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The Hunter May Soon Become The Hunted By Dr. Wumi Akintide

January 2, 2017

The hunter may soon become the hunted if Donald Trump continues to uproot Barack Obama's legacies and accomplishments with impunity.

Tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us. Only God knows what may happen to any of us the very next minute. In a way, human beings are like the squirrel that leaves its safe and secure nest on the tree to go cross the street to fetch some nuts for lunch.

I have seen one such squirrel get run over by a car, no questions asked. I see its innocent but luckier companion come out from under a parked vehicle to stay for a few minutes with the mangled and lifeless body of its dead companion only to quickly disappear back to their nest with its companion gone forever.

In a way, we human beings are like those squirrels. We are here one minute and gone the next. Hence people say no condition is permanent. Donald Trump believes he has the whole world in his palm with his election as President and that the man he is going to succeed is gone forever into the dustbin of history. He sees himself as the today and tomorrow of America who can turn daylight into utter darkness with the stroke of his pen. I call him the proverbial hunter who may soon become the hunted, as he, like the Greek titan Atlas, carries the whole burden of the world on his shoulders. It is an awesome responsibility that Trump is yet to fully appreciate based on his verbiage and body language some 20 days to his inauguration as President of the United States.

Trump is demonstrating a lot of euphoria. He is already seeking to claim for himself the greatest of Obama’s accomplishments and achievements as President while giving the false impression to the whole world that he and not Obama is the one who has actually turned round the American economy. Many of his supporters would believe that to be the case, just like he bad-mouthed far more superior candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich in the Republican primary season to snatch the nomination.

Very soon, Donald Trump is going to claim he killed Osama Bin Laden and that he gave to America the best affordable health care reform law that no fewer than 10 American Presidents have tried to pass but failed to do in more than 50 years. The truth is that Trump and his supporters hardly ever want to give any credit to Obama and the Democrats for any good they have done in 8 years of building a sustainable coalition with the rest of the world to ensure peace in the world and to relieve America of having to carry the whole burden of the world by claiming to be the only police man of the world.

Thank God that Trump is not God who knows the beginning from the end and is able to use the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Yes, Trump, with some help from Russian President Vladimir Putin and an inside job from FBI Director James Comey, has been able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in an election he actually lost by 3 million votes.

The guy is actually happy he has won a Jackpot and he wants to go the next extra mile to humiliate his predecessor, wipe out all of his legacies with the stroke of the pen within his first 100 days in the White House.

It is a lofty and grandiose ambition and plan to contemplate on the short run, but I dare say it is a scheme and agenda that could come back to haunt him big time, and predictably destroy his presidency, because what goes around comes around.

Donald Trump is doing everything today to exonerate Vladimir Putin, James Comey and WikiLeaks about any role they might have played in his narrow victory at the Electoral College. He is opposed to any sanctions that Obama is correctly and wisely invoking on Russia. Donald Trump sees those sanctions as an attempt by Obama and the Democrats to cast some aspersion on his victory and to consequently delegitimize his election as the 45th President of the United States thru subterfuge. Mr. Trump is also seeking to incite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against Obama in his last days as President just to score a cheap point.

I can assure you that all of these plots are going to blow up in Donald Trump’s face within 6 months of his taking office, when he can no longer blame anybody but himself for anything happening under his watch as the plenipotentiary landlord of the White House. 

The chickens are going to come home to roost as he tries to deliver on all of the false promises he has made or as he tries to walk away from many of them because they are simply untenable and impractical to say the least.

Trump is trying to convince his party and all Americans that he is going to be far tougher on the Russians and Vladimir Putin than Obama was. We are watching closely to see how that is going to play out and how former KGB agent and current Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose ultimate goal is to restore Russia to its old glory as the Soviet Union, is going to respond to the appeasement tactics of Donald Trump.

Trump has already told Russians he is going to use his superior negotiation skills and rope-a-dope charisma to subdue the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese and countries like Britain, France and Germany who now know what to expect from a President Trump and his demolition derby of a team in the fullness of time 

Donald Trump will soon learn and realize that “Khaki no be leather” and that "making America great again" may be good for sloganeering but making it work in reality is a different ball game. His claim to jump start the American economy is totally misplaced because that is what Obama has already done with great success. His decision to also make America the Lord of the Manor to dominate other countries may be good for public consumption of his praise singers but a big security risk for America.

Such countries would be more than willing to gang up against America and to pool together their resources and share expertise and intelligence, if they realize thru the abrasive personality and braggadocio of Donald Trump that their collective security is in jeopardy. Donald Trump is behaving like the Tortoise in Yoruba mythology who gathered and locked up all the wisdom in the world in a calabash he alone had access to. But the tortoise soon realized in the end that he fooled nobody but himself, as nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Pulling together and sharing intelligence and expertise as partners and never a cat-and -mouse relationship is the way to go for America to maintain her leadership position in the world.  

If any of us thinks that the arms race is deadly serious right now, we all must wait till we see a President Trump. It is going to be a totally different ball game. There is no substitute to building an international consensus between Israel and Palestine like Obama and past American Presidents since Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower have done without exception.

What Donald Trump is promising is a total break from the past and it is not going to work. The whole foolishness is going to unravel and melt like an Ice Cream in the Summer time in 4 short years if Donald Trump maintains his present stance and arrogant disposition to the ideas of his wiser predecessors across the board. It is easier to win the presidency through deception. It is going to be much harder to keep it going thru deception and subterfuge like Donald Trump is suggesting.
His current inclination to gang up with Netanyahu against Obama can only serve him well up to a point because Netanyahu and he share the same abrasive personality, and they are going to, sooner rather than later, knock heads and fall apart. Just like KGB Putin is going to come after Trump if Trump deviates from Putin’s expectation of him, most Americans, even the Republican Party, are not going to stand for that.

For the avoidance of doubt, America can never be a fair-minded peacemaker and intermediary between the Palestinians and the Israelis if America is seen to be so biased against the Palestinians. Hamas and Palestinians should be told in no unmistakable terms that their threat to wipe out the State of Israel from the surface of the Earth is a threat they can never sustain or successfully carry out. They are throwing stones with their bare hands and catapult at an adversary carrying an AK-47 rifle and heavy armored tanks. They are throwing stones at a tiny nation with an arsenal of nuclear weapons at her disposal.
The Palestinians and Hamas are simply insane. Not to realize that Israel is the United States in the Middle East; an attack on Israel is an attack on America. There is no way in the world the Palestinians and Hamas can ever achieve their goal against the Israelis. The best they can do is lose some and win some and that is exactly the Israelis would need to do just Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat did when they both signed the Camp David Accord with President Jimmy Carter as the sponsor and presiding officer. 

Faced with that reality on the ground, it is foolhardiness for them to still insist they are not going to recognize the existence of the State of Israel. Israel too must not overstretch her luck by refusing to stop the building of more Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank while America is trying to prevail on the Palestinians and Hamas to face reality and to stop fooling themselves. That to me is the crux of the matter.

The two- state solution is the ultimate answer to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I don’t care if Trump is King Solomon, the wisest man in the Bible, if he does not accept that reality, he too is fooling himself.

I totally support the Obama approach because Obama like all previous American Presidents before him appreciate that fact.

Both Israel and Palestine must give peace a chance because war is an ill wind that blows no good to either side. Both sides can surely get along and save the whole world of the negative effects of their endless conflict. That was exactly what President Jimmy Carter did when he negotiated the most enduring peace treaty in that region in the great Camp David Accord which has saved so many lives and too much bloodshed.

The Covenant relationship between God and the Jews that is so much talked about in the Holy Scriptures is a fact that nobody can wish away. The real Promise Land and Canaan to me is America without any question. That is why the Jews prosper and thrive so much in America. They have become King Makers and they always play a dominant but silent role in the power configuration of American politics and military power.

Let the Palestinians not continue to fool themselves that they can ever defeat Israel. Obama not only armed Israel with sufficient cash to defend herself, he has also bent over backwards to secure Israel by offering Israel the dome and by voluntarily sharing intelligence with the greatest security agency the world has ever known. I am talking of Mossad, which can take out anyone it wants to target. Palestinians have to be reminded of that and to know that they would fight Israel for eternity and still come off short or empty-handed after all is said and done.

I have greatest respect for the Jews as a people. They are among the most resourceful and cohesive in the whole world. I am a proud product of the Yeshiva Jewish University of New York, my alma mater. I know the Jews like a book and I would be the last person to ever second-guess or underrate the Jews. Among my greatest heroes include the great Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and the young fighter pilot, Elan, who led the Israeli raid to destroy the Syrian Nuclear Reactor at a very desolate area of Syria that Syrian President Assad kept as a top secret for more 7 years that not even America was able to detect for that long.

I love the Jews and the world needs the State of Israel and her survival as a nation living in peace and understanding with their Palestinian neighbors who have suffered so much deprivation from the disputed territory since 1948 following the Treaty of Berlin led by America which created the State of Israel to put them back in their Biblical Home land in the Middle East. America is never going to desert Israel but Israeli leaders like Netanyahu and his supporters must not overplay their hands and start crying wolf against the first black President who has proved himself to be a great friend of Israel and never a weakling to be pushed around by Netanyahu.  

Let me conclude by saying compliments of the Season and a Happy New Year to all of you as I pull the curtains to end the year 2016.      

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