Arab against Arab
ABU MUSAB al-Zarqawi's terrorist gang has claimed credit for the bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. The people of Jordan may now grasp what it means to have direct experience of the nihilistic cruelty Zarqawi's followers have been inflicting next door in Iraq. After a statement appeared on an Islamist website boasting that ''the places of execution were chosen to be some hotels that the tyrant of Jordan has turned into a backyard for the enemies of Islam," hundreds of angry Jordanians demonstrated in front of one of the targeted hotels, shouting, ''Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!"
Their emotion ought to be instructive. Their anger illuminates the chasm between jihadists who feel justified blowing up wedding parties and the mainstream of Arab and Muslim society. People within that mainstream may have their discontents, but the delusional fantasies of the jihadists offer no true answers to the real-world problems of people who are forced to live under authoritarian governments and make a living in sclerotic, corruption-ridden economies.
When Zarqawi's gang calls Jordan's King Abdullah a tyrant, the expression is not meant as a condemnation of particular regional or domestic policies. Even if Jordan were not a staging area for hundreds of UN personnel in the World Food Program and the UN Children's Fund who have been channeling humanitarian aid to Iraq, Zarqawi's killers would have targeted Jordan. The fact that top officials of the Palestinian Authority were killed in the hotel bombings, including the authority's chief of military intelligence, highlights the way in which the jihadists' actions can harm even the one cause that has often seemed capable of uniting the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Zarqawi's gang calls itself Al Qaeda in Iraq. These fanatics seek to destabilize Jordan not simply because the monarchy has a peace treaty with Israel. The jihadists want to overthrow King Abdullah and every other government in the Arab world because, in their eyes, all those states are insufficiently Islamic. Zarqawi's terrorists have arbitrarily murdered both the father of the bride and the father of the bridegroom at a hotel wedding in Amman for the ultimate purpose of installing regimes in the mold of the Taliban throughout the Muslim world. The atrocities in the Amman hotels are acts of war. It is more a war within Islam than a war between Islam and the West. Ultimately, it is a war that the people of Jordan, Iraq, and the other Arab countries will have to wage and win on their own.
