Open letter to Donald Trump

Mr. President, over the last 15 months your country has subjected the people of Gaza to mass murder, genocide & ethnic cleansing. You armed, assisted & enabled the State of Israel to murder, by your own admission, hundreds of thousands of innocent Gazan civilians the vast majority of whom were women & children.

You turned their once beautiful country into a poisonous, stinking, uninhabitable, burnt flesh-filled, rodent-infested sea of landmines & sulphurous rubble & into an ocean of foul, rotting, verminous body parts.

You did this by supplying Israel with the most deadly modern weapons including 2000-pound bombs which they unleashed on a weak, impoverished & defenceless civilian population in what can only be described as the most barbaric slaughter in modern history.

You crushed them in body, spirit & soul.

Yet your nation was still not done. As soon as you were sworn into office, to the horror of the civilised world, you declared your insidious intention to displace the 1.6 million Gazans that are still left alive (there were originally 2.5 million) and take over their land in order to develop it into a “prime piece of real estate” & a “beautiful holiday resort” for rich Americans!

These are the homes & ancestral land of the Palestinian people who have been living there for over 2000 years.

This is the land in which their loved ones & families have been caged, butchered and buried by your murderous Zionist friends for the last 76 years.

This is the place in which millions of them have fought & died for the last seven decades to preserve their honour, dignity, heritage, history and identity, and leave something for generations of their children yet unborn.

You went further by publicly stating that you were “committed to owning Gaza” and that “we will let other countries develop parts of it: it will be beautiful. People can come from all over the world to live there”.

In conclusion, you said: “The Palestinians would have no right to return when they leave.”

As Ambassador A. M. Shawesh, the Palestinian Ambassador to India, rightly said: “When a real estate developer rules the world no one will be spared, everyone will follow.”

Your lack of empathy for the plight of the women and children of Gaza is appalling. Your inability to feel their pain & acknowledge their tears betrays the fact that you lack compassion.

You not only want to take the little that is left of it from them but you also want to send the 1.6 million Gazans that have been left alive to Egypt and Jordan (both of whom have outrightly rejected the proposal) and turn their homeland into a holiday spot filled with American hotels, American holiday homes, American escorts & American casinos.

You fail to appreciate the fact that to stand with Gaza is to stand with humanity. This sentiment is shared by the majority of nations including Ireland, South Africa, Brazil, China, Russia, Iran and Spain who have taken the lead in this cause.

It is not only the Muslims and Arabs that feel this way: His Eminence Pope Francis and the majority of Christians throughout the world do as well. Killing innocent women and children, subjecting them to mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide and forcefully displacing them and taking over their land cannot be justified under ANY circumstances.

Is this so difficult to comprehend?

You will recall that Vice-President Kashim Shettima eloquently stated the unassailable position of the Nigerian people when he said the following at the United Nations General Assembly: “Today we are all witnesses to the heart-wrenching situation in Gaza and other Palestinian Territories. Justice is antithetical to revenge. Freedom is an inalienable right & a natural entitlement that cannot be denied to any people. The Palestinian people deserve their independence. They deserve to have a home of their own on territories already recognised by this very assembly and by international law which is being routinely ignored.“

His words reflect the position of no less than 149 countries that recognise the State of Palestine as an independent, sovereign nation. I am proud of the fact that my country has taken such a noble stand and, unlike yours, has chosen to stand for peace & justice.

I have always admired you because of what I believed to be your reverence for God, your Christian values, your stated intention of pulling America out of foreign conflicts, your rapprochement with Russia, China and North Korea, your opposition to the globalists and your support for the nationalists.

Again I have always respected you because of the way you stood strong and proud in the face of the persecution that you were subjected to by the Deep State. Yet despite my respect, I am constrained to tell you the truth. This is not the time for platitudes or spouting the cowardly words of a quisling & lickspittle.

I must be candid.

Permit me to begin by saying that your proposition for Gaza is an expression of unadulterated evil. Whilst others are rightly talking about establishing a two-state solution where both the Palestinians and Israelis can live in peace you are talking about America taking over Gaza for itself & forcefully acquiring its offshore gas & oil reserves.

Is there no end to your greed? Is your insatiable desire to pillage & steal other people’s land & wipe them off the face of the earth just to gain access to their natural resources not of the devil?

Is this not the same thing that your white American forefathers did to the Red Indians? Is this not what Pharaoh, Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Christopher Columbus and Adolf Hitler did to others in their time? Did they not annihilate their victims, driving many into extinction, subject them to a holocaust and take their land? Is it not the same violent, butchering, slaughtering, conquering, plundering and pillaging spirit that drives you all?

Then come your puerile gaffes and brazen threats which are reminiscent of that of a schoolyard bully. For example when you say things like “all hell will break loose if Hamas does not release all the hostages by Saturday”, you betray the fact that you do not know that Hamas is far stronger today in terms of resolve and numbers than it was before October 7th.

This came as a consequence of the massive number of Palestinian women & children that were butchered post-October 7th by Israel in the name of retaliation.

Hamas has been energised by their quest for vengeance & if they had 10,000 fighters before October 7th they now have at least 200,000. The more innocent Palestinians you kill the stronger Hamas will get.

This is why Gaza has been described as the “graveyard of imperialist delusions”. Worse still, the “hell” that you threaten to unleash may well engulf Israel and the entire Middle East.

Surely an attempt to ensure that the ceasefire is not broken and that negotiations for the release of hostages on all sides continue is better than issuing threats which may well endanger the lives of the very hostages that you are trying to save.

I pray that you cultivate the presence of mind to appreciate this point.

Your obsession with meddling in the affairs of other nations and laying claim to their territory, whether it be Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa, Colombia or Gaza is symptomatic of a troubled mind.

If you are not threatening other countries with taking over their land or withdrawing aid, you are threatening them with trade tariffs in an attempt to bring them to their knees.

Worse of all your disdain for immigrants & desire to send them back to where they came from in chains without any humanity & dignity or lock them up in Guantanamo Bay whilst at the same time offering white South Africans refugee status is shameful.

It also provides us with a graphic expression of your inherent racism. Your aversion to immigrants & categorisation of them as being “criminals, gangsters, murderers & mentally deranged people” is shameful.

Permit me to remind you that you are the grandson of a German immigrant, the son of a Scottish immigrant, the husband of a Slovenian immigrant & the ex-husband of a Czech immigrant.

You were a beneficiary of America’s immigration policies yet you hate immigrants with a passion & seek to not only stop them from entering your country but also to deny foreigners that are born their citizenship rights & abolish the ‘birthright law’ which is embedded in your constitution.

Such is your contempt for immigrants that Pope Francis was constrained to say the following to ameliorate the pain and damage that your vitriol has caused.

He said: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant & refugee brothers & sisters.”

‘Making America Great Again’ does not mean destroying the aspirations of others & does not give you the right to intimidate, threaten, subjugate & conquer the world!

You would do well to remember that it was the collective prayers of millions to God that delivered you from the assassin’s bullet on two separate occasions, that stopped you from being sent to jail & that got you to where you are today.

Those same prayers will bring you to your knees if you refuse to change course.

May God guide you.

Femi Fani-Kayode is the Sadaukin Shinkafi, the Wakilin Doka Potiskum, a former minister of culture and tourism and a former minister of aviation