Israel summons Jordanian ambassador over ex-minister’s Hitler quotes

Cnaan Liphshiz

(JTA) — Israeli diplomats summoned Jordan’s ambassador to protest a Jordanian former minister’s use of Nazi propaganda.

Ambassador Walid Obeidat was summoned Thursday in connection with the recent publication in the English-language Jordan Times of an op-ed by former foreign minister Kamel Abu Jaber, The Jerusalem Post reported.

In the op-ed, Abu Jaber, who served as Jordan’s foreign minister from 1991-1993, quoted Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in writing about how to manipulate large audiences.

“[In] the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature,” Abu Jaber wrote in quoting Hitler.

The Abu Jaber op-ed, titled “The big Zionist lie and the task ahead,” goes on to discuss the “Zionist big lie about Palestine — ‘a land without a people’ — that the entire Western world adopted, and the biblical, Talmudic myth of the ‘chosen people.’”

Quoting an Arab proverb which says “the rope of lies is short,” Abu Jaber wrote: “Hopefully that will prove to be true in the case of Zionism, too, though for that to happen, we need to intensify our efforts in that direction.”

Obeidat was summoned to the headquarters of the Israeli foreign ministry in Jerusalem by Aviva Raz Shechter, deputy director- general of the Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Division.

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