Keeping mum on an outrage in Jordan

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
22 April '13..

The very fact that 110 members of Jordan’s parliament (out of a total of 150) signed a petition for the release of the murderer from Naharayim speaks volumes about what parades as morality and coexistence next door to us.

Jordan, it needs to be stressed, is formally at peace with Israel.

Hence the implicit message from Amman is disconcerting in the extreme. Purported representatives of public opinion showed us where their hearts are, regardless of whether the massacre-perpetrator stays behind bars or not.

Surely even the minimally fair-minded must agree that the March 13, 1997, cold-blooded shooting of Israeli schoolgirls is as heinous a crime of hate as imaginable.

There should be no equivocation here.

In the wake of the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers, (Naharayim – two rivers in Hebrew) was reserved as a tourist site and named optimistically “the Island of Peace.” It was under Jordanian sovereignty but developed and maintained by several Israeli kibbutzim. It was ironically there that a Jordanian corporal, Ahmed Daqamseh, opened fire on Israeli children from Beit Shemesh during their school outing.

He killed seven 13-year-old girls and wounded others.

Daqamseh was sentenced to seven life terms, which in the Jordanian context means 25 years in prison. Yet he is far from being disowned and condemned by his compatriots.

The reverse is true. There has been continued overt and vociferous agitation for his release and he is often outrightly celebrated as a hero. Distressingly, King Abdullah keeps mum.

The Island of Peace - Poor impulse control or deadly ideology?

In 2011, Daqamseh said that he had not committed any crime, but rather “fulfilled his national and religious duty.” He was supported by Jordan’s Justice Minister (and his former attorney) Hussein Mjali, who called him a ‘hero’.

Fresnozionism.org..
15 April '13..





News item:

An overwhelming 110 members [out of 120] of the Jordanian House of Representatives signed a petition demanding a pardon for a Jordanian soldier who shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997.

Ahmad Musa Mustafa Daqamseh shot the girls during a school fieldtrip [to the Island of Peace] in Naharayim, near the Israel-Jordan border, and is currently serving a life sentence.

Here’s a description of the island:

The Island of Peace is an Israeli-Jordanian park at the confluence of the Jordan River and Yarmouk River, on the border between Israel and Jordan. …

Land along the Jordan River’s alluvial slopes and floor bed was under Jewish ownership before the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1927, Pinchas Rutenberg, founder of the Palestine Electric Company, signed an agreement with King Abdullah I of Jordan to build a hydroelectric power station. The canals and dams built for this purpose created a man-made island. …

In 1994, Israel ceded the area to Jordan as part of the Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace. Jordan agreed to lease it back so the Israeli farmers from Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’acov could continue to cultivate the land. Farming continues under a 25-year, automatically renewable lease. A gate was established to enable Israeli tourists to visit the park without a visa or passport, on presentation of their identity cards to the Jordanian guards at the border crossing.

It is a remarkably beautiful place, and represented one of the rare instances of anything approaching normal relations between Israel and any of its Arab neighbors. In 1994, King Hussein of Jordan told PM Itzhak Rabin that “no place better illustrates the fact that we are at peace.”

The 1997 murders were horrific. Daqamseh said that the picnicking girls had ridiculed him while praying, so he opened fire on them from a guard tower with his M16. Then he climbed down and chased them, continuing to fire until his weapon jammed.

In a gesture of a kind not seen from an Arab leader before or since, King Hussein came to Israel and visited the the shiva houses of the victims, sat on the floor with mourners, and ordered that the families be compensated. “Your pain is my pain,” he said.

Daqamseh was sentenced to life in prison by a Jordanian court, which normally equates to 25 years. His defense was a form of insanity plea: he could have received the death penalty, but the court was lenient because of his “antisocial personality disorder.” And by Western standards — even by King Hussein’s — anyone who would shoot down 13 and 14-year old girls because he believed they had made fun of him would have to be crazy.

In 2001, his mother called an al-Jazeera TV program and made this statement:

I am proud of my son, and I hold my head high. My son did a heroic deed and has pleased Allah and his own conscience. My son lifts my head and the head of the entire Arab and Islamic nation. I am proud of any Muslim who does what Ahmad did. I hope that I am not saying something wrong. When my son went to prison, they asked him: ‘Ahmad, do you regret it?’ He answered: ‘I have no regrets.’ He treated everyone to coffee, honored all the other prisoners, and said: The only thing that I am angry about is the gun, which did not work properly. Otherwise I would have killed all of the passengers on the bus.