cannot, and I may say ever, get it right in being a peacemaker unless he gets himself right with the children of Palestine who are victims of the sheer rottenness and evil of Israel as a colonial-settler state with its accompanying features of occupation, ethnic cleansing, genocide and wars.

__________

Notes:

[1] President Donald J. Trump Inaugural Address – 20 January 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/01/the-inaugural-address/

[2] Letter from Prince Turki to President Trump dated 3 February 2025 published in the Saudi newspaper The National: https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2025/02/03/palestine-israel-middle-east-donald-trump/

[3] See Laurent Guyénot, The Unspoken Kennedy Truth (Bolton, ON: Amazon, 2021), especially chapter 2, pp. 21-35.

[4] See The Moscow Times, 24 January 2025: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/01/24/russia-might-not-have-invaded-ukraine-if-trump-had-been-president-putin-says-a87736

[5] Scott Ritter on X: https://x.com/realscottritter/status/1885042193330536671?s=51

[6] Wesley Clark’s interview, “We’re going to take-out 7 countries in 5 years”:

[7] “Trump Says U.S. Spent $7 Trillion in Middle East 'Mistake,' Now Iraq May Cost $88 Billion More to Rebuild,” Newsweek, 13 February 2018: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-us-spent-7-trillion-middle-east-mistake-iraq-cost-88-billion-804215

[8] Prof. Jeffrey Sach at the Cambridge Union, October 2024:

[9] See Sach’s remark reported by The Guardian and subsequently a clip of that remark posted by then President-elect Donald Trump in his social media platform Truth Social: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/08/trump-video-crude-reference-netanyahu

[10] See President-elect’s Truth Social post dated Jan 7, 2025: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113789043423746072

[11] See transcript of the White House joint press conference, Feb 4, 2025: https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump--press-conference-joint-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-february-4-2025/

[12] Ibid.

[13] Tyler Durden in Zero Hedge, Feb 5, 2025: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/palestinians-would-love-leave-gaza-trump-proclaims-while-hosting-netanyahu

[14] See fn. 11: https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump--press-conference-joint-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-february-4-2025/

[15] See Saudi Arabia’s response to Trump: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-says-it-wont-establish-ties-with-israel-without-creation-2025-02-05/

[16] See Drop Site News on X: https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/1886911549387702325?mx=2

[17] See population figures for 2023 in Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics: https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/site/lang__en/881/default.aspx#Population

[18] See fn. 11 (the transcript of the February 4 White House press conference).

[19] See https://thecradle.co/articles/ex-israeli-war-chief-confirms-issuing-hannibal-directive-to-kill-own-civilians-soldiers-on-7-oct

[20] See The Times of Israel report of 9 October 2023: https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-intelligence-official-says-israel-ignored-repeated-warnings-of-something-big/

[21] See Secretary-General António Guterres’s remarks: https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0

[22] See fn. 11 (the transcript of the February 4 White House press conference).

[23] See the full statement of the Abraham Accords: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Abraham_Accords_Declaration.jpg

[24] See on the ICC sanction: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/war-crimes-prosecutor-first-target-trumps-icc-sanctions-sources-say-2025-02-07/ ; also https://apnews.com/article/trump-icc-sanctions-israel-order-01beee050ae84d0d9eae66d00bc8ead9

[25] See fn. 2 for Prince Turki Al Faisal’s letter to President Trump.

[26] David Holden & Richard Johns, The House Of Saud (London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1982), pp. 137-138.

[27] Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 93-94.

[28] See https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/trumpinc/episodes/trump-inc-trumps-patron-chief-sheldon-adelson

[29] See https://www.timesofisrael.com/miriam-adelson-gives-100-million-to-trump-campaign-making-good-on-reported-pledge/amp/

[30] Muhammad Asad, The Road To Mecca (Gibraltar: Dar Al-Andalus, 4th Revised Edition reprint 1985, pp. 94-95).

[31] For a full discussion of this memorandum, see Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel 1917-1948 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 5. Christopher Sykes was son of Sir Mark Sykes of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that drew the map of the post-war Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire divided between Britain and France.

[32] John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America (reprint) (Middletown, DE: The Dot Connector Library, Book 5, 2016), p. 159.

[33] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (New York: Free Press, 2007), p. 35.

[34] Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York, Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 17-18.

[35] Ibid., p. 295.

[36] Ibid., p. 296.

[37] See Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, And Their Secret World War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013), chapter 5, pp.119-146.

[38] Jeffrey D. Sachs, To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (New York: Random House, 2013), p. xv.

[39] Salim Mansur, “Blessed are the peacemakers: Recalling JFK”: https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/blessed-are-the-peacemakers-recalling

[40] James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 32.

[41] Ryszard Kapuściński, The Other (London & New York: Verso Book, 2008), pp. 57-58.

[42] Cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York: Random House, Fawcett Premier Edition, 1971) p. 510.

[43] Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, The Art Of The Deal (New York: Ballantine Books, 2015), p. 1.

[44] John F. Kennedy, Profiles In Courage (New York: HarperPerennial Classics, 2000), p. 1.

[45] Ibid., p. 14.

[46] Ibid., p. 15.

[47] Ibid., p. 18.

[48] Ibid., p. 225.