King of Jordan has to choose between Martyrdom and Monarchy

King Abdullah of Jordan arrived in Makkah to attend the Arab and Islamic summits attired in the religious two-pieced white Ihram sheets. The Arabs dictators are masters in using religion in politics and also in organizing summits where they can gather up to 57 Muslim country like the Islamic, the Arab and the Gulf summits held in the past few days in Makkah. Every tyrant is ready for the highlight with a glorious pan-Arab and pan-Islamic statements.

The Arab media was ready too to display the political menu. The big titles appears on Arab TV screens and newspapers: “our struggle with Israel,” “Palestine, the historical cause of the Islamic nation,” and then the Iranian issue. But very few talks about the Bahrain confab expected in June. An albatross around their necks. The antisemetic shaikhdom of Qatar criticized it but ended up issuing a statement saying that it will attend the meeting. At the same time its media arm Aljazeera channel hasn’t stopped hammering away at the countries that are willing to take part in the workshop calling them traitors of the “Cause.”

Conflicted Saudi Arabia, while having secret relations with the Hebrew state and showing support to a conference that will be attended by Israel, it has prepared for its huge Arab audience (spanning from Morocco to Iraq) in this month of Ramadan a set of soap operas crammed with antisemitism and hatred toward the Jews; the Saudi TV serial al-‘Asoof (winds of change) or Duf’at al-Qahira (Cairo promotion) produced for the Saudi-owned MBC media empire are good examples for the hypocrisy and double standard of the hidebound kingdom.

Undoubtedly, the Arab regimes, so far, don’t seem genuinely interested in any peace deal. In effect they are satisfied with the status quo that actually lies in conformity with the collective Islamic belief in an eternal struggle and constant Jihad movement against the Jews until the end of time. The wide spread Hadith of the Prophet taught to youngsters in schools and mosques says:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (the Boxthorn tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).

This Hadith is as popular in the Arabsphere as Madonna in the West.

They have money and they have fanatics in Gaza who are willing to quench their ideological thirst. Therefore they can keep waging Jihad and rebuilding Gaza repeatedly for hundred years. However, they are bound to accept the US invitation to the workshop in Bahrain for America has always been there to save their heads from the Iranian guillotine. They lack sincerity and goodwill. That’s why the Palestinian issue should be resolved bilaterally between Israel and the US through a de facto policy far from any pan-Arab intervention apart from financial contributions.

For his part, King Abdullah wants to preserve his throne, and he wants also to keep the US aid and protection. But apparently this is not enough for him. He still wants to compete with the custodian of the two holy mosques (the Saudi Monarch) by keeping the title of the custodian of Al-Aqsa (the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan only acknowledged a “special role” —and not custodianship— of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem.) It is essentially a question of prestige and boosting of an image. But Abdullah in his greedy aspirations could dramatically lose everything. He has then to choose, along with his other royal Arab brothers, either to be a martyr, a Saladin, or a monarch whose reign depends completely on the “infidels” support.

By adding more religious ingredients to the conflict and adopting a radical if not suicidal stance, the king is only making it harder for his precarious monarchy to survive and undermining vital alternatives that could serve (in trying time) as an escape route from a doomed fate. He has been empowering the Islamist ideology throughout the kingdom, legitimating the Muslim Brotherhood narrative, and cultivating an antisemetic environment that extends from social and cultural life to parliament to the gradual Islamization of his little royal army.

Watching a Jordanian female military parade posted to YouTube in May 2018, I was appalled to see not a single unveiled women in the show, a disturbing Islamist hegemony in a country where the elegant Queen projects herself on the covers of the glowing Western magazines as a model for the modern Arab woman and a fierce fighter for women’s rights in the Middle East. It should be noted that the Islamist veil is not a mere religious symbol of modesty, but in addition to that it is an obligatory dress code imposed sometimes by governments and sometimes by the norms of the indoctrinated Islamic societies. It embodies the essence of the antisemitic and anti-western ideology. When an unveiled Muslim woman takes the decision to wear hijab, the Islamists celebrate it as conversion to Islam; they call the new veiled woman a “Moultazima” from the linguistic root “Iltizam” or discipline, that is, a person who became ideologically disciplined, a loyalist to a set of Islamist ideas and doctrines which we find anti-Jews and the “freeing of Palestine from river to sea” at the core of it.

Jordan gives the impression of a country preparing for a holy war. The king, by Inducing the local media and state-run newspapers to incite the Palestinian to stage a new Intifada and revive the spirit of resistance and suicide bombings, only to save his self-styled title of “protector of Al-Aqsa,” and by angering his subjects against the US peace plan, he may lead the kingdom —that depends mainly on loans and endowments from regional and international donors— to an economic collapse.

As far as I know, the king’s forebears do not belong to a Jordanian tribe. His family belongs to the Dhawu Awn, one of the branches of the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca – also referred to as Hashemites – who ruled Mecca continuously from the 10th century until its conquest by the House of Saud in 1924. They were two sons of Sharif Husain ibn Ali the king of Hijaz, one was given Iraq, king Faisal, after losing syria, and the other, Abdullah, marched into Trans-Jordan —that was at the time a no man’s land— at the head of an army of 300 men from the Hejazi tribe of ‘Utaybah.

Maybe Abdullah doesn’t want to be another example of the medieval Moorish king Boabdil nicknamed al-Saghir (the small), sultan of Granada and last Muslim king in Spain who relinquished its keys to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The legend has it that his mother Aixa told him: “You do well, my son, to cry like a woman for what you couldn’t defend like a man.” But the difference between the two is that king Abdullah doesn’t have the keys of Jerusalem, and most importantly that no one has kicked him out of Amman yet.