27-Aug-21: Peace, terror and Jordan's under-reported attachment to anti-Jewish bigotry

Jordan's King Abdullah is received in President Joseph R. Biden's Oval Office, July 19, 2021

We anticipated the fawning reception King Abdullah II of Jordan would receive during his three week tour of the US in July. 

We were ready for the high-intensity five days of meetings he had with President Joseph R. Biden in the Oval Office, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and with a long list of Washington insiders both in the Congress and around it, very few of whom have shown the smallest interest in engaging with us. (Details to follow.)

Everything was more or less predictable,

Less expected and seriously unwelcome was how the Washington media remained, almost entirely without exception, docile to the point of self-parody, lacking all desire to seize on the obvious issues thrown up by the King Abdullah royal tour. 

This was noted in a critical comment over at MediaIte.com. See: "White House Press Corps Whiffs By Not Asking Biden About Jordan Harboring a Wanted Terrorist During King Abdubllah’s WH Visit" [Jackson Richman, July 19, 2021] 

The issues from which the intrepid reporters shy away as they have for years are dramatic, involving murdered American young women, a killer who boasts of the lives she destroyed, and brazen efforts to evade a long-standing treaty obligation. 

It's startling to us how wide a consensus there appears to be among reporters and their editors in America's news industry that Jordan's role in harboring the admitted bomber of a busy pizzeria filled with children (and targeted for that very reason) is untouchable. 

Turkish news report from 2016

We hoped right to the end that the Ahlam Tamimi case would get some degree of analytical attention in the public parts of July's unusually long and extensively reported Royal Hashemite state visit. But it got approximately none.

Those factors among others are behind an opinion piece Arnold Roth co-wrote with Dr Sharon S. Nazarian of the Anti-Defamation League that is published today on the Forward website ["Jordan has a public antisemitism problem. Why isn’t the U.S. holding them accountable?"].

It's hard for us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) to deny our perspective is subjective and affected by our personal experiences. We are the parents of one of the two American nationals murdered by Jordanian terrorist Ahlam Tamimi in the Sbarro massacre. Starting in 2012, we pressed for the fugitive to be charged under US law. And once that happened, we kept asking the US to explain to Jordan what it needed to do next; to extradite Tamimi to stand trial on those charges in Washington as the 1995 Jordan/US treaty requires.

This process has put us on a steep learning curve. 

Once Jordan - a country of 10 million inhabitants of whom almost none are Jewish - defied the US extradition request ["23-Mar-17: Looking for justice in Jordan, Jerusalem and Washington"], we began being treated to a long line of senior officials in three US administrations - Obama, Trump, Biden - practically falling over themselves to keep the whole mess under wraps. 

No less troubling, a strangely uncurious media failed - and continues to fail - to question what was going on. The failure is on show and damning right up until today. 

Being treated contemptibly by powerful officials, finding that all our questions go unanswered or get mechanical, thoroughly meaningless mantra-like responses has been for us a chilling experience.

Meanwhile we, a bereaved couple armed with few tanks and even fewer battleships, felt we were perceived, and still are, as some kind of hostile force. 

We recognize the principles of realpolitik that underlie the US-Jordan relationship. But what we understand a lot less well is why those charged with pretending they don't exist think that they alone can see the big picture that eludes grieving parents. We tried making that point in July as Jordan's king sailed through Washington's halls of power ["25-Jul-21: What we said in the media about King Abdullah's visit"]

But there's a flip side. The diplomatic seers seem blinded to a companion reality that is all too apparent to us and it's this: Jordan, despite the peace treaty with Israel, remains a hotbed of vicious Jew-hatred.

To be clear: Like most of our neighbors and friends, we want to see good and better relations with Jordan. It's a goal with which we totally identify. But justice is a powerful goal too. And it's clear to us Jordan has for decades been in the grip of a powerful hatred that will define the future unless its leadership takes determined steps to change direction. 

We have searched and we would welcome bring told how wrong we are. But there is simply no evidence that King Abdullah either intends those changes or has ever acknowledged the vast problem exists.

So we will be blunt. The ongoing Tamimi travesty illustrates Jordan's continued commitment to a culture of deep bigotry towards Jews. Its brazen breach of a strategic treaty with its most important ally and supporter is not a special case but an example of a much broader mind-set and systemic policy failure. 

Here are three more.

► Making serious trouble on the Temple Mount

Jordan secretly maintains its own “incitement force” on the Old City of Jerusalem's Temple Mount as part of a kingdom-driven policy of Israel-focused calculated violence and overt trouble-making. This emerges from a research paper published August 6, 2021 by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (known as the BESA Center), a think tank doing policy-relevant research on Middle Eastern and global strategic affairs and based at Israel's Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. 

In "Jordan’s “Incitement Force” on the Temple Mount", the author, Dr. Edy Cohen, an Israel intelligence service veteran, quotes Jordan's current Minister of Religions revealing that some 850 Jordanians are working at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on behalf of Jordan’s Ministry of Religion. 

Here's why this is startling. Jordan is an economic basket case that is the world's third-largest recipient of US foreign aid amounting to billions of dollars in US tax-payer-funded contributions each year. Yet it manages to find some NIS 56 million (roughly US $17.5 million) annually to keep this ugly strategy going, according to the BESA analysis. 

What underpins this madness is the little-publicized rivalry between Hashemite Jordan and Saudi Arabia which rules the desert kingdom from which the Hashemites were forced to flee a century ago. The Saudi/Jordanian rivalry centers on Jerusalem's sacred Islamic sites as a kind of counter-balance to the control the hold the Saudis have over Mecca and Medina as their 'guardians'. 

Jordan is known to fear moves that might end its term as guardian of the Jerusalem sites. The kingdom's minister of religion, Dr. Muhammad Khalaila, told a parliamentary committee that those 850 workers are registered as employees of Jordan's Ministry of Religion. Dr Cohen notes that this strikes an odd note for people tuned in to events in the Old City: 

"As anyone visiting the mosque can attest, no more than a few dozen Jordanian Waqf security guards are visible—not hundreds, and certainly nowhere near 850. So who are the others, where are they, and what are they doing? The most likely hypothesis is that those workers are used as mercenaries of a sort in times of crisis. Many significant gatherings have sprung up almost instantly on the Temple Mount in recent years whenever the site deteriorated into violence—during the recent Gaza war, during the magnetometer riots (July 2017), during the Mercy Gate crisis (March 2019), and in many other violent outbursts. The Jordanian workers might serve as a “rapid incitement force” that increases the volume of the event, stirs up the crowd, and stimulates it to conduct riots, or joins with the crowd to create a sense of “togetherness” against the “occupation.” If each of those Jordanians brings along one or two young men, in a short time thousands of rioters can be expected. This allows the organizers of the riots to put tremendous pressure on the Israeli authorities and render it difficult for them to calm the situation. The road from there to surrender is short."

Given the current fog of confusion and doubt that characterizes Israel's Jordan relations, the worrying questions these revelations throw up are unlikely to get any useful answers.

► Antisemitism in Jordanian Textbooks?

A carefully-argued report by the Anti Defamation League published four months ago (and almost totally ignored by the media) says that an ADL review of Jordanian middle school and high school textbooks finds the kingdom's textbooks fuel and foster antisemitism. Those books are official parts of today's educational curriculum.

The report's author, David Andrew Weinberg, ADL’s Washington Director for International Affairs, focuses his research and writing on antisemitic incitement in the Middle East. 

Among the messages injected into the minds of Jordanian school-children, he quotes these:

• "The Israelites who did not believe in Jesus, peace be upon him, wanted to be rid of him and eliminate his call, so they tried to kill him" but because of a divine intervention "they grabbed someone who resembled him from among the people, and they killed and crucified the lookalike..."
• A textbook that teaches “the historical roots of the Palestinian issue” presents an array of civilizations that inhabited the area but makes no mention of Jews or Israelites until the 19th century, at which point it notes the emergence of “Zionist greed in Palestine,” in league with imperialist powers.  
• The Zionist movement is defined as “a racist, settler political movement aimed at establishing a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine, founded on historical claims without basis in truth.” 
• Jewish links to Jerusalem are “founded on historical and religious claims without any actual grounds on which to base them”.
• Treachery is a characteristic Jewish trait,
• The deadly riots of 1929 were because of Jewish actions and religious claims. The riots “broke out because of the Zionists’ claim that the Buraq Wall [better known as the Kotel or Western Wall] led to "transgression on the Islamic holy sites, so they [the Arabs] attacked groups of participating Jews at the Buraq Wall”
• Totally inverting the 1969 attempted arson attack by a mentally-unwell Australia Christian visitor on an Islamic holy site on the Temple Mount, a Jordanian text says "Israelis had the audacity to burn the al-Aqsa Mosque". The unsuccessful arson attack is listed under "Israeli Occupation assaults on the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque". 
• It teaches that current Israeli archeological sites “seek to link everything discovered to fake Talmudic narratives... to claim that they have extended historical roots in Jerusalem and Palestine” and therefore to “forge historical facts.” 
• Israeli excavations in Jerusalem "intentionally aim" to harm the Arab economy and to “secure the Jewish settlers who come to Jerusalem to practice their Talmudic rituals.”  
• Treason and the breaking of pacts are among the characteristics of the Jews and the hypocrites.

There's a special irony in how the breaking of pacts is ascribed to Jews. Since March 2017, it has been Jordan itself ["26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions"] that spins a disingenuous tale about a narrow and highly technical flaw in the way its 1995 extradition treaty with the US. That alleged flaw is the sole basis on which Jordan fails to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who confesses to the the bombing massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria where our daughter's life ended. Jordan argues it isn't a breach at all because the treaty was never ratified, We now hold documentary proof that that this is untrue. 

The US has very quietly continued since 2017 to say the treaty is valid and in force. Throughout the years since then, it has incomprehensibly failed to make a single public call for Jordan to honor it.

The author of the ADL report in a summing up that to us sounds remarkably restrained says that

if Jordan keeps publishing official textbooks that demonize Israel, Jews, and Judaism in such a manner, the next generation may be less likely to support this relationship, nor the desirability of peace with Israel more generally. 

► Jordan is a hotbed of seriously antisemitic views. What if anything is its government doing to change that?

Some findings again from the ADL. No one comes close to its statistics-driven insights into the current state of antisemitic sentiment worldwide and the dynamics behind that make it possible. And while it's certainly an issue that deserves careful thought and wide attention, it's the Jordan aspect that we feel the need to highlight here and now.

On a published index they call the ADL GLOBAL 100: AN INDEX OF ANTI-SEMITISM®, the ADL's researchers ascribe a score to most of the world's countries. Their methodology is laid out in clear terms. It's a respected analysis.

Jordan, the last time the study was done there in 2014, weighs in with an index score of 81%. This isn't something to ignore. For comparison purposes, that puts Jordanians - relative to other Muslim and Arab countries - as more antisemitic than Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. 

If you don't find this startling, you might not realize how much support Jordan gets in Washington.

Jordanians as a society are also substantially more antisemitic than the Middle East and North African countries taken as a whole (average index score of 74%). 

And Jordanians are between two and three times more antisemitic than (ranking them in order from most antisemitic to least) Eastern Europe, then Sub-Saharan Africa, then Asia as a whole, then the Americas and finally Oceania.

This blog post isn't meant to encourage hatred or criticism of Jordan or Jordanians. 

Source

But when its ruler spends most of the month of July traveling around the United States, being received with uncommon courtesy and often with striking enthusiasm by political leaders at the very highest level - and certainly including America's Jewish leaders - we wish they would pause before they launch into gushing praise. Something is seriously wrong with the current reality.

They could and should ask the man who owns and runs the Hashemite Kingdom. In our words:

Your Majesty, is this the way to bring peace? When will you acknowledge publicly that the devotion to hatred and violent extremism (by which we of course mean terrorism) among your subjects and institutions at every level of the society over which you preside is an embarrassment and a serious impediment to everything your friends want to help you achieve?

Ahlam Tamimi needs to be extradited now as the treaty made by the father of today's king with his American allies in 1995 demands. 

Changing course, handing her over to US law enforcement without further unconscionable delay, will be one step, but an important one, in the direction of addressing issues that sadly and avoidably push peace further away rather than draw it closer.

27-Dec-18: What's changed these past 15 years with the maleducation in Palestinian Arabs schools?

One of the most distressing and depressing aspects of how the Abbas and Hamas regimes weaponize their Palestinian Arab society's children is in how they educate them.

The evidence for the open and callous manipulation of their children's minds and futures has been out there for anyone concerned with the truth to absorb. Yet its corrosiveness goes on. And no less disturbing, it continues in large measure to be funded by non-Arab states in the name of "helping".

We're reposting here an article written by Arnold Roth for the Wall Street Journal back in September 2003 - more than a decade and a half ago.

Readers paying attention will see that, while some things have changed somewhat, others remain just as rotten as they were back then.

Blood, Money and Education
Arnold Roth / The Wall Street Journal Europe
September 26, 2003

JERUSALEM -- The European Commission is abuzz with financial scandals involving significant sums and the EU's statistical agency. They pale, however, compared with the consequences and scale of EU mismanagement in an area that affects my family and me.

Last December, I traveled to Brussels as a member of a small contingent of Israelis. Each of us had experienced the loss of a family member by terrorism in the past two years. My daughter, Malka Chana, 15, was killed by a Hamas terrorist cell. She was a high school student, a talented musician, a volunteer passionately dedicated to the care of disabled children. When her murderer exploded himself in a Jerusalem restaurant in August 2001, he massacred 15 innocent civilians, mainly children and teenagers. Hundreds were injured.

Chris Patten, the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, plays a central role in the provision of EU financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. I intended to ask him in that visit whether he was aware of evidence that EU money, channeled through his office to the PA and so necessary to improving Palestinian lives, was being diverted to fund terrorism. Did he believe a just peace could be achieved when teachers paid from EU grants to UNRWA (U.N. Relief and Works Agency) teach Palestinian children that Israel has no right to exist and that their martyrdom is a glorious part of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East?

Unlike the other senior EU figures we approached, Mr. Patten declined to meet us. We met his deputy instead.

I referred him to evidence uncovered by Israeli forces in 2002 showing that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are a routine part of corruption in the PA. My concerns were misplaced, he said, since all payments made via Mr. Patten's office to the PA are closely supervised by the International Monetary Fund. Immediately after our meeting, I checked the record and learned that some months before, the IMF had published a report denying this. The IMF report confirmed budgetary abuse by the PA.

Earlier this month, my family and I again lost friends to terrorism. One of the victims of another massacre in a Jerusalem cafe was an emergency room doctor, David Appelbaum, who had dedicated his life to caring for terror victims -- Jews and Arabs alike. His daughter, killed with him, was to be married the next evening.

Their tragic murders led me to reflect again on what it would take to stop the hate-filled education of Palestinian children that turns them into walking grenades.

Checking the EU's Web site, I found a Dutch MEP had just asked some questions to Mr. Patten on this theme. Mr. Patten's written answer said that the Commission "has no evidence of Community funding to the Palestinian Authority being misused for anything other than its agreed purpose. Should such evidence come to light, immediate action would be taken."

This was strikingly similar to his response to charges about the misuse of EU money by the PA. The refrain was repeated after Human Rights Watch's report into Palestinian terrorism noted that "The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades appear to have benefited from the routine misuse of PA funds."

Some 55% of all Palestinian Arabs are under the age of 20. Addressing their needs is critical to the building of bridges of peace between our two peoples. Around 3.5 billion euros in the form of EU aid reached the Palestinian leadership between 1994 and 2001. Wherever it went, it has failed to benefit their education or bring peace. The hateful messages that permeate their education, including EU-funded textbooks, guarantee another generation incapable of reconciling itself to peace with Israelis. In fact, there is internal Palestinian correspondence verifying that Hamas has taken control of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, ensuring the children continue to be taught to admire and emulate suicide bombers.

Mr. Patten promised immediate action when concrete evidence comes to light. I have now written to him, pointing to two specific sources.

First, the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview last week with Mahmoud Abbas, the PA prime minister who just resigned, quotes him as confirming what Israeli documents proved 18 months ago: that the PA's top managers skim money off the payroll and that secret bank accounts are routine.

The story quoted Mr. Abbas as saying that Arafat blocked financial reforms because they threatened illegal slush funds Arafat was using to pay for the intifada. PA officials' salaries are paid by the EU, "but Arafat or his cronies were skimming off up to 15% in income taxes and using it for their own causes," said the story.

It then quoted Mr. Abbas as saying "Personally, I don't know where those funds go. When we wanted to cancel them, they said: `You're harming the intifada'."

A second source is a report on the Palestinian economy released last week by the IMF. This reveals that $900 million was "diverted" by Arafat from tax receipts alone over the past several years. Most of it possibly ended up in Palestinian public assets. But the IMF adds that not all the missing money can be accounted for and points to additional specific problems in internal PA budget control practices. Published Israeli military intelligence reports said exactly this last year. Mr. Patten dismissed them.

The Commission has stubbornly denied the existence of such corruption even while serving as one of its principal feeders. Innocents like my daughter die because money is available to lubricate the wheels of evil and corruption and for hate-filled education.

My letter reminds Mr. Patten that the EU-sponsored road map demands an immediate end to Palestinian terrorism. He can choose to exercise the funding power already in his control, and condition future PA grants on unambiguous prior evidence that Palestinian education has become peace-directed and positive. Or he can continue denying the price of EU blood money.

* * *

Click to go to "Snouts and troughs"

Chris Patten, better known today to those who respect and appreciate him as Baron Patten of Barnes, CH, PC, went on at the conclusion of his European Commission gig to to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford and then Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation. He resigned (on grounds of ill-health) in 2014. He never troubled himself to reply to our expose or to the letters mentioned in the WSJ article.

For a little additional colour and background, please take a look at some related past posts of ours:

• 6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen
• 9-Sep-13: Snouts and troughs
• 28-Mar-14: Once more: European double-talk on the funding of Palestinian Arab terrorism
• 09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

28-May-18: Names and identities: A Jerusalem battlefield

Earlier today we tweeted this famous 1948 image, originally
photographed by the remarkable John Roy Carlson [Source]

It won't be surprising to regular readers when we say that we keep an eye on what the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan does. And that we wish people would pay closer attention to some of the disturbing things that emanate from there.

An article in yesterday's Jordan Times ["Changing Arabic names of Jerusalem heritage sites is attempt to ‘Judaise’ city - study", May 27, 2018] provides an illustration. (The emphasis is ours):

The Israeli occupation has changed the Arabic names of 667 archaeological and heritage sites in Jerusalem with the aim of “Judaising the city” and “erasing its historical and religious identity”, according to a recent study.
“Replacing the Arabic names is part of a long-term and systematic attempt to distort facts and falsify the real identity of the holy city until the future generation forgets its Arab and Islamic identity,” Ibrahim Bazazo, researcher and dean of the Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of Jordan told The Jordan Times on Sunday.
The study was conducted over the course of three years by Jordanians Omar Jawabreh, Mohammad Sarayreh, Haitham Abdelraza and Bazazo, under the title “Towards Sustainable Documentation of Geographical Names of Touristic and Heritage Sites in Occupied Jerusalem Using Geographical Information System [GIS]”. Researchers used documents dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries, including holy books, historical and geographical atlases..."

It goes on in this vein, accusing the enemy of "forcing a ‘Judaised’ identity" and blaming "the Israeli occupation" for replacing "Arabic names not only from all signs and banners but also from school books and official curricula". (The very loaded issue of school books offers an egregious example of a Jordanian talent for skating on thin ice.)

Perhaps to bolster the mean-spirited and essentially untrue Jordanian allegations with a little gravitas, the government-controlled newspaper refers to certain thoughts of its ruler:

During the Extraordinary Session of the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held in Istanbul earlier this month, His Majesty King Abdullah called for “immediate measures by brotherly Arab and Muslim countries to support the perseverance of Palestinians and empower them economically, while countering attempts to Judaise Jerusalem and alter its Arab, Islamic, and Christian identity”.

Reacting to the assault on this Arab, Islamic, and Christian identity, an associate professor at Yarmouk University, Omar Al Ghul, is quoted saying:

"We cannot deny the Judaisation processes which are evidenced by the existence of a special committee in the Knesset to change the Arabic names..."

He could be referring to Israel's Government Committee on Names (ועדת השמות הממשלתית) whose work which got started right after Israel's independence 70 years ago is mostly done by now. It has had responsibility for giving places Hebrew names when there are no such modern names. The English-language stub of the Hebrew Wikipedia entry for the committee calls it

a public committee appointed by the Government of Israel, which deals with the designation of names for communities and other points on the map of Israel, and the replacement of Arabic names that existed until 1948 with Hebrew names. The committee's decisions bind state institutions...

It's not clear to us why a sovereign state ought to be criticized for wanting to change the names of places that were given Arabic and/or Turkish names under long-overturned foreign military occupation.

In any event, an academic lawyer whom we consulted informally about the committee's work told us

There’s nothing in international law about names per se. One can always try to stitch together a clever argument that it is part of a bigger plan of genocide or apartheid or whatever the Jewish evil du jour is. The Hebrew [Wikipedia] entry’s claim on the purpose of the committee being the replacement of Arabic names that existed until 1948 appears to be editorializing. The entry quotes Ben Gurion as saying להרחיק את השמות הערבים מטעמים מדיניים: כשם שאין אנו מכירים בבעלותם הפוליטית של הערבים על הארץ, כן אין אנו מכירים בבעלותם הרוחנית ובשמותיהם" but no source is provided, and in any event it does not seem to be part of the official charge of the committee.

That Hebrew quote of B-G's, in our words: "To remove Arab names for political reasons: Just as we don't recognize Arab political ownership of the land, so too we don't recognize their spiritual ownership or their names..."

Back to the Jordanians. The dean of the Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of Jordan weighs in with some views in yesterday's article. He gets credit as one of the researchers of the "Judaization" study, though not as a lawyer. This doesn't prevent him from dispensing legal advice:

“It is now the role of government institutions and civil society organisations to use the research data and take action to stop the Judaisation of Jerusalem,” the researcher said, stressing: “We should speak out to the international institutions and the International Court of Justice to ensure that our identity is preserved and protected.”

Jerusalem, December 1956 during Jordanian military occupation
[Image Source: Getty]

It's startling to hear Jordanian officials refer to international organizations as providing them with backing and their claims with validation. Jordan's utterly devastating impact on Jerusalem when it ruled the city via a deadly military occupation for nearly two decades ending in 1967 is remembered with considerable bitterness here.

Its ruling family from when Jordan was carved out of Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s, the Hashemites from the place we today call Saudi Arabia, presided over massive, merciless elimination of almost every sign of Jewish presence and history once the British-led Arab Legion overwhelmed Jerusalem's Jewish defenders in 1948:

While Christian holy sites were protected, and Muslim holy sites were maintained and renovated, Jewish holy sites were damaged and sometimes destroyed. According to Raphael Israeli, 58 synagogues were desecrated or demolished in the Old City, resulting in the de-Judaization of Jerusalem. The Western Wall was transformed into an exclusively Muslim holy site associated with al-Buraq. 38,000 Jewish graves in the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were systematically destroyed, and Jews were not allowed to be buried there. This was all in violation of the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement... Following the Arab Legion's expulsion of the Jewish residents of the Old City in the 1948 War, Jordan allowed Arab Muslim refugees to settle in the vacated Jewish Quarter. Later, after some of these were moved to Shu'afat, migrants from Hebron took their place. During the 1960s, as the quarter continued to fall into decay, Jordan planned to turn the quarter into a public park... ["Islamization of East Jerusalem under Jordanian occupation", Wikipedia - accessed today]

We snapped the image above in 2012; it originally appeared in this post

For more about the rank hypocrisy of the Jordanians and the Palestinian Arabs (ah, but we're repeating ourselves), see this six year old post of ours that still has some fresh things to say: "26-Feb-12: A moment to think about Jerusalem".

Here are a few sentences from there about one of the last prominent visual reminders of that dark and awful chapter:

Half of this city was captured by the army of the Jordanian king during Israel's desperate war of survival in 1948. Jordanian forces then set about destroying and desecrating anything Jewish on which they could lay their hands. The United Nations and other international agencies (to their eternal shame) did nothing to prevent or condemn this or the fact that the Jordanians prohibited access by Jews to all of the holy sites under their control. Then, in an unconscionable act of self-tribute, the Jordanian king built himself a large mansion on a Jerusalem hill-top that we can see as we type these words. Ostensibly a tribute to his dominion over a city holy to three religions, it serves as an indictment of his hypocrisy and that of the nations of the world who were evidently content with what was done by and in the name of the Hashemite regime to eastern Jerusalem and its historical and religious uniqueness during those nineteen miserable years.
The war of 1967 that was explicitly intended to drive the Israeli Jews into the sea (a euphemism for mass killing) resulted in the east and west parts of Jerusalem being reunited under Israeli rule. The city began to flourish in ways that it had not for two thousand years. Its splendour today is greater than at any time in the past. The freedoms it offers its residents and visitors in 2012 are the polar opposite of how things were when the Jordanians ruled.
The palace that King Hussein ordered built in his own honour on one of the highest points in Jerusalem still stands today. But it was never completed and remains an empty, dilapidated shell. Empty shell also happens to be an accurate way to characterize the undertakings Jordan gave in the framework of the 1949 Armistice Agreement to allow "free access to the holy sites and cultural institutions and use of the cemeteries on the Mount of Olives." 

No one is going to lose too much sleep in our part of the world because of Jordanian huffing and puffing over the names of places they continue to dream of dominating - and of destroying. 

13-Apr-11: Ready for statehood? [Part 2]

More on the momentum that's building internationally and at the UN for a Palestinian Arab state.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE), which annually reviews textbooks from Israel, the Arab world and Iran, unveiled its 2011 report on PA school textbooks in a briefing yesterday. Summarizing Jpost's report:

• Generally the Palestinian schoolbooks teach a total denial of the existence of Israel. Where an Israeli presence is mentioned, it is generally very negative.
• There is zero education about or towards co-operation and co-existence between Israelis and Arabs.
• The books blame Israel for all of the PA's environmental problems.
• In geography textbooks, maps of the Middle East generally omit Israel.
• “Palestine” is shown to encompass Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 
• The city of Jaffa is shown on maps of Palestine. But the cities of Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan, as well as the many Israeli kibbutzim and moshavim (communal settlements the length and breadth of the country) are not displayed - they are wiped from the map.
• A book entitled History of Ancient Civilization, published in 2009 for fifth-graders, says the countries in the area are Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Israel is not mentioned.
• A map of the Old City of Jerusalem omits the Jewish Quarter. 
• A postage stamp from the British Mandate period has the Hebrew text erased. The omitted Hebrew words are “Palestine: The Land of Israel”. See the pictures below.
• Some textbooks described the Canaanites as an Arabic-speaking people whose land was stolen by Jews.
• Some textbooks say the Jews came from Europe to steal Palestine after the British conquered it in 1917.
• The books erasing Jewish claims to such holy sites as the Western Wall and Rachel’s Tomb. For example, National Education, a textbook for seventh-graders published in 2010, refers to the Western Wall as the “Al-Buraq Wall,” and to Rachel’s Tomb as “Al-Bilal Mosque.”
• Many of these officially sanctioned Palestinian textbooks include multiple references to martyrdom, death, jihad and refugees returning to cities and towns in Israel.
• They frequently demonize Israelis and Jews. 
• Though there are some positive developments in the Palestinian educational system- mention of democratic values and respect for women, elders and authority – no Israeli is depicted as a friend or partner. 
• The Oslo Accords are rarely mentioned.
• Political agreements in general are presented as resulting from Arab and Muslim weakness.
• 118 textbooks currently used in Palestinian schools were analyzed, along with 22 teacher guides distributed by the PA Ministry of Education and Higher Education. These are used not only in the PA-controlled area but also in the Hamas regime's Gaza Strip.

To the surprise of no one, the report reminds us that the bulk of funding for these problematic textbooks comes from the EU. Some comes from the US.

Photograph of cover of an official PA school text
book (personally photographed by this blog's writers).
Note the Palestine postage stamp in bottom right corner.

Same book cover - Palestine postage stamp enlarged. It was
issued in the 1940s by the British mandatory authority.
Note the Arabic text on right, and blank space (at the bottom) to its left.

The stamps of Palestine, during the Mandate period (1917 to 1948)
always included Hebrew text, as seen at bottom left. The Hebrew writing
says "Palestina" followed by the letters Aleph Yud which stand
for "Eretz Yisrael", meaning the Land of Israel.

Are the Palestinian Arabs ready for an internationally recognized state? It would be nice to think so - for them and for us. It would be nicer still if they gave a sign of understanding that living with us as neighbours requires educating their own children for peace and for neighbourly relations.

The ongoing scandal of official Palestinian textbooks reminds us there's no sign that that process has begun. 

8-Oct-06: Child's Play, Gaza-Style

On the right side of this screen, you can see a thought-provoking newsagency photo above a caption that we have reproduced verbatim from the Associated Press source. (Thanks to Little Green Footballs who posted it, which is how we saw it.)

Rarely does a picture speak volumes about so many different topics.

• This is the schooling that Palestinian parents and teachers have been imparting for decades. Children educated to solve problems with sub-machine guns are not likely to have a penchant for peaceful co-existence. For some time, Israelis have been protesting to a deaf European Union that European funds earmarked for school-books are actually purchasing the tools of Palestinian terrorist indoctrination. But there is no more effective tool than personal example. Hoisting a child onto daddy's shoulders at a Hamas rally, handing him the family sub-machine gun and urging him to listen-up to war mongering speeches are certain to produce a far more eager fighter than the most vicious text-books.
• The rally this child attended took place in the midst of bloody clashes between Fatah and Hamas militia that have claimed 16 lives and injured 120 in ten days. This is apparently an accepted way for Palestinians to settle scores with their kinsmen. Does it make any sense then to expect them to talk through their differences with Israelis, their decades-old sworn enemies, at any time in the near future?
• The sub-machine gun in the photo shouts authenticity. The size, the detail, the materials apparently used, all indicate that the AP caption is a bald-faced lie. A lie spun to protect the Palestinians from the criticism that an honest caption would have elicited. Training child soldiers is unequivocally considered child abuse is by Western standards, that is, unless the child is a Palestinian. What you do then, if you're an "unbiased" news service, is tip-toe around the abuse to protect Muslim sensitivities. Dishonest captions of this sort are no less outrageous than the rash of Photoshop doctoring that made headlines during the recent war in Lebanon.
• Israel is being blamed for creating a humanitarian crisis with the economic blockade it imposed following the election of the Hamas government in February of this year. Why are there boundless dollars available to purchase expensive ammunition such as the sophisticated piece pictured here but none to be found for PA government salaries or food? Couldn't the West condition delivery of its humanitarian aid to Gaza on this: that Palestinian parents first trade their weapons in for food, clothing, medicines, toys – the sort of supplies that this ten year old and his friends really need? Only then will Israel's blockade be fully lifted to admit a free flow of Western aid.

Food for thought.

28-Sep-06: Terrorism? Child's Play

In his excellent "Letter from Israel" blog, David Frankfurter points out the unwanted consequences of uncritical, unaudited and uncontrolled European material aid to the Palestinian Arabs. David writes today that:

Materials captured by the IDF in Lebanon reveal that the Palestinians have finally found a successful export product. Indeed, one created by a home grown industry nurtured and encouraged by European taxpayer funded aid monies. Hezbollah has learned from the Palestinians the value of hate material aimed at children. It uses colouring and picture/story books to instill the virtue of killing Jews and joining the "resistance" at an early age. Here (at right) is an example. A few crayons will add colour to Hezbollah soldiers crossing the border, abducting Israeli soldiers. The Funding for Peace Coalition and Palestinian Media Watch have long documented the way internationally funded budgets of official Palestinian Authority institutions were used to ensure that education to terror starts early. The headline in this morning's Israeli Yediot Aharonot newspaper announces the reward the Palestinians are receiving for this knowledge and skills transfer: "Hizbollah is preparing Hamas for a battle with Israel in Gaza."

What Palestinian Arab society has done, with eyes wide open over a period of generations, to its own children is both a crime and its own punishment - a crime and a punishment of historical proportions.

As parents of a child actually, physically (not nearly, not virtually) murdered by the pathological savages created by that enterprise, we feel the need to endlessly remind people of the powerful truth contained in the words of a wise old woman. Golda Meir famously said: "We'll have peace with the Arabs when they learn to love their own children more than they hate us."

It hasn't happened. And as important resources like Teach Kids Peace show, it does not look like happening anytime soon.