King Abdullah’s Everyday Untruths - by Elder of Ziyon

...The entire “frustration” meme is an excuse to avoid looking at the core issue: Arabs refusing to accept Israel, even if some of them are forced to pretend that they do for political reasons. But deep down, the vast, vast majority of Arabs see a Jewish sovereign presence in the Middle East as temporary — just like the Crusader control of Jerusalem. If they are patient, the Arab people believe, the Jews will eventually be forced out..

Elder of Ziyon..
Algemeiner .com..
17 September '17

This interview with Jordan’s King Abdullah — from the Petra News Agency (and posted on the Jordanian embassy’s website) — is clearly meant for an American audience:

Jordan News Agency: Your Majesty, when it comes to the Palestinian issue, have there been genuine international efforts to bring the Palestinians and the Israelis back to the negotiating table?

King Abdullah: In my interactions with US President Trump and his administration, I have sensed a commitment to bolstering efforts aimed at reaching a solution that guarantees peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, which is positive and encouraging. I expect that we will see this commitment translated into action in the near future, based on the two-state solution, which is the only way to end the conflict.

Regional issues are interconnected. Reaching just and comprehensive peace that guarantees the emergence of an independent state for the Palestinians on their national soil with East Jerusalem as its capital will, in turn, achieve security and stability for the region and its peoples. In the same vein, failure to make progress in the peace process will fuel frustration and anger among the region’s peoples and serve the agenda of extremists, who exploit the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians and the frequent violations against Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. We have witnessed this during the recent crisis in Jerusalem.

You won’t read about Abdullah’s muted — but clear — praise for the Trump administration’s peacemaking efforts in the media.

But the second paragraph is more interesting, even if it’s boilerplate.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Oh, to be Abdullah! by Sarah Honig

...Ashton, Obama, Earnest and Psaki prefer that Jewish victims be swept into the dust bin of history. In contrast, the world saw the king from Amman suffer a single loss and enthusiastically affirmed his right to retaliate. Oh, to be Abdullah!

King Abdullah in combat mode: The
buzz was that Clint Eastwood’s royal
torchbearer would himself participate
in airstrikes [Royal Hashemite Court]

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
26 February '15..

Jordan’s King Abdullah may be barely hanging in there – thanks mostly to Israel’s tacit support – but there are times when we Israelis must envy him. His PR is peerless. We see him posing in camouflage combat gear and the entire civilized world can’t applaud the macho-man loudly enough.

In a photo circulated by his palace, Abdullah strikes a daunting figure – the great hope of the world’s democracies. Their hype/hope is that Abdullah will fight their fight against Islamic State (ISIS a.k.a. ISIL). To boot, Abdullah is a Muslim which is awfully handy for the spin that IS barbarities shouldn’t color our attitudes toward Islam.

But Muslims have always been fighting Muslims in numerous internecine wars between rival factions of Islam. Abdullah, moreover, isn’t the only Muslim headliner who today wages war – such as it is – on IS. Damascus despot Bashar Assad does the same.

Assad’s anti-IS tactics have included gassing thousands of his own compatriots. Does that make him a good-guy? Do Assad’s Hezbollah foot-soldiers also deserve rehabilitation because they form the actual backbone of the anti-IS campaign? Does Iran, Assad’s and Hezbollah’s senior patron, get into our good-Muslim list because it too is so incontrovertibly against IS?

The Middle East confounds our predilection to regard our enemy’s enemy as a friend.

Such configurations never work in the mutually destructive Muslim sphere. Most of the combatants on the many battlefields all around us are intrinsically the worst of the world’s bad-guys. When the bad-guys fire at worse-guys, their Muslim devotions – each in his doctrinaire manner – don’t prove Islamic goodwill. They establish nothing about who purportedly perverts Islam’s message and who doesn’t.

None of the warriors on Iraq’s, Syria’s, Libya’s or Yemen’s killing fields do. They all shed blood without compunction. They all are Muslim to the core and the Islamic realm was always violent.

But back to Abdullah, this half-British scion of the Arabian Peninsula’s Hejazi lineage might not win popularity contests in the Mideast but the West positively adores him.

No sooner was caged Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kassasbeh burned to death publicly by IS, than Abdullah vowed retribution. Members of the US House Armed Services Committee attest that immediately upon having heard of his pilot’s horrific execution, Abdullah (then the Committee’s guest in Washington) quoted Clint Eastwood’s character Bill Munny in the 1992 movie Unforgiven:

“Any man I see out there, I’m gonna kill him. Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I’m not only going to kill him, I’m going to kill his wife and all his friends and burn his damn house down.”

Imagine if Binyamin Netanyahu swaggered thus. Indignant condemnation of Bibi’s fascist pose would have dizzyingly whirled around the planet and picked up more vehemence with each furious rotation. But what’s unthinkable for some is only to be exhorted in others.

Abdullah avenged al-Kassasbeh by promptly hanging two convicted terrorists and the enlightened ones everywhere extolled his true grit and dogged determination. Liberal Israel doesn’t execute even the most heinous of terrorists but is mercilessly trashed by the same enlightened ones. Murderers like Marwan Barghouti, convicted by Israel’s super-liberal courts, are depicted as prisoners of conscience and Netanyahu is pressured excruciatingly to let more convicted murderers loose as “goodwill gestures” to terror masterminds.

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.

Jerusalem - Whose Holy Sites are Under Attack?

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
01 April '13..

To hear Mahmoud Abbas tell it, Al-Aqsa Mosque -- Islam's third holiest shrine -- is under systematic attack by Israel. And not only Al-Aqsa, which sits atop Temple Mount, but all other Christian and Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. Such was the alarm sounded by the Palestinian leader at last week's Arab League summit. In return, Arab leaders pledged a $1 billion fund to protect "Arab East Jerusalem."

Abbas followed up this Sunday during a trip to Amman, where he and King Abdullah signed an agreement to protect holy sites in Jerusalem. Again, Al-Aqsa was depicted as a prime target of Israeli attacks. But for good measure, the two leaders also professed to become protectors of all Muslim and Christian shrines in Jerusalem.

Not only was all this a bogus concoction since Al-Aqsa and all other religious shrines in Jerusalem remain open and under full Israeli protection. But conspicuously missing from all these supposedly threatened targets were Jewish holy sites in Israel's capital, where Temple Mount and the Western Wall are Judaism's most sacred places.

Somehow it escaped the attention of Abbas and King Abdullah that, if they really were sincere about protecting all sacred sites in Jerusalem, the only actually vulnerable shrines in Jerusalem and adjoining West Bank are Jewish ones.

Sherman - From potentate to puppet?

Martin Sherman..
Into the Fray/JPost..
03 February '12..

We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are perpetual and eternal and those interests it is our duty to follow – Lord Palmerston, British foreign secretary, 1848

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (The more things change, the more they stay the same) – Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, 1849

The Lone Ranger, to his hitherto trustworthy American-Indian comrade, Tonto, on realizing they are surrounded by hostile Apaches: It looks like we’re in a lot of trouble, old friend!
Tonto: What do you mean ‘we,’ Paleface? – an old joke

The eternal potential for perfidy – or at least the impermanence of loyalties – in pursuit of interests, personal or national, is being illustrated by the events unfolding in Jordan today.

Crumbling of conventional wisdom?

It has long been a pillar of conventional wisdom in the Middle East that the Hashemite kingdom is a bastion of moderate pro-Western stability. Accordingly, it has been held that the relationship between the monarchy and radical elements in the Arab world in general, and among the Palestinian in particular, will inevitably be adversarial. Consequently, the assumption has been that, by their very nature and the nature of their goals, these elements necessarily are an existential threat to the regime in Amman.

Furthermore, with the eruption of the Arab Spring, the dominant view has been that the popular waves of support for resurgent Islam are a grave menace to the rule of incumbent autocrats, monarchical or military.

After all, Islamic regimes have risen in the wake of deposed dictatorships in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, while other are under siege in Syria and Yemen. The same scenario was presumed valid in Jordan.

However, here it seems the Palestinian question might be disrupting – even reversing – this pattern, at least for the time being.

For as the recent visit by Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal to Amman (his first official one since his 1999 expulsion) shows, a surprising, even counter-intuitive, truth seems to be emerging.

Rather than radical Palestinian Islamic elements threatening to overthrow the monarchy, they appear to be articulating a rationale for sustaining it. At least in the medium term and at least as far as appearances are concerned. This may have dangerously deceptive consequences for Israel.

Tobin - Abdullah’s Hypocritical Lament

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
16 June '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/06/16/abdullah%E2%80%99s-hypocritical-lament/

Jordan’s monarchs have always gotten a free pass from the Western press no matter what their country did or how despotic the Hashemite regime was. That explains the way King Abdullah turned an interview with the Washington Post yesterday into another commercial for his government as a force for peace and democracy.

Abdullah was in the nation’s capital for talks with President Obama in which he urged him to take “bold steps to “jump-start peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinians. Abdullah seemed to be reading from the Obama playbook when he said that Israel had to act now to save itself: “If it’s not a two-state solution, then it’s a one-state solution,” he said. “And then, is it going to be apartheid, or is it going to be democracy?”

Astonishingly, Abdullah went on to lecture Israel about the need for granting democratic rights to Palestinians and said that the ascendance of right-wing parties in Israel was the result of too much American support: “When you get billions in aid and your weapons resupplied and your ammunition stock resupplied, you don’t learn the lesson that war is bad and nobody wins,” Abdullah said.

That the autocratic, unelected leader of a minority regime such as that of Jordan would be allowed to lecture a democracy like Israel on this score without being challenged is a tribute to Jordan’s incredibly good public relations if nothing else. If anybody needs democracy, it is the Palestinian majority in Jordan that has chafed for generations under minority Bedouin rule. But although he is as much under the gun as other Arab autocrats during the year of the Arab Spring, Abdullah was not asked by the Post about giving his own people some rights.

Yet Abdullah’s carping about Israel is particularly absurd and hypocritical. Israel’s turn to the right, it has little, if anything, to do with American support. Rather, it is the direct result of Palestinian rejectionism that has utterly destroyed the Israeli left in successive elections in the last decade. Israel has already embraced the two-state solution that he advocates but it has been rejected time and again by the Palestinians who even now refuse to even negotiate with the Jewish state. Even worse, the Palestinian “moderates” that Abdullah and Obama want Israel to make concessions to have now embraced a coalition with the Islamists of Hamas making peace even less likely.

If there is any country that has been coddled by the United States it is Jordan, not Israel. It was Abdullah’s father, after all, the charming and popular Hussein, who is responsible for the unification of Jerusalem and Israel’s capture of the West Bank. It was he who embraced Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and war against Israel in 1967. Hussein also supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Though he was loved in Israel for making peace with it in 1994, over the decades he slaughtered thousands of Palestinians in order to hold onto his kingdom. Yet the United States, and Israel have always been so desperate to preserve that monarchy that they have winked at everything its rulers have done.

If Abdullah cares that much about democracy, he ought to try it at home. And if he’s worried about peace, the king and his friend President Obama need to start pressuring the Palestinians, not Israel, to negotiate.

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King Abdallah Compliments President Obama, Sort Of?

Barry Rubin
GLORIA Center
02 July '10

Posted before Shabbat

According to the press pool reporter for the meeting between King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia and President Barack H. Obama of the United States, who wrote it just after stepping out of the meeting room, the king:

"Began his remarks saying he wanted to tell Obama what was spoken of him around the world: 'That you are an honorable and good man.'"

Is it just me or is there a gigantic unspoken, "But..." at the end of that sentence? It is true that Obama clearly relished this compliment. After all, popularity is everything to him. Presumably, it is the kind of thing his supporters think proves he has been successful.

Yet imagine two Middle East leaders or other rulers meeting: "Hey, ___, you're a really honorable and good man!" Does that indicate the compliment-giver respects or fears or will do what the subject of that phrase wants him to do? No, quite the opposite.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad said that it was better to be feared than loved. Usama bin Ladin said people prefer the strong horse in a race. He didn't say anything about the honorable and good horse. I can't think of anyone in Arab politics in the last 80 years who could be described as "honorable and good." Maybe, King Hussein of Jordan, but he had to appear nice since he ruled the weakest country in the region. And even he had an iron fist, as he demonstrated in crushing the PLO in September 1970.

And so, knowing something of how King Abdallah thinks, I can't help but hear some possible implied endings in his statement to the president:

(Read full article)

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Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Equates Israel With Iran--Neither Should Exist

Daled Amos
01 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah wants to go Iran one better when it comes to wiping countries off the map:

On June 5, he [King Abdullah] reportedly told French Defense Minister Hervé Morin that "There are two countries in the world that do not deserve to exist: Iran and Israel."

The scoop comes from Georges Malbrunot, a French journalist with Le Figaro. Malbrunot, a respected Middle East correspondent who spent four months as a hostage of the Islamic Army in Iraq, goes on to report that two sources, from diplomatic and military circles, have confirmed the story. He suggests that the anger directed as Israel was the result of the IDF raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla, which occurred just days before this outburst.

That might explain the anger, but not necessarily the sentiment itself.

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The myth of the Arab triangle

Tony Badran
NOW Lebanon
04 May '10

The last couple of weeks have shed the spotlight again on the tensions between Egypt and the regional Iranian axis, which includes Syria. The tensions surged with the conviction of Hezbollah cell members by the Egyptian judiciary, as well as with Cairo’s friction with Hamas and the persistence of its strained relations with Syria. Despite talk of reconciliation between Cairo and Damascus, the gap dividing the two states remains wide, as they have conflicting objectives and opposing strategic alignments.

The possibility of Egyptian-Syrian reconciliation had received ample airtime ahead of the Arab Summit in late March, but it amounted to very little. During the summit, the political differences dividing the two states were on display, pitting Egypt and Syria in opposing camps on key issues such as Palestinian politics, the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, their respective positions on “resistance,” and, in general, Syria’s strategic position within the Iranian camp.

In the end, the Egyptians and Syrians only agreed to stop media campaigns against each other, which had reached a fevered pitch. It was speculated that the freeze in media wars was to pave the way for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to visit his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, who had undergone surgery.

(Read full article)

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Rank hypocrisy and transparent double standards

David Harris
In the Trenches/JPost
07 February '10

I know I shouldn't be surprised any longer, but I still can't help it.

In a recent edition of The New York Times, after seeing 25 column inches on page 4 devoted to an article entitled "Israel Rebukes 2 in Attack on U.N. Complex," I read a short news item two pages later. It wasn't quite eight lines long, the fourth of five items under "World Briefing."

Here are the first two (of three) sentences:

A human rights group criticized Jordan on Monday for stripping the citizenship of nearly 3,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin in recent years. Concerned about increasing numbers of Palestinians, who make up nearly half the population, Jordan began in 2004 revoking the citizenship from Palestinians who do not have Israeli permits to reside in the West Bank."

Apart from the scanty news coverage of what is, after all, an important story - thousands of people losing their citizenship as a country seeks to tilt its delicate demographic balance - there is, of course, another issue.

Apart from the group that blew the whistle on this years-old policy, where is the outcry?

When Israel is accused, however unjustly, of any alleged misdeed against the Palestinians, the din is immediate and deafening. But when fellow Arabs are shown to be inflicting real damage on the Palestinians, there's hardly a peep.

Since the story surfaced nearly a week ago, I've looked in vain for editorials, columns, op-ed pieces, or letters-to-the-editor on the citizenship policy. Couldn't find a thing.

(Read full article)
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A Third Intifada?

Eric Trager
EricTrager.org
20 October 09

On Monday, Jordanian King Abdullah II referred to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “the most serious threat to the stability of the region and the Mediterranean.” Middle East policy analysts should take his warning to heart. After all, in gauging the political trends of the Middle East, the Jordanian monarchy has been among the most reliable barometers historically.

This is partly due to Jordan’s uncomfortable geo-strategic position. Indeed, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its west and Iraq to its east, Jordan is uniquely susceptible to the ideological currents and strategic shifts affecting the region’s hottest battle zones. Moreover, Jordan’s imbalanced demography – in particular, the fact that a Hashemite king presides over a Palestinian majority – makes its monarchy particularly wary of any destabilizing signals. These sensitivities create a strong bias in favor of non-ideological, interest-based policy-making, with Jordan shifting its priorities – and, at times, its loyalties – in rapid response to the regional changes that it perceives.

In this vein, Abdullah’s sudden insistence that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “the most serious threat to the stability of the region” represents a critical shift in judgment. Indeed, back in 2004, the Jordanian monarch warned that a looming “Shiite crescent” – a near-contiguous sphere of Iranian influence extending through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories – was the foremost threat to regional stability. Abdullah was prescient: Iran’s interference in Iraq undermined the U.S. war effort, while Tehran’s increased support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria solidified an anti-western axis in the Middle East.

Of course, the challenges associated with Iranian ascendancy haven’t been resolved, and dealing with Iran’s ongoing pursuit of nuclear capabilities still tops the U.S.’s Middle East agenda. Still, Abdullah’s shift in priorities towards the Israeli-Palestinian sphere is worth noting, as it constitutes the best open-source indicator that recent Palestinian threats to resume suicide terrorism and launch a third Intifada are not idle chatter. Naturally, the prospect of renewed Israeli-Palestinian fighting – particularly within the West Bank – is far more threatening to Jordan than a nuclear Iran, and Abdullah’s diversion from his former fear of a “Shiite crescent” suggests that the next, bloody chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be fast approaching.
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King Abdullah's imaginative inter-faith initiative

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
1 October 09

In Arab News, we learn that Bava Jain, secretary-general of the World Council of Religious Leaders, has described as historic and bold the two-day international inter-faith conference which opened today in Geneva. The conference is the initiative of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who, says Bava Jain, deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for an initiative which potentially

would have tremendous impact on world peace and stability if effective measures were taken to implement it.

The report tells us:

Delegates from 35 countries are taking part in the conference, which opens Wednesday. They include William Baker, president of Christians and Muslims for Peace in the US; David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs at the American Jewish Committee; Pramjeet Singh Sarna, president of Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Sahib; Kuniaki Kuni, president of the Association of Shinto Temples in Japan; and Xue Cheng, vice chairman of the Buddhist Association of China.

Er...William Baker? Wikipedia tells us:

William Baker ... was expelled from Robert H. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral mission after exposure of his affiliations with extremistfar-right racist, antisemitic and Neo-Nazi groups, including chairmanship of the Neo-Nazi Populist Party.

Orange County Weekly reported in 2002:

... evidence supplied by the Anti-Defamation League shows that Baker delivered a 1983 speech to the racist Christian Patriot Defense League in Licking, Missouri, in which he made several references to [Willis] Carto’s neo-Nazi newspaper, Spotlight. A 23-page transcript of that rambling speech reveals a number of anti-Semitic remarks, including Baker's reference to Reverend Jerry Falwell as ‘Jerry Jewry.’ (Falwell is known to be friendly to Jews.) In the same speech, Baker described his disgust at traveling to New York City: ‘God help me. Why? ’Cause the first people I meet when I get off the plane are pushy, belligerent American Jews.’

... During the same period, Baker wrote and published Theft of a Nation, a 1982 book whose salient feature is its unrelenting pro-Arab, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish politics. Writing on contemporary Middle East politics, Baker stated that ‘true justice and real conciliation’ requires that ‘all Jews who entered Palestine during the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948 and after the establishment of the state of Israel should return to the various countries of their origin’ and that the ‘Zionist state of Israel . . . should be dismantled and eventually eliminated.’

Isn’t inter-faith dialogue wonderful?

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