A court in Amman sentenced Hiba Abu Taha, a Jordanian investigative journalist of Palestinian origin, to a year in prison on 11 June, one month after her arrest for revealing alleged trade links between Jordanian and Israeli companies despite the war in Gaza.
Ah, so they want to continue trading with Israel while not being held responsible for trading with Israel.
Jordan has seen a surge in harassment of journalists, including arrests, censorship and intimidation since December 2023. Those targeted have included journalists covering demonstrations in support of Gaza or revealing information concerning relations between Jordan and Israel, and the harassment has been carried out under the cybercrime law in particular.
Add Jordan to the list of countries where it is strangely forbidden to criticize Israel no matter what Israel does.
If anyone you read, or know, ever refers to a monarchy as progressive, you can immediately disregard everything they ever write, or say.
The only context where it's at least explainable would be in a limited to direct comparison between Jordan and the other regional monarchs with large petroleum reserves.
Sweden is technically a monarchy but a constitutional one. Jordan is actually a traditional monarchy, just weakly pretending to be a constitutional one.
Who tf said that? Jordan is a country but is merely the current seat of power for one inbred family of absurdly wealthy religious zealots, who've been in strict charge of their subjects for the last 1,000 years.
It's just the acting head of that family understands the reality of their predicament, and that is that that their entire neighborhood is under imminent threat of a violent Iranian-led religious crusade against Israel and Jewish people, and that when Iran collapses as a result, pretty much every country within a few thousand miles in any direction through West Asia, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean is also going to collapse under the weight of tens of millions of war refugees. But two seats of power that will not change hands in the next 100 years are Jerusalem and Washington.
That's the actual war that's going to happen, and it boils down to the fact that western, liberal values are an existential threat to these far right, Islamic monarchs and dictators. Eventually the hardliners in Iran, who want to "restore Islam to its rightful glory"--which is just coden language for genociding every Jew and other liberal in the Middle East--are going to win out, and they are going to start some shit that they can't take back or that they can't de-escalate. They are morons and are funding terrorism all over the world; literally they are worse than crazy children who hear imaginary voices, playing with matches.
