New Yorker and King Abdullah's Jordan

The Financial Times has an article concerning a fellow who wounded six tourists in Amman yelling Allahu Akbarun, and killed one British man. Contrary to Dominion of Canada and Seattle Wash practice, authorities announce that "This operation is considered a terrorist act unless the man is found to be deranged." Unlike the Muslim man in Seattle who shot six women at a Jewish Community Center and killed one, screaming "I am a Muslim and I hate Jews," who the Seattle papers mused was probably just an angry woman-hater. Or the fire-bomber in Montreal who torched a Jewish school in an act of "unexplained arson," ......you get the picture.

I am very exercised by the Jordan incident because I always considered Amman one of the most welcoming of Arab cities. I even recommended to the State Dept upon request for a new location for the Arab language Foreign Service Institute that it be set up in Jordan for the relative purity of its desert Arabic---this after the Beirut FSI where I studied was being moved to Tunis, a doubtful place to learn the most complicated language in State's estimation [along with Japanese].

Also, I just finished reading a good piece in The New Yorker [not online] about King Abdullah's attempt to establish a Jordanian version of Deerfield Academy, where the King schooled in his youth, in the vicinity of Amman at a new venture called "King's School." While reading I remembered having lunch with Crown Prince Hassan in the Middle East Institute garden in the early '80s when I was a Fellow there in DC. The jovial CP and I kept in touch for a while, but I think King Hussein may have made the right choice when on his deathbed he chose the young and energetic Abdullah to succeed him rather than the intellectual Hassan.

I also wondered whether the new and much-hyped school, with its multicultural and non-religious curriculum, wouldn't automatically become a cynosure for whack-job Islamists aiming to explode themselves in the new school among students from Israel, the US and many Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Just how much would security measures to prevent terrorist acts also prevent an atmosphere of intellectual and personal development that the King seeks to replicate from the quiet countryside of Massachusetts?

Much as I admire the young and energetic King's noble ambitions, I'm afraid that the one percent of Muslims who are rabid fanatics [adding up to perhaps five million males] might find some way to attack a school that might become a symbol of toleration and comity among civilizations.

While at the US Embassy in Jidda in the seventies, I tried to brush up my Arabic by studying at King Abdul Aziz University, where Osama was studying at the time. And the seething hostility I as a Westerner and non-believer encountered convinced me of one thing.

Toleration is not on these fellows' agenda.