by Dr. Efraim Herrera
In addition to this internal threat, Jordan is facing a clear and present threat along its border with Syria.
Until December 2015, Abu Salah was Islamic State's finance minister. An American airstrike turned him into a martyr.
Nahed Hattar, a
Christian Jordanian author, thought it was a good idea to post a cartoon
to his Facebook page depicting Salah having fun with two virgins in
heaven with Allah (God) himself standing at the entrance to the tent. In
the cartoon, Abu Salah commands Allah to bring him wine (which is
forbidden in Islam, but permitted to Muslims in heaven) and cashew nuts
and to send someone in to clean the place, and reminds Allah to knock
before coming in.
That was enough for the
Jordanian government to launch criminal proceedings against Hattar, but
someone far less patient took matters into his own hands, assassinating
the author outside a courthouse in Amman on Sunday.
The assassination
highlights the overriding sentiment on the Jordanian street, despite the
government's efforts to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood and rig
elections to keep the movement's representation to a minimum -- and
still the Brotherhood apparently won 16 of the 130 seats in the
Jordanian parliament this week.
When elections are
completely free, the outcome is different. In 2002, the Muslim
Brotherhood won all 12 seats in the Jordanian Engineers Association. The
Brotherhood's hatred of the Hashemite government is nothing new: Jordan
is an artificial country, born from the San Remo conference in 1920,
when control was handed to then-king of the Hejaz, Abdullah I bin
al-Hussein, in exchange for his support of the British. He didn't last
in power for very long and was murdered in Jerusalem, apparently at the
behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood
movement in Palestine.
In addition to this
internal threat, Jordan is facing a clear and present threat along its
border with Syria. Several points along the border are under the control
of Islamic State or its supporters. ISIS has denounced the Jordanian
government as idolatrous and has declared it a religious duty to
overthrow it. A Jordanian pilot was burned alive after falling captive
to ISIS. The group justified the manner of execution, which is
supposedly forbidden in Islam, with a Quranic verse requiring that an
enemy be put to death in the same manner in which he has killed Muslims.
The Jordanians are partners in the anti-ISIS coalition.
Along with the external
threat posed by Islamic State and the internal threat posed by the
Muslim Brotherhood, there is the imported threat -- in the form of
around 1 million Syrian refugees joining a population of only 8 million.
The Syrian refugees, save for a few thousand, have not been given work
visas, and the economic aid promised by the West has been sparse at
best. The result is a powder keg that also threatens the government.
Meanwhile, because one of Islamic State's stated war strategies is to
embed terrorist cells among these refugees, we can expect large
terrorist attacks to take place soon in Jordan, which has already
suffered two such attacks in the past year.
Alongside all these
threats is the demographic situation in the kingdom. The majority of the
population is Palestinian, and only through government-imposed
affirmative action are Bedouin tribal representatives able to remain in
key positions.
Israel is certainly
interested in the survival of King Abdullah's Jordan, which keeps the
Islamists away from its eastern border, and will help the king in any
way possible. The West, too, is enjoying its ability to bomb Islamic
State from Jordanian air bases, and will continue supporting the
kingdom. It is doubtful, however, that this help will suffice in the
long run.
Dr. Ephraim Herrera is the author of "Jihad -- Fundamentals and Fundamentalism."
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=17289
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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