8/14/2020

My dear Friend & POTUS, DJT,

            It is going to be HOT here today – 107 degrees to be exact. We will hunker down in our cool room for the evening. Let’s get busy on fixing climate change NOW!

            Congratulations on the UAE/Israel deal. JCK must be ecstatic. I was sorry to see that when you announced it yesterday, the Oval Office was full of White men, none wearing masks. Oh well!

Thomas Freidman opining in the NYT called it “a geopolitical earthquake,” while WP’s column by Daoud Kuttab included the term, “diplomatic circus.” I think a tweet described in the Guardian might have captured it best, which indicated that the UAE & Israel have been having secret relations for a while now & they are finally bringing them out in the open. Kind of like when a couple who have been having a clandestine love affair, finally get married.

https://www.emirates247.com/news/government/mohammed-bin-zayed-at-yas-marina-2013-10-02-1.523193

            In any case, it looks like MBZ is an interesting fellow. I like the fact that he cycles, & that he renamed a mosque, Mary, Mother of Jesus Mosque" to exemplify the values of co-existence among religions in the UAE. He’s known as a “strong man” so that makes me nervous.  

            I worry about the Palestinians. They feel that they have been abandoned. It’s bad enough that Israeli forces demolished a Covid quarantine center for infected Palestinians in Hebron in July, but now the Palestinians are worried that all of their defenders in the Arab world will support Israel in an effort to oppose Iran, forgetting all about them and their plight.

Freidman says that the Middle East has two kinds of people, “those who want to let the future bury the past and those who want to let the past keep burying the future.” I think that Israel’s illegal expropriation of Palestinian land in 1967 is not something we should forget. The Palestinians have been harmed and they deserve some reparations. Please reach out to them so they know we are thinking of them.

HYITL,