May 17, 2024

I found this article on the King’s honest commentary and his own government and media’s censorship of this topic at the warsclerotic blog HERE, they found it at:

Jordan monarch’s comments on Palestinians raise tensions in kingdom, Al Monitor

(Does the King of Jordan want to rid Jordan of Palestinians and hope they will go to Israel? That’s a great idea; Not.– DM)

While speaking with the local media, King Abdullah typically repeats national talking points on political reform. When addressing foreign audiences, he frequently adopts a different approach: bluntly assessing the country’s challenges and even violating sacred taboos. The Hashemite monarch’s recent interview with The Washington Post followed the same pattern.

In a surprising remark, Abdullah noted in the April 6 interview, “In 2016, for the first time, we captured and killed 40 [Islamic State] terrorists in two major incidents. Ninety-six percent of them were of Palestinian origin.” He added, “So if we don’t move the Israeli-Palestinian process forward, that is a major recruiting [opportunity] for disenfranchised and frustrated people.”

However, when the government media printed the king’s remarks, they inaccurately translated the king to avoid publicizing the potentially uncomfortable sections. The 96% statistic was removed from Petra News, and the regime-censored version did not refer to Palestinians as “terrorists” in contrast to Abdullah’s own words. Even Al-Ghad newspaper, which bills itself as Jordan’s most independent paper with the slogan “Right to Know,” deleted the embarrassing sections from the interview.

Jordanian political analyst Katrina Sammour explained that the explosive nature of the king labeling such a high percentage of IS terrorists as Palestinian forced newspapers to censor this part of the interview. She told Al-Monitor the 96% description would increase “resentment between Palestinians and Jordanians even more. Palestinians will feel that they are being attacked, and Jordanians will feel that Palestinians are a threat to society.” Due to political sensitivities, Amman does not publicize data about the percentage of Jordanians of Palestinian descent, but The New York Times estimates that the number is up to 60%.

[Not surprising – Jordan *IS* Arab Palestine, judging by the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine. Israel became the smaller, Jewish, Western portion, Trans-Jordan became the larger, Arab, eastern portion. They lost the “Trans” when they lost territory to Israel in 1967. But conflicts in the Middle East never end, and as even Nostradamus says, will lead to WWIII soon.]

A prominent Jordanian journalist, who insisted on anonymity due to the risks of directly critiquing Abdullah, told Al-Monitor that saying 96% of IS terrorists in Jordan were Palestinian was inappropriate since it “keeps reminding people where they came from and stigmatizes them, linking terrorism to their origin.”

Given the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict where Jordanian media consistently portrays Israel as the aggressors and the Palestinians as victims, the king’s remarks were especially surprising. Kirk Sowell, an Amman-based political analyst and principal of Utica Risk Services, a Middle East-focused political risk firm, told Al-Monitor, “In Arabic, you would never say this. You can’t refer to Palestinians as terrorists. I am not surprised they [Petra News] edited it since it’s a very sensitive issue.”

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