The Crocodile tears of Queen Rania

In an interview with CNN (Tuesday 12 March 2024) Queen Rania was discussing the humanitarian aspects of the Gaza war. She said “Aid under bombardment does not stop the destruction, the death and the heartbreak. We cannot save people from hunger only then to bomb them to death”. Rousing words indeed. As usual she reduced the root cause of the conflict as all the twisted and dishonest opponents of Israel do, to historical injustice: occupation, settlement expansion, human rights abuses and disregard for international law. Ho hum . We have heard this litany of slander many times before. Naturally the lack of democratic peace loving nature of Palestinian society was not addressed .

Even the interviewer Christina Amanpour, not known for her regard for Israel or her balance in coverage of the conflict, could not hold back from questioning the queen about the events on 7 October 2023. Queen Rania gave this astonishing response:
“Israel experienced one October 7, since then, the Palestinians have experienced 156 October 7’s”.

This breathtaking lie suggest that for the last 156 days of the Gaza war, Israel has been committing similar atrocities to Hamas on a daily basis on the civilians of Gaza. Not one single instance has been recorded of anything remotely approximating (G-d forbid), torture, burning, mutilation, rape , even necrophilia by Israeli soldiers on Palestinian women and children.

But her rank hypocrisy and dishonesty have a far more profound dimension. She totally overlooks the Black September massacre of the Palestinians by the Jordanian armed forces in 1972. The viewers of CNN should have been reminded by Amanpour of this glaring historical fact.

Quick rewind. After the Six Day war in 1967 the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, mostly from the former Jordanian occupied West Bank, fled to Jordan. Refugee camps were set up. The fedayeen ie PLO fighters conducted their international terrorism activities from Jordan. In 1970 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a splinter group of the PLO, hijacked three civilian aircraft to Dawson’s Field in Jordan. The aircraft were blown up and Jewish hostages were taken. The left wing of the PLO became became emboldened calling for the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy to create a Palestinian state within Jordan. There were assassination plots against King Hussein. The king saw these actions as a threat to the sovereignty of Jordan and took military action against fedayeen posts in the refugee camps. Some writers describe this conflict as a civil war. In September 1970 the Jordanian armed forces launched full scale military attacks on Palestinian strongholds and the PLO was expelled. Many sought refuge in Lebanon. Palestinian fatalities including civilians are estimated to be between 4000 and 25 000 depending on the source. No love for the Palestinians from Jordan.

Another elephant in the room during this interview is the question why Jordan has refused to accept refugees from Gaza. This would be a natural and immediate humanitarian response from Jordan. Queen Rania was silent on this issue. As the old adage has it, people in glass houses shouldn’t thrown stones.

But Queen Rania soldiered on blaming Israel’s “hardline leaders keeping their people in this perpetual state of fear of an existential threat that dosn’t exist…”
She obviously wasn’t watching the video of Hamas official Ghazi Hamad who said on 1 November 2023:

“We must teach Israel a lesson and we will do that again and again. The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be second, a third, a fourth.”

If her highness by some chance missed this egregious declaration of genocide, then she surely must be familiar with the Hamas charter which seeks to establish an Islamic state in all of Israel. That’s an existential threat by any measure.

She can be forgiven for her ignorance or dishonesty, but her compliant interlocutor Amanpour cannot. She is a seasoned news veteran on a major network and one would assume has some smidgen of journalistic ethics to place the real facts on record. Would that be expecting too much from CNN?

In the words of Bob Dylan from the song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall –

“And I’ll tell it,and speak it,and think it, and breathe it
And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it
And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinking
But I’ll know my song well before start singing”

We know our song well and we will never be silent or silenced by a world that turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to the injustices and lies against our people.