RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Island of Peace massacre was a Mass murder attack that occurred at the Island of Peace site in Naharayim on March 13, 1997 in which Ahmed Daqamseh, a Jordanian soldier opened fire at a large group of Israeli schoolgirls from the AMIT Fuerst School in Beit Shemesh who were on a class field trip, killing seven of them and injuring six others.

The shooter, who expressed pride for his actions, was imprisoned by Jordanian authorities, but was later called a “hero” by the Jordanian Justice Minister and Parliament, who called for his release.

Speaking on Al Jazeera in May 2001, Ahmed Daqamseh’s mother said, “I am proud of my son, and I hold my head high. My son did a heroic deed and has pleased Allah and his own conscience. My son lifts my head and the head of the entire Arab and Islamic nation. I am proud of any Muslim who does what Ahmad did.

“When my son went to prison, they asked him: ‘Ahmad, do you regret it?’ He answered: ‘I have no regrets.’ He treated everyone to coffee, honored all the other prisoners, and said: The only thing that I am angry about is the gun, which did not work properly. Otherwise I would have killed all of the passengers on the bus.”

In an interview Daqamseh gave in 2004 to Jordanian weekly a-Shahed, he expressed pride in his actions and said that “if I could return to that moment, I’d behave exactly the same way. Every day that passes, I grow stronger in the belief that what I did was my duty.”

But that’s just the killer and his mother talking. They don’t represent a larger segment of Jordanian society. Right? Wrong.

In February 2011, Jordanian Justice Minister Hussein Mjali, who previously served as Daqamseh’s defense lawyer during the 1997 trial, called Ahmed Daqamseh a hero and added that “if a Jew murdered Arabs, they’d [the Israelis] build him a statue.”

An overwhelming 110 members of the Jordanian House of Representatives signed a petition demanding a pardon for a Jordanian soldier who shot and killed seven Israeli schoolgirls in 1997.

That’s 110 out of 120. As close to unanimous as you can get in the lower house of Jordan’s parliament.

The parliamentary memo described Dagamseh as a “hero,” calling for a special pardon to release him.

Maxims added by the MPs themselves included “We are all Ahmed Daqamseh”, “pardon based on justice” and “freedom for the soldier hero.”

The effort is led by Ali Sneid, briefly a leftist hero.

Statements like these give some of the flavor of the political rhetoric by Islamists in Jordan.

“Not only does the Jordanian regime protect the Jewish entity usurper and maintains it by making our sons in the military border guards for this entity artificially on the land of Muslims, but beyond that to provide full protection for the herds of the brothers of apes and pigs that roam our land.

“Making of your sons the servants and guardians of those who humiliated Allah who created the Jews as brothers of monkeys, makes the blood of your sons worthless.

“We have described the outrage previously done by the (king) to the soldier-hero Ahmed Daqamseh that and disgrace to the Jordanian Armed Forces by kneeling on his knees at the feet Jews (the families of the murdered girls), comforting and apologizing, and then sentenced that hero to life imprisonment.”

Peace. Impossible.