King Abdullah of Jordan Address to a Joint Session of Congress

CSPAN ^ | 3/7/2007 | n/a

[Pyro7480]

Jordan's King Abdullah is addressing a joint session of Congress.

[Pyro7480]

On right now on CSPAN1!

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

ping for future (don't have cable television).

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Has he finished?

What did he mention?

[Pyro7480]

It was mainly on the peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Since this is not getting much traffic (at least posts), going to take the liberty of a long post:

---

"Jordan's king urges US peace push" (from the BBC).

King Abdullah of Jordan has told top politicians in Washington that the US must throw its weight behind an urgent drive to make peace in the Middle East.

In an address to Congress, the king said the status quo could not be allowed to continue.

It "is pulling the region and the world towards greater danger... the cycle of crisis is spinning faster," he warned.

The king suggested a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was more urgent than the conflict in Iraq.

He said there was now a "rare and historic moment of opportunity" to make a difference in the region.

He called for support for a Saudi peace plan drawn up in 2002, which offered collective Arab recognition of Israel in return for a viable Palestinian state.

But he said the US must move fast.

"Nothing can assert America's moral vision more clearly, nothing can reach the world's youth more directly than your leadership in a peace process that delivers results, not next year, not in five years, but this year," he said.

"We need all hands on deck. The international community, especially the US, must be engaged in moving the process forward."

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Appreciated.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

From the BBC article, his speech didn't seem all that bad and critical of the United States.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Picture:

[montag813]

His wife is a nice piece of tail.

[Pyro7480]

Yeah, she is a "stunner." As the "babes" of the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon demonstrated, women in the Middle East can be quite attractive.

[dervish]

Gall of the Hashemites
New York Sun Staff Editorial
March 8, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/50077

If one were to distill 110% wrongheadedness and then distill it again a second, third, and fourth time, one couldn't come up with a speech as purely wrongheaded as the one that the Hashemite king, Abdullah II, delivered yesterday to a joint meeting of Congress. The king's aim amounted to blaming Israel for all the world's problems. "The wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment and frustration far beyond, is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine," the king said. "This is the core issue. And this core issue is not only producing severe consequences for our region, it is producing severe consequences for our world."

Balderdash is the kindest way to describe it. It doesn't track with the actions of the violent terrorists, and it doesn't track with their statements. If the terrorists are upset about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, why are they setting off bombs in Indonesia and Spain and Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which are hardly in the vanguard of support for Israel? Given that the terrorists state publicly that their end goal is to make all of Europe and America subject to Islamic law, why should we believe that in fact they have the far more modest goal of merely seizing land belonging to the Jewish state?

In a speech on American soil, Abdullah incredibly snubbed his own country and his own family when he referred to "Sixty years of Palestinian dispossession." Why, his family knows all about Palestinian Arab dispossession. The gall of the son of King Hussein, who perpetrated what the Arabs call Black September, fetching up in the Congress to lecture the Americans on Palestinian Arab dispossession is astounding. Abdullah well knows that Jordan controlled the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967. If the Palestinian Arabs were dispossessed during that period it was no one's fault but the Hashemites', who didn't exactly use those decades, or the years after, to race to establish a Palestinian Arab state.

Abdullah made reference to a Saudi proposal from 2002 that he described as the "Arab Peace Initiative." That plan would be more accurately described as the Arab Destruction of Israel Initiative. Its aim was to seek to reward the second so-called intifada, which followed the collapse of President Clinton's Camp David II, by giving the Palestinian Arabs half of the Israeli capital of Jerusalem. The Saudis not only sought to divide Israel's capital in Jerusalem but also to force Israel to abandon Jerusalem's Old City, retreat to militarily indefensible borders, and absorb within those borders enough Arab "refugees" so that its character as a Jewish state would be eradicated. No one fell for it save for Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

Abdullah's speech yesterday won negative reviews from many of the Democratic lawmakers who now control Congress. The New York Times' Paris edition quoted Rep. Steve Israel of Long Island as saying, "I was troubled to hear the suggestion that the fact that Sunni and Shia are murdering each other is somehow the fault of the Israelis. This implication is a dangerous one and completely unacceptable." The chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, Rep. Thomas Lantos, was quoted by Fox News as saying the speech was "Profoundly disappointing … a missed opportunity." One of the effects of the Islamist terrorist onslaught of recent years is that more Americans have thought more deeply about these matters. They will not be gulled by a foreign potentate offering up Israel as a scapegoat for troubles that originate with the failings of the Arab and Islamic world and their nondemocratic leaders, Abdullah among them.