: What the Arrest of a Prominent Jordanian Cartoonist Says About the State of Satire in the Arab World #WorldNEWS The course of renowned Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjajs decades-long career has not

What the Arrest of a Prominent Jordanian Cartoonist Says About the State of Satire in the Arab World #WorldNEWS
The course of renowned Jordanian cartoonist Emad Hajjajs decades-long career has not always run smoothly. Becoming the first local satirist to portray Jordans King Abdullah II in cartoon form in 2000 cost him his staff job at a government-owned newspaper. His persistent satirizing of Al Qaeda and ISIS brought death threats. And Amman’s general prosecutor collared him for questioning after a 2017 portrayal of Jesus Christ “disowning” the Greek Orthodox church offended some Jordanians.
Still, none of the pushback for Hajjajs lampooning of Israeli and Arab leaders, terrorists, or religious institutions prepared the 53-year-old for what happened on Aug. 26. So innocuous did Hajjaj consider the latest cartoon he’d filed to his editor—which mocked the recently-announced pact between Israel and the UAE to normalize relations—that when police in Jordan detained him at a checkpoint on his return from a picnic with his wife, he had no idea why he was being stopped. He ended up being arrested and imprisoned.

“I thought that I understood the game,” Hajjaj told TIME six days later, shortly after being released, noting that he had not named Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the Emirati monarch to whom the caricature appears to allude. “It was shocking, very confusing for my family. It was a difficult moment standing in line to enter the jail with criminals and drug dealers. ”
What Hajjaj hadn’t understood was that the normalization deal was so sensitive a subject that satirizing it would bring counterterrorism charges connected to “harming Jordan’s relations with a friendly state. ” Hajjaj’s arrest is more evidence of the deteriorating state of press freedom in Jordan, where police in July beat journalists covering a teachers’ protest. But it also illustrates the growing soft power of the UAE in the region. Jordan’s authorities would “rather abuse the rights of their own citizens than risk offending a Gulf leader’s feelings,” Human Rights Watch deputy Middle East director Joe Stork said in a statement calling for his release on Aug 28.
Activists and satirists on social media took note. German cartoonist and author Rainer Hachfeld penned an image of Jordan’s Prime Minister Omar Razzaz with his hands around Hajjaj’s throat. Another cartoonist, Ataq Shahid, drew a Jordanian-flagged boot stepping on the cartoonists hand. Amid the outcry, Jordan released Hajjaj on Aug 30—a move so abrupt it surprised his lawyer. He remains under investigation and could still face up to three years in prison under the country’s cybercrime laws, according to his lawyer.