The founders of a local Palestine Solidarity Committee in Washington State are peddling a new curriculum for teaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to secondary-school students. They have appeared at several teachers’ conferences and claim that their program has been adopted by at least three schools. The teaching materials include a gamut of anti-Israel propaganda, Edward Alexander writes, wrapped in a brazen appropriation of the Holocaust:

The tawdry character of [this] curriculum is inherent in its bizarre title: “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Its designers noticed that the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center had packaged materials relating to the Holocaust in one of the trunks used by Jews who were shipped off to the death camps of Europe. But how dare the Jews monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering, which other groups, and none more so than the Palestinian Arabs, would very much like, ex-post-facto, to claim for themselves? And so it came to pass that [the designers of the curriculum] collected their own CDs and sacred relics of the “Palestinian cause” into an online “trunk.”

Last week, Jordanian police arrested sixteen members of the country’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood for acquiring explosives, trying to manufacture drones, and planning rocket attacks. The cell was likely working in coordination with Hamas (the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood) and Hizballah, and perhaps receiving funding from Iran. Ghaith al-Omari provides some background:

The Brotherhood has been active in Jordan since the 1940s, and its relations with the government remained largely cooperative for decades even as other political parties were banned in the 1950s. In exchange, the Brotherhood usually (but not always) supported the palace’s foreign policy and security measures, particularly against Communist and socialist parties.

Relations became more adversarial near the turn of the century after the Brotherhood vociferously opposed the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. The Arab Spring movement that emerged in 2011 saw further deterioration. Unlike other states in the region, however, Jordan did not completely crack down on the MB, instead seeking to limit its influence.

Yet the current Gaza war has seen another escalation, with the MB repeatedly accusing the government of cooperating with Israel and not doing enough to support the Palestinians.

Jordanian security circles are particularly worried about the MB’s vocal wartime identification with Hamas, an organization that was considered such a grave security threat that it was expelled from the kingdom in 1999. The sentiment among many Jordanian officials is that the previous lenient approach failed to change the MB’s behavior, emboldening the group instead.