The girl who sat in front of me was six years old. Her father took a seat with us as she showed work pages from nursery school. The Arabic writing confirmed her story. At age four her teachers taught her to hate Zionists and Ariel Sharon. A hand-drawn map in the collection of work pages showed that Palestine covered the entire area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The child pointed to the picture of a purported hero – a Palestinian martyr with an injured and bloodied face. No, this was not the doing of the Palestinian Authority. No, she did not go to a Palestinian school. This was in Jordan. Her school was Jordanian.
Then the father told his story. Speaking out in favor of coexistence with Israel was a tactical error. He lost his job for it.
Israel has made peace with Jordan. At least the Israeli government has made peace with the Jordanian government. That peace, however, has still not filtered down to all segments of the Jordanian people. King Abdullah II has made a careful effort to clamp down on the spreading of hate, but in the final analysis he is a Jordanian ruling over a country the majority of whose population is Palestinian. Too strong a hand carries the danger of serious repercussions. The phenomenon of anti-Semitism is too widespread and entrenched to be totally erased, certainly not by royal decree.
The Union of Professional Associations (UPA) occupies an undistinguished building in the Shmeisani neighborhood of Amman, the Jordanian capital. The architectural style is not worth mention, even though architects are members of the UPA. The building is the seat of some of the fourteen groups that comprise the UPA, an organization with more than 100,000 members “engaged in activities that seek the advancement of the professions they represent … by
organizing lectures, conferences, seminars, and continuous [sic] education courses.”
The flavor of professionalism is clear as one enters the building. Signs denouncing the Zionist enemy are ubiquitous. Maps deny the existence of Israel. During my visit two days after the simultaneous suicide bombings at the old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv on January 5, pictures of the “martyrs” (murderers) were displayed on walls and bulletin boards. Charity boxes are to be found throughout the building — Support the Intifada!
In December 2002 a UPA committee was outlawed, its leaders arrested, and its propaganda confiscated. The Anti-Normalization Committee, “concerned with confronting the infiltration of the Zionist enemy into Jordan,” was no more. Yet, its message still can be heard throughout the UPA building. Its posters were still on display a month later.
Elections held in May by the 22,742-member Jordan Engineers Association are perhaps a gauge of current sentiment. In an atmosphere heavily laden with praise for the intifada and the Palestinian cause, Islamic candidates were overwhelmingly elected to the positions of president and vice-president of the association, as well as to all but one seat on the association’s governing council. The anti-Israeli platform of the Islamists gained strong support.
Politics has overshadowed professionalism. The Winter issue of the Engineering Society bulletin, distributed to all takers without charge, features a front-cover picture depicting a Palestinian child firing a sling shot at Israeli tanks. Another photograph inside the back cover shows the funeral procession for five Palestinians whose bodies are covered with the national flag.
Not to be outdone, the Dental Society in its Winter magazine shows such professional “dental” cartoons as Jewish footprints leading away from the burning World Trade Center and Ariel Sharon as a saluting Nazi. Another illustration equates a Magen David with a swastika. On page after page the cartoons of hate continue. The magazine is quite direct. These messages are not only anti-Israel. They are crudely anti-Jewish.
Nor does one have to visit the professional societies to see an ode to hate. Uncompromising Islamic extremism is spreading in Amman and other Jordanian cities. It is not the historic Islam of learned treatises and deeds of charity. It is a threatening wave of politicized religion.
One street vendor in the busy downtown area was offering for sale a two-volume Arabic edition (printed in Jordan, 1984) of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In one of the half-dozen “new Islamic” bookstores in the Al-Abdaly area one unique volume (printed in Jordan) stood out from among the tomes of anti-Israeli tracts. This book claimed on its cover (illustration: American flag with Star of David) that the Torah foresees the destruction of the State of Israel.
The problem is not only that these materials are offered for sale in Jordan. A much more serious hindrance to true peace is that people buy these publications and support the ideas they contain.
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