Queen Rania packs it in.

Blogging, that is…

Jordanian queen Rania’s project to dispel “stereotypes” has not “made intolerance melt away”

Which is precisely why more Jordanians support Hamas than they do Rania and her Westernized husband. Then again, this all might be a bit of taqiyya. “Jordan queen wraps up YouTube plan on stereotypes,” by Dale Gavlak for the Associated Press, August 12:

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — Jordan’s Queen Rania said Monday that her 5-month YouTube project aimed at challenging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims hasn’t made intolerance “melt away” but it has sparked some change in attitudes.

* No need to bother with the Bull:  lets move straight to Hugh’s comment to get the facts behind the face…

“the Palestinian-born Rania…”
–from the article above

A previous article on this “Palestinian” and “Jordanian” business:

“Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terror group led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi…” — from this article

The whole matter of “Palestinian” Jordanians and “Jordanian” Palestinians and why Al-Zarqawi is forever to be known among his pals as a “Palestinian” but the Western media, automatically performing its task of public relations for the “Palestinians,” now deliberately chooses to call him “Jordanian-born,” can be found in such authorities as the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In it, “Palestine” is defined as follows:

We may describe Palestine as the strip of land extending along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea from the mouth of the Litany or Kasimiya River (33 22′ N.) southward to the mouth of the Wadi Ghuzza; the later joins the sea and runs thence in a south-easterly direction so as to include on its northern side the site of Beersheva….Eastward there is no such definite border. The River Jordan, it is true, marks a line of delimitation between Western and Eastern Palestine; but it is practically impossible to say where the latter ends and the Arabian desert begins.

So Jordan, in its populated parts (not the Syrian Desert) comprises Eastern Palestine, and Israel Western Palestine.

What does this mean? It means that in Jordan both Eastern Palestinians (Jordanians) and Western Palestinians (from the territory now held by Israel) live. A person born in Jordan to “Western Palestinian” parents would call himself Jordanian. A person born in Jordan to parents who were born in Jordan, to grandparents who were born in Mandatory Palestine, would call himself whatever is most advantageous to him, depending on where he travels, to whom he speaks, and who harbors what suspicions. It is best, in Arab countries, to be a “Jordanian,” not a “Palestinian,” despite all the support for “Palestinians” as the shock troops of the Jihad against Infidel Israel. On the other hand, at least until recently, one might garner more sympathy from the unwary Westerner by calling oneself a “Palestinian” who lives in Jordan. It is fascinating to see how al-Zarqawi, a name given to him because he was born in a “refugee village” in Zarqa, would ordinarily call himself a “Palestinian,” but everyone has been quick to label him as “Jordanian-born” without going into detail. Why? Because Arabs think calling him a “Palestinian” might damage the “Palestinian” (i.e. Arab Muslim) cause, and the Western press, without even considering the matter for a moment, has obligingly gone along.

But what if al-Zarqawi if not a “Palestinian” Jordanian, which is to say, if we can draw this accordion out still further, a “Western-Palestinian Eastern Palestinian”? And what of those who were born in, say, the West Bank in 1953, and were therefore Jordanian at birth, and now live in Amman? Such people would be Jordanian, but no ordinary Jordanians. Rather, from 1948 to 1967, those people born under Jordan’s rule in the West Bank were Jordanian citizens (no one talked then of “Palestinians” or of a “Palestinian people” — that came sometime after the defeat of June 1967) from birth. In order to distinguish such people from those “Palestinians” born in Eastern Palestine, i.e. east of the Jordan River, it would be best to speak of Western-Palestinian Eastern Palestinians (born in Israel and the West Bank, and now living in Jordan) and Eastern-Palestinian Eastern Palestinians (born in Jordan of parents or grandparents who were from “Eastern Palestine” and still living there) and the final group, those people who were born in Jordan, as were their parents and grandparents. These would be the Jordanians, or rather the plain-vanilla unadjectivized Eastern Palestinians, mostly of Bedouin extraction.

Al-Zarqawi, as noted, was born after 1967 in Zarqa, in what is present-day Jordan (i.e. present-day Eastern Palestine) and therefore should be most accurately described most accurately as a “Palestinian-never-not-even-between-1948-and 1967-a-Jordanian Jordanian” which is to say, a “Western-Palestinian Eastern Palestinian” — using the guidelines of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, as well as the last two thousand years of Western history. Of course, I haven’t bothered to go into the fact that a great many of the Muslim Arabs who claim to be descended from “Western Palestinians” and now live either in Israel and its territories or in Jordan, are in fact people whose presence in the area does not go back further than the 1920s and 1930s, when the Arab Muslim migration into Mandatory Palestine was far larger, though illegal, than any Jewish migration allowed by Great Britain — the Mandatory authority that was supposed to, but did not, “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “encourage close Jewish settlement on the land” by the express terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
Does that make it all clear?

I thought it would.

The moral of all this is:

What a tangled toponymic web Muslim Arabs weave, when e’er they practice to deceive, first by making up the “Palestinian people,” and then by pretending that no matter when some Muslim Arab ventures into “Palestine” (or, not an Arab, but even Kurds, Berbers, Turks, Muslims from Bulgaria, the latter plunked down by the Ottomans in the 1880s — all of them more-or-less Arabized by now, though many know exactly, or have a good idea, as to their ancestors’ origins outside of “Palestine”), this necessarily makes all of his descendants into “Palestinians,” with all the claimed rights thereto appertaining — and apparently forever. This is true both backwards and forwards, and no matter how tangential or short-lived a particular Muslim Arab’s connection to “Palestine” has been, as long as there was one, at some point, who set foot there. At least, that is what “Palestinians” wherever they live claim.

Except of course, when they do something particularly awful, that the Western world really will not stand. Then, presto-magico, they are not “Palestinians” but “Jordanians.” Sirhan Sirhan was carefully called a “Jordanian.” And Al-Zarqawi is carefully called “Jordanian-born.”
Q.E.D.

[Posted by Hugh at October 19, 2005]

So the mediagenic Rania is, if she was at birth either a Gazan Arab, or a “West Bank” Arab, is now an Arab living — and quite luxuriously, on American taxpayers’ money that pays for that Mercedes 600, and so many other cars and planes and the odd palace and the delightful trips abroad (whew! can’t wait to get out of Jordan to London, Paris, Rome — what fun!)– whom one may call, if one is an Arab propagandist or a handmaid of such, “Palestinian-born” which is to say, an “Eastern Palestinian” born in “Western Palestine” which makes Rania the Fair an “Eastern Palestinian” of “Western Palestinian” descent which, shorthandedly, we may sum up as “Rania is a Western Palestnian Eastern Palestinian.”
And remember: whenever there is an obviously bad man, a Sirhan Siran or Al-Zarqawi, he’s almost always described as “Jordanian-born” without more. “Jordanian-born Sirhan Sirhan” is how he was known for decades. “Jordanian-born Al-Zarqawi” is how the late monster in Iraq was described.

But la bonne reine Rania, with all her Western un-Islamic chic — which means we have nothing to fear, which means she is just like us, which means she is to be believed in her propaganda campaigns — turns out, for the Western press fed what the Arab press wishes to feed it, “born in Palestine.”

Posted by: Hugh  at August 13, 2008 9:35 AM

The media-savvy monarch plans to wrap up on Tuedsay a series of daily interactive YouTube video and written blog postings that she launched in March to create online dialogue with young people in the West and promote moderate Islam.

“I’d like to think I’ve made some people pause, reflect and reconsider ideas and assumptions they held as true, but it would be naive to think that everyone who clicked on to the page, now thinks differently,” Rania told The Associated Press in an e-mail.

Over the past five months, her YouTube site had more than 2 million visitors. Viewers can watch her daily video postings on subjects that including honor killings, terrorism and the Arab women’s rights. Musicians, comedians and other personalities also contributed, and viewers could respond by posting their own written comments and videos.

An ardent advocate of women and children’s rights in Jordan, the Palestinian-born Rania said she was “very pleased” with the frank discussions and probing questions YouTube’s freedom provided. She said she witnessed “changes in attitude” mainly among the site’s returning visitors.

While her YouTube debate “hasn’t made tensions and intolerance between cultures melt away,” she said she hoped it challenged some to reconsider how they think about those who “look different, dress differently, worship in a different way, and live in the same community as them.”

“If it resulted in a smile to a stranger, or a knock introducing yourself to your neighbor, then I’d be very proud,” she added.

Rania said her YouTube channel would remain online after Tuesday, and she would post “from time to time,” but less frequently.