03-Dec-17: Understanding Jordan's king and his "holistic" approach to terror

Yesterday in Jordan [Screen grab]

Regular readers know we pay more than the usual amount of attention to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It's where our daughter Malki's murderer lives free as a bird.

And even though

• she has boasted over and again for the cameras and the media of her central role in the 2001 bombing attack on the people inside Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria; and 
• she confessed in an Israeli court in 2003 to the calculated murder of 15 innocent victims, most of them children, and to having done this on behalf of the Islamist terror regime, Hamas, whose first-ever female terror agent she is reputed to be; and 
• the US government, the US Department of Justice and the FBI want her arrested and extradited to face Federal charges in a Washington court

Jordan's ruler King Abdullah II, aware of her celebrity status among his people, has stubbornly presided over a series of measures whose effect is to spit in the eye of the Americans, to deny the validity of the 1995 Jordan/US Extradition Treaty and to ensure one of his kingdom's - and the Arab world's - most admired females remains free to pursue her career of incitement to terrorism, Islamist values and the murder of Jewish children.

Nigeria's president and entourage hear from Jordan's
king on how Jordan has defeated terror [Image Source]

Jordan is currently hosting an event variously termed (depending on which media channels you consult) the Aqaba Retreat, the Aqaba Process or the Aqaba Meetings. (Aqaba is a resort town located at Jordan's southern-most tip, adjacent to the much smaller Israeli resort of Eilat.)

Jordan's semi-official English-language mouthpiece focused on who was there in an official-sounding report yesterday ["King meets with leaders, officials as Aqaba Meetings kick off: Gathering aimed as venue to bolster security, military cooperation in the fight against terrorism", Jordan Times, December 2, 2017]:

• "His Majesty King Abdullah on Saturday met with the presidents of a number of African countries and representatives of nations participating in the two-day Aqaba Meetings to discuss the global efforts to fight terrorism and extremist ideologies, especially in West Africa..." 
• "The participants [include] senior officials from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Cyprus, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Australia, India, Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Nigeria, Mauritania, Antigua and Barbuda, Mali, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Chad, and Burkina Faso, in addition to representatives of regional and international organisations..." 
• "His Majesty also held meetings with US Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis, Brazilian Minister of Defence Raul Jungmann, French Minister of State attached to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, UK Minister of State for the Armed Forces Mark Lancaster, and High Representative of the African Union Pierre Buyoya... On the sidelines of the Aqaba Meetings, King Abdullah met with President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari, President of Guinea Alpha Condé, President of Niger Mahamadou Issoufou, and President of Mali Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, a Royal Court statement said."
• "The Aqaba Meetings were launched by the King to maintain international and regional coordination and cooperation in the fight against terrorism within a holistic approach, and to discuss security challenges in regions around the world that are dealing with terrorism hotspots, with the aim of identifying shortcomings and coordinating efforts to fight terrorism."
• "The meetings are part of His Majesty’s initiative to reach out to countries around the world and coordinate with them on this issue, since the anti-terrorism fight “must be a joint, international effort, based on close coordination and consultations, to counter the global threats of terrorism and extremism”, the statement said... 

A brief Associated Press report makes plain what we find so perplexing about this:

Jordan's state news agency says King Abdullah II is hosting a high-level conference on fighting terrorism and extremist ideologies, particularly in West Africa... The agency says the conference is the latest in a series launched by Jordan's monarch to reach out to other nations and help coordinate the fight against terrorism... Jordan's king is seen as a key Western partner in the battle against Islamic extremism. ["West Africa is focus of Jordan counter-terrorism conference", AP, December 1, 2017]

For us, the elephant in the room is Ahlam Tamimi. 

Source: Al Jazeera

Abdullah has treaty obligations to the US. His father signed a 1995 Extradition Treaty with the Clinton Administration in 1995 and in its wake several Jordanian terrorists and felons were shipped off to face the US justice system. Though his media, aided by compliant reporters and editors outside Jordan, put up a facade that makes it seem extraditing Tamimi to the US is somehow problematic, it's clear that it's Tamimi and the specific crimes to which she has confessed that are the problem. And the real story. 

Though no one in the mainstream media seems to have picked this up yet, there's a clear analysis of the legal mess into which Jordan has inserted itself while giving its native jihadist killer safe harbor. See "Pressure on Jordan: Refusal to extradite mastermind of deadly 2001 Sbarro suicide bombing in Jerusalem contravenes international law and agreements" [Michelle Munneke JD of American University Washington College of Law, in National Security Law Brief, October 28, 2017]:

This analysis means the United States should not give up on attempting to extradite Al-Tamimi. If other countries place enough pressure on Jordan due to concerns of Al-Tamimi’s danger and susceptibility to planning another attack, Jordan may change its position. Al-Tamimi is above all else, a significant danger that Jordan should take seriously—if not for the world, for Jordan’s own citizens that live amongst Al-Tamimi.
Jordan should reconsider its position and permit extradition in the case of Al-Tamimi for the safety of Jordanians, and citizens of other nations that may be subject to another attack by Al-Tamimi. Thwarting extradition not only violates the principle of comity, but it also perpetuates the international danger presented by Al-Tamimi.

But for most people, this isn't about law but simply crime and punishment. Tamimi was sent by her Hamas masters in the summer of 2001 to kill Jews. Especially Jewish children. She succeeded by all of their perverted measures. And she's now free, extremely well-compensated, raising a family and a media celebrity.

She has never denied the facts. And she has been applauded - literally - time and again in her public appearances throughout Jordan as well as in her well-publicized VIP speaking visits/travels to such countries (listed alphabetically) as Algeria (December 2011), Kuwait (July 2012 and March 2014), Lebanon (April 2012 and January 2015), Qatar (April 2012, again December 2013), Tunisia (April 2012 and November 2015) and Yemen (April 2014). 

She hosted a popular weekly TV program called “نسيم الأحرار” [Transliteration: “Nassem al-Ahrar”] meaning “Breezes of the Free” between February 2012 until September 2016.  Devoted to Palestinian Arab prisoners and their families, it appears to have been designed to bolster their morale, act as a two-way conduit of information and to encourage more of the kind of the kind of acts that turned these terrorists into prisoners in the first place. Tamimi stopped being its presenter in September 2016 at about the time she was very briefly (for a single night) taken into custody by Jordanian authorities pursuant to an Interpol arrest order at the behest of the US Department of Justice.

Tamimi and her connections publicly thank Jordan's judiciary and
leaders for getting her off the hook with the FBI and the US
Department of Justice - though the pursuit continues [Source] 

Jordan is a family-run business that like so many other Arab polities presents itself as a nation-state and even as a constitutional democracy, which is a real stretch given the total domination exercised by the British-installed Hashemites that have run it since the 1920s. 

Thus it was no secret to Jordan's Royal Palace that Tamimi was recording a weekly tribute to terrorism-and-Islamism in an Amman studio (Amman, Jordan's capital, is where she lives). And that it was uploaded and broadcast around the world every week for years by the Hamas-owned Alquds satellite television network. Her appalling show was and still is rebroadcast by a multitude of Arabic and non-Arabic websites that stream all or some of the programming put out by Alquds. The king and his Hashemite Kingdom never had any problem with any of this. Their "principled opposition" to terror only stretches so far. 

In April 2017, an Australian TV journalist told us privately that Tamimi had been advised by the Jordanian authorities to lower her profile in the wake of a Jordanian Court of Cassation decision that Jordan's 1995 extradition treaty with the US was unconstitutional. In particular, he told us, the "Jordanian authorities have now banned her doing any media interviews". Our impression is she is taking the advice seriously for the time being. 

Before that, and for several years from her home base of Jordan, she appeared numerous times as the presenter on several Alquds TV specials - including a number of propaganda programs that went to air in the summer of 2014 as fighting raged between Hamas Gaza and the IDF. She may be the most influential and important female public figure in Hamas.

So what does the Royal Hashemite Palace and its central personage say to all this?

Nothing, at least not publicly. Nor can we expect them to respond for so long as he and they continue to be absurdly feted as central players in their "holistic" struggle to defeat the terrorists by the likes of the most senior politicians of the United States, the UK and Europe. 

Just so long as they're not Jordanian terrorists.

17-Dec-13: When they next tell you that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter etc etc [UPDATED]

Closed-circuit video at this link

Max Boot writing in Commentary Magazine ["AQAP’s Global Threat"] yesterday:

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula doesn’t get the kind of publicity that al-Qaeda central, based in Pakistan, receives but it has emerged as one of the deadliest terrorist groups on the planet–and one that is a direct threat to the United States.
If you want to know how bad AQAP is, all you have to do is look at the horrifying video footage of its attack on a military hospital in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The WallStreet Journal summarizes some of the atrocities the terrorists committed:

A gunman walks toward more than a dozen men and women clustered in the hospital corridor. He raises his assault rifle in his left hand as if to shoot them, but then puts his right hand up and tosses a grenade into the crowd a few feet away. It lands at the feet of a frail-looking man stooped over an IV pole. He stares down at it for a moment, then a woman lunges to try to clear the grenade, her black robe whirling around her in the seconds before it explodes.

Some 63 people died in this ruthless and merciless mass murder spree.

He goes on to connect the horrifying Pakistani carnage with a matter to which we related here two days ago ["15-Dec-13: Now what could possibly motivate a man to load up a car with explosives and drive onto an airfield tarmac?"]

If you want to know why this is of concern beyond Yemen’s borders, consider the little-noticed arrest over the weekend of an airport technician in Wichita, Kansas, named Terry Lee Loewen... He was arrested for plotting to set off a car bomb at the Wichita airport. Luckily the FBI was onto his plot and the man who he thought was helping him turned out to be an FBI agent. Easy to overlook in the perfunctory news reports on Loewen’s arrest was the fact that he was a jihadist with a devotion to AQAP whose act of would-be violence was inspired by AQAP’s late propagandist, the American-born Anwar al-Awlaki. [Commentary Magazine]

(There's some harrowing closed-circuit video footage here, with Arabic-only commentary.)

It all seems so far away and just-marginally relevant when terrorism is something you associate with the evening news and foreign correspondents. More and more, ordinary people are coming to understand that it's actually an all-encompassing phenomenon. And we're all in it, even if not all of us fully understand that yet.

UPDATE December 22, 2013: About that hospital massacre in Yemen? Relax. A mistake, a huge, thoughtless mistake and a pity about all those dead people. The point of a YouTube video, posted on Saturday December 21, 2013, featuring a cool and calm Al Qaeda murder-spokesperson, is to say this was one big misunderstanding, and let's just move on while "we continue our jihad" (direct quote from the "apology"). If you have the stomach for it, it's here in Arabic with English subtitles. Along with large swatches of the jihad industry, these people know their audience and understand the marketing and branding game and the need to unbalance and confuse public opinion. Keep an eye on the mainstream media and you'll see their tactics generally work.

29-Nov-10: Finally the neighbors are caught washing some of their dirty laundry

For years, we Israelis have been subjected to the terrorist threats and attacks of the jihadist regime of the Mullahs of Teheran and their agents in Hamas and Hizbullah. The Iranian ambitions always extended beyond this tiny country, and now - finally - its extent is front-page news throughout the world today.

Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show. Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year. The cable is a detailed, highly classified account of a meeting between top Russian officials and an American delegation led by Vann H. Van Diepen, an official with the State Department’s nonproliferation division who, as a national intelligence officer several years ago, played a crucial role in the 2007 assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity. The missiles could for the first time give Iran the capacity to strike at capitals in Western Europe or easily reach Moscow, and American officials warned that their advanced propulsion could speed Iran’s development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. [Source: The New York Times] 

Iran's Moslem cousins have known this and more for a long time. They, more than almost anyone except perhaps the Israeli government, have been anxiously lobbying for the power of the jihadists in Teheran to be curtailed - one way or (ahem) another. The British newspaper The Guardian, known in our circles for its vitriolic and unceasing attacks on and demonization of Israel and Israelis, published some insights today into how Arab political leaders view the Iranians when the flashlights are off and the cameras are not rolling. It's a revelation. You can get a sense of what follows from the header: Arab states scorn 'evil' Iran: US embassy cables reveal Tehran's reputation as a meddling, lying troublemaker intent on building nuclear weapons

• King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged Iran's foreign minister to "spare us your evil" in a meeting that reflected profound Arab hostility to the Islamic Republic.
• The Saudis and smaller Gulf states, plus Egypt, Jordan and others, complained bitterly about Tehran's nuclear ambitions, its involvement in Iraq and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas.
• The Teheran regime has "no business meddling in Arab matters", the Saudi monarch is quoted telling Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister. 
• "Iran's goal is to cause problems," the Saudi king says. "There is no doubt something unstable about them... May God prevent us from falling victim to their evil... The bottom line is that they cannot be trusted." 
• The leadership of the United Arab Emirates feared being "46 seconds from Iran as measured by the flight time of a ballistic missile".
• Abu Dhabi's crown prince and deputy commander of the UAE armed forces, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, called Iran an "existential threat" and feared "getting caught in the crossfire if Iran is provoked by the US or Israel". 
• Bin Zayed said the US should send in ground forces if air strikes were not enough to "take out" Iranian nuclear targets. 
• The UAE the foreign minister says Iran is "a huge problem that goes far beyond nuclear capabilities. Iranian support for terrorism is broader than just Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran has influence in Afghanistan, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and Africa."
• Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa says Iran is "the source of much of the trouble in both Iraq and Afghanistan" and argued forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear programme "by whatever means necessary. That programme must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it."
• Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said of Oman called Iran "a big country with muscles and we must deal with it." 
• A senior Omani minister singled out Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar as the three Gulf countries that would probably want the US to attack Iran.
• Kuwait's military intelligence chief says the Iranian jihadists are supporting terrorist groups in the Gulf and extremists in Yemen. 
• Yemen and Saudi Arabia repeatedly accuse Iran of supplying weapons and money to the Houthi rebels in Yemen's Saada region.
• Qatar, the wealthiest country in the Gulf region, is an outspoken critic of Iran in private while maintaining cordial public relations with it - and with the US.
• The Qatari prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, says "Iran is clever and makes its opponents dizzy... Iran will make no deal. Iran wants nuclear weapons... They lie to us, and we lie to them".
• Jordan and Egypt are also deeply hostile to Iran. Egypt's intelligence head Omar Suleiman calls Iran "a significant threat to Egypt … supporting jihad and spoiling peace".
• Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak calls the Iranian president Ahmadinejad an extremist who "does not think rationally... Iran is always stirring trouble". 
• Mubarak has "a visceral hatred for the Islamic Republic [of Iran], referring repeatedly to Iranians as 'liars', and denouncing them for seeking to destabilise Egypt and the region. He sees the Syrians and Qataris as sycophants to Tehran and liars themselves."

And since we're suddenly being exceptionally candid with each other, some further insights from the NY Times by way of those Wikileaks:

• The Saudis are the chief financier of terrorist groups including al-Qaeda.
• Qatar, described as "a generous host to the U.S. military" by the NY Times, was the "worst in the region" at counter-terrorism efforts (says a State Department cable from December 2009). 
• Qatar's security service was "hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the United States and provoking reprisals."
• The US has tried, and failed, to prevent Syria from supplying arms to the Hizbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Hizbollah's weapons stockpile and particularly rockets and missiles has swelled hugely since the 2006 war with Israel. 
• Just one week after Syrian President al-Assad promised a senior State Department official that he would not send “new” arms to Hezbollah, the United States found that Syria was providing increasingly sophisticated weapons to the terrorists.
• And finally (at this stage) from The Guardian again: The Iranian Red Cross (technically its Red Crescent society) smuggled Iranian weapons and Iranian agents into Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel. 

Welcome to the neighborhood. The double-talk and the deception about who is doing the terrorism, about the scale of their terrorist weaponry and about the size of the danger - well, how shall we put this? It's all far worse than the news channels and the politicians have been telling us for years. But not nearly as bad as it's going to get.