The ‘noise’ of political intimidation, intolerance and first dibs

The scene played itself quite rapidly on Facebook pages. A couple of videos were posted to illustrate the unacceptable and illegal noise levels from nightly parties at a club, comments were coming in about the noisemakers’ disregard for citizens seeking peace in their homes, people were quoting other cases of improper noise: screeching cars, outdoor parties in hotels, repetitive bell ringing from churches and the loud speakers calling to prayer from mosques.

Then all fury was unleashed on the author of the original post, fuelled and encouraged by a well-known social media outlet, which reprinted the Facebook post with a headline that misrepresented the intention of the post owner, as it revealed her relationship to a former official.

In a flash, the post owner, married to a “liberal” former official who, it is claimed, is politically aligned with a public nemesis, was calling for the abolition of the call to prayers. Full stop.

The different levels of wrongs in this story are quite astounding and in my opinion quite damning of us as a people and as a government, and especially of our state of democracy.

Other than the fact that this woman’s privacy and right to self expression in her own private space — albeit online — was snatched from her for public entertainment and exploitation, it was clear that the agenda of the “snatchers” was to target the husband’s perceived political agenda.

To that end, they sought to engage the religiously conservative public to partner with the Jordanian “old guards” in further alienating and intimidating the so-called liberal reformers who believe in social and political inclusion, but suffer from a reputation of running after economic and personal gain.

The story played itself like clock work. The public piled on verbal abuse, accusing the original post owner of calling for the abolition of Islamic prayer and of the call to prayer, and despite all her protestations that she was discussing the noise level of the bad quality loudspeakers and not the call to or the prayers themselves, the abuse continued.

In the meantime, the social media outlet published the next day an ostensibly independent and unrelated “political analysis” further damning the husband’s political position.

The noise level of this quickly orchestrated campaign of intimidation was even louder and more disturbing than that of the club next to the post owner’s house, which started this whole story in the first place.

Over the past two decades, a conservative Jordanian political movement has been working behind doors, armed with the tools of social and political intimidation, to undermine any emerging political movement that calls for the full political and economic inclusion of all Jordanians, regardless of their origin.

It builds its political base on the narrative of exclusion, citing limited resources and what I call the “first dibs” narrative. First dibs is mostly a child-like argument, where a group or individual argue that they should have a first chance at selecting in order to lay their claim to use first or exclusively. The criterion for first dibs is not necessarily justified and is put forward or devised by those laying the claim.

What this story illustrated last week was the depth and breadth of the gulf between those who want to deal with the reality in front of them — that Jordanians are of different origins, ages, sexes, economic ability, political ideologies and with varying commitment to religion and its manifestations — and therefore are looking for solutions that can contribute to tolerance and mutual respect, and those who want the world to rotate around their priorities, their needs, their political and economic aspirations, their continued and contested right to have first dibs.

One is on the side of democracy and its institutionalisation in political parties and processes that give voice to all these variables in society without bullying or intimidation tactics; the second is on the side of preserving the status quo aided until now by a government that turns a blind eye to preserve its own interests and keep its options open. 

Needless to say one hopes that democracy wins.

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