Jordan's Assault on Journalism

[\"Freedom for journalist Suleiman al-Khalidi and no to the detention of journalists.\" Image from executive-magazine.com] [\"Freedom for journalist Suleiman al-Khalidi and no to the detention of journalists.\" Image from executive-magazine.com]

Jordan's Assault on Journalism

By : Christoph Wilcke

Free speech beaten by book and by bludgeon

Character assassination is a hot topic in Jordan these days as thousands of demonstrators, riding the winds of the "Arab Spring," call for reform and accuse government officials and business leaders of abuse of power and corruption. Asking judges to put critical journalists behind bars is also popular among a ruling class that feels threatened by the sudden surge in revelations pouring out on the street and from the media.

The government of Prime Minister Marouf al-Bikhit is doing its bit to stifle free speech in the name of fighting corruption. A draft amendment to a law setting up an anti-corruption agency would punish people who spread “unjustified” rumors about corruption that “lead to insulting the reputation or infringing upon the dignity” of another person, with at least six months in prison. Taher Odwan, the government spokesperson, resigned over the proposed amendment on June 21.

Rather than add new provisions criminalizing defamation, Jordan should cancel those already in its penal code that send peaceful critics to jail for “insulting” the king or government institutions. In May, Secretary General of the Political Development Ministry Malek Twal promised that a new media strategy would reform those provisions. The government adopted the strategy in June, but it strangely remains unpublished. Instead, Bikhit said he would refer alleged character assassins to the courts.

Bikhit made good on his promise in late May by yanking a criminal defamation case against a journalist, Alaa al-Fazza, from a civilian court and referring it to the military-dominated State Security Court (SSC). The SSC prosecutor promptly detained Fazza for “working to change the constitution by unlawful means,” an offense punishable by death, based on an article he published about a Facebook group that supports the reinstatement of former Crown Prince Hamza, King Abdullah’s half-brother, whom Abdullah replaced with his own son Hussein. Allegedly among its members were ten members of parliament and two former ministers, including Nabil al-Sharif, the former information minister who had brought the complaint against Fazza. Unlike Fazza, Sharif was not detained or investigated for suspected unconstitutional activities. Fazza is out on bail, but the case continues.

Fazza also incurred the wrath of police chief Husein al-Majali over an article that blamed him and the interior minister for allowing Khalid Shahin, a business tycoon convicted on corruption charges, to leave prison and the country for medical treatment abroad, never to return. The scandal cost the health and justice ministers their positions, and Majali filed a criminal complaint against Fazza for “spreading false rumors.” Fazza was spared in a general amnesty, but Majali in July filed a civil suit seeking 10,000 dinars [14,100 dollars] in damages for harming the police department’s reputation.

Yahya Sa’ud, a member of parliament with roots in the town of Tafileh, was so upset over a June 13 Agence France-Presse (AFP) report that Tafileh residents attacked the king’s convoy on a visit there that he led protests seeking to have AFP Amman bureau chief, Randa Habib, referred to the SSC; two days later, a mob ransacked the AFP offices, and witnesses put Sa’ud at the scene. A police car stationed nearby to protect Al Jazeera’s offices did not intervene.

Al Jazeera correspondents have also been the victims of physical and verbal attacks. Two correspondents’ cars were smashed in March, and a policeman assaulted the bureau chief, Yasir Abu Hilala, while he was covering a demonstration in Amman on July 15. An internal police report on the incident, in which police beat ten journalists and some protesters, stated that policemen “did not differentiate between protester and journalist” in their beatings “because of the angry commotion that took hold” of them following previous protests on March 25 in Amman and April 15 in Zarqa’, in which numerous policemen were injured.

The police report recommended referring the heavyhanded policemen to court, but Jordan has a dismal record in holding officials to account for violence. When police stood by while a pro-government gang attacked demonstrators in February, there was no investigation, a police spokesperson told Human Rights Watch. And police who failed to stop similar attacks on March 25 and then attacked protesters themselves also faced no charges. Sa’ud faces no charges and is free to launch new attacks on AFP.

Jordan is attacking free speech, both by pursuing journalists under draconian laws and by failing to hold police accountable when they stand by doing nothing — or even join in — when journalists are attacked.

[This article first appeared in Executive Magazine.]

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412