WHERE THE ONE-EYED MAN IS KING: The New York Sun quotes Jordan's King Abdullah's speech before a joint meeting of Congress on Wednesday:

"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."

The New York Sun's understated response is

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.

Mark Steyn notes the absurdity of the King's claim in historical terms:

His Majesty well knows the character of Palestinian "justice and peace". Palestinian "nationalists" assassinated his great-grandfather, and attempted a coup against his father, and in retaliation for the latter in the space of a few weeks King Hussein slaughtered Palestinians on a scale that the poor old Zionazi apartheid butchers could never contemplate in their wildest dreams. During the 20 years the West Bank was part of Jordan, King Abdullah's father made no effort to address "dispossession" by making it a Palestinian state – and why would he? Jordan was already a majority Palestinian state.

Steyn goes a step further, pointing a finger at Jordan's own particular role in destabilizing the region by virtue of its own existence.

Abdullah's lazy speech to Congress reminds us that, if Palestine is really "producing severe consequences for our world", in part it's because of the high price of the Hashemite monarchy. In 1922, the British installed in Amman a spare prince they didn't have a gig for mainly as a colonial cost-saving measure. If the Hashemites hadn't been imported as figureheads, chances are that today a "Palestinian" would be president in the eastern half of Mandatory Palestine. And King Hussein's weakness before the Arab League 35 years ago created the trap in which Israel is caught: If the "occupied territories" are indeed occupied, why not merely return them to the fellows you occupied them from – ie, Jordan? Instead, in a uniquely perverse global consensus, Israel was instructed it could not return territory captured in war to the defeated party but only to officially designated terrorist successors.

These days, no one suggests returning the West Bank to Jordan--from whom Israel captured it when Jordan ignored Israel's advice and decided to attack. Then again, Jordan is no more eager to take back the West Bank than Egypt is to take back Gaza.

Both Jordan and Egypt prefer to support these Palestinian Arabs from a distance.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Jordan and King Abdullah.