OPINION:
This week, Jews around the world celebrated Purim, the miraculous Biblical story of the Jewish people overcoming a genocidal threat by Haman in the Book of Esther in Persia 2,500 years ago. Many Christians also celebrated, knowing that if all the Jews had been exterminated then, Jesus would not have been born, and in solidarity with Israel and the Jewish people, especially at such a time as this.
Despite the festive celebrations, the Jewish people are facing a modern genocidal threat again today, headquartered in Persia: Iran. As much as we celebrate Queen Esther and her selfless bravery, there’s another Middle Eastern queen who is fanning the flames of genocide against, and threatening the Jewish people today.
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Unlike Esther, an orphan who was born in Jerusalem and exiled in Babylon, Queen Rania of Jordan could not be more polar opposite. She was born in Kuwait, the daughter of Palestinian Arabs. Unlike Esther, Rania came from a well-off family, got the best education, and became a desirable match for her King, Abdullah II.
Unlike Esther who remained in exile, Rania came home. What’s now called the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is overwhelmingly ethnically Palestinian because Jordan today was made up, and carved out of 80% of what used to be “Palestine.” Deliberate or not, her marriage to Abdullah II gave him a kind of legitimacy, consolidating ethnic Palestinian Arabs into the monarchy as no previous Hashemite ruler ever had because they were originally from Arabia.
Esther became famous for her selfless and potentially life-threatening sacrifice to save her people. Upon learning of the threat from Haman against all the Jewish people, Esther instructed all the Jewish people to pray and fast for three days, as she did. Simply, they turned within, and to the Creator.
SEE ALSO: Purim: Christian reflection on a Jewish holiday
Far from being selfless, the at-home Queen Rania has made a habit of blaming others for the problems or her people. Most recently, she has twisted reality and misrepresented facts about Israel’s war against Hamas. Rania is fanning flames of hatred, blaming others, and putting others’ lives at risk, rather than taking responsibility. It would be interesting to know if she ever had a heart-to-heart with her father-in-law, the late King Hussein. Hussein attacked Israel, losing the Six Day War, and with it Jerusalem and Biblical Judea and Samaria on the west bank of the Jordan River, and the Palestinian Arabs living there.
Rania has a history of public hostile anti-Israel comments, broadcasting these in the global media. Her most recent was with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the queen’s go-to Israel-bashing journalist who herself is never one to miss an opportunity for an anti-Israel scoop.
In her polished verbal assault, Queen Rania accused Israel of “dehumanization” of Palestinians, and doing so in a way that is “systematic.” And of course, she nonsensically accuses Israel of “apartheid.” Her blood-libel is not only false but is based on a false premise that Israelis believe (regarding Palestinian Arabs), “if we don’t kill them, they’re going to kill us.” Rania blames “hardline leaders for keeping their people in this perpetual state of fear of an existential threat that doesn’t exist and making them feel like just killing Palestinians and killing Hamas is going to be the solution to the problem.”
Hello, Queen Rania. Did you not see Hamas’ own live broadcast of the atrocities they committed on October 7? Do you not think that just maybe their terror and using Gazan civilians as human shields has anything to do with it?
Queen Rania boasted about Jordanian aid to Gazans, conducting the interview in a warehouse amid cartons emblazoned with Jordanian flags. Nevertheless, she said that while Jordan is providing as much aid as possible, her pattern of blaming Israel reached a crescendo with Ms. Amanpour. Tone deaf to facts and history of Hamas hijacking Gaza and putting all its residents in harm’s way, she chastised that providing “aid under bombardment does not stop the destruction, the death, and the heartbreak. We cannot save people from hunger only then to bomb them to death.”
Implying that Israel does not have a legitimate cause to defeat Hamas (and parenthetically free Gazans from under the boot of Hamas’ evil terrorist infrastructure and culture), Rania said, “There are no victories to be had as long as this war continues.”
SEE ALSO: Jordan’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah misses an opportunity
Rania tripled down on blaming Israel for actual problems that Gazans are suffering, including claims of cutting off food, fuel, and water, rather than place any responsibility on Hamas, or Egypt which also shares a border with Gaza, and under which no shortage of weapons and other terrorist infrastructure have been smuggled. A thoughtful observer wonders if Hamas can smuggle weapons from Egypt, why not food for Gaza as well, even if Egypt blocks such aid.
Blaming only Israel, Rania suggested that it was a calculated, “deprivation by design.” Not very Esther-like to always blame others rather than being introspective.
Ms. Amanpour, surprisingly, asked Rania about the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7. Rania responded, “As devastating and as traumatic as October 7 was, it doesn’t give Israel license to commit atrocity after atrocity. Israel experienced one October 7, since then, the Palestinians have experienced 156 October 7’s.”
Presumably, Rania’s interview took place 156 days after October 7, a fact she was prepared with for her scripted talking points. Despite her fine education, Rania must have missed a few math classes because had Gazans experienced 156 October 7 massacres, more than 187,000 Gazans would have been killed, a number so ridiculously high not even Hamas would think to make up such figures. But facts don’t matter to Rania when good rhetoric and lies can be used to blame Israel and the so-called “occupation.”
Rania must have also missed a few history classes as she pontificated, “I think a lot of people need to know more about this conflict to really understand the intricacies of it, to understand that this is one of the greatest historical injustices, to understand what the root cause of this issue is, to understand that this conflict did not begin on October 7, that that it was a result of years of occupation, of settlement expansion, of human rights abuses, of disregard for international law, and this is what led us to this point.”
Interestingly, she neglected to mention the occupation of Gaza (by Egypt) and “the West Bank” (by Jordan) under her husband’s father, and great-grandfather for whom he is named. To her, the original sin is Israel’s “occupation,” neglecting the fact that when Palestinian Arab ethnicity was invented, so was the “armed resistance” that they still practice. Terror. She forgets that Palestinian terrorists also threatened her father-in-law’s reign, a bloody revolt he put down in September 1970, during which as many as 25,000 Palestinian Arabs were killed.
There’s no doubt that Rania’s remarks were well prepared if not scripted. There’s also no doubt that Rania would never have given such an interview without the advanced knowledge if not outright approval of King Abdullah. While he has plausible deniability regarding her remarks, it would be nonsense to think that he and his court were not consulted, and did not consent. Maybe even helped write the script.
The truth is that while Abdullah did not make these remarks directly, the king has also been doubling down on the anti-Israel rhetoric. In a statement just weeks before Rania’s interview, King Abdullah let slip that he also blamed Israel’s “occupation.” However rather than using the kinder and gentler approach to the term as coined when his father lost Jerusalem and the west bank of the Jordan River in 1967, Abdullah touted the “70-year” occupation, meaning that Israel’s very existence is by definition illegitimate.
As an Arabian Hashemite king ruling over a territory and people in which he and his tribe are not indigenous, in a country that was made up in 1946, aside from employing unprecedently hostile anti-Israel rhetoric, this gives new meaning to the term “the pot calling the kettle black.”
Back to the queen and the “occupation.” She opined that “Palestinians do not hate Israelis because of who they are, they hate them because of what they’re doing to them.”
Just because she’s a queen does not mean she is or ought to be immune from being called out on her anti-Israel diatribe, her deliberate twisting of facts and omitting others, her minimizing Hamas’ actual genocidal threat to Israel and the Jewish people, much less the severity of Hamas’s premeditated use of sexual crimes to rape and mutilate women. Perhaps she does this because she considers herself a proud Palestinian, as Esther was a proud Jew. Or perhaps because she knows that in some way if she were actually to speak the truth, she’d risk threatening her husband’s monarchy, also a target of Islamists.
Queen Rania ended her comments magnanimously saying, “We in this part of the world need to find a way to share these holy lands in peace.”
The problem is that when she delegitimizes Israel and blames only Israel for the actual suffering that’s happening now, and only blames Israel rather than taking or assigning any Arab culpability for their own situation, she continues generations of lies that does anything but enable us to live in peace.
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Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six. Throughout his life and career, he has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation (www.Genesis123.co). He writes regularly about Israel and shares experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast and publisher of www.IsraeltheMiracle.com. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.
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