Global media is reporting that Israeli Muslim Brotherhood leader was allowed to enter Jordan after being banned by that country for several years. According to one report:
“Amman – An Islamist leader in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, was allowed by the authorities to enter Jordan on Thursday after a ban that lasted for several years. The Palestinian Islamic scholar, recently released from an Israeli prison, is due to attend a seminar at the Red Sea port of Aqaba about the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem 14 centuries ago. Sheikh Salah was welcomed at the King Hussein crossing point on River Jordan by leaders of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood movement and its political arm, the Islamic Action Front. The government’s official spokesman, Minister of State for Media Affairs Taher Adwan, welcomed Sheikh Salah’s arrival, saying Jordan ‘highly appreciates his courageous defence of the sacred Islamic shrines in Jerusalem.’ The last time Sheikh Salah was barred from entering Jordan was in 2008 when the authorities turned him back without giving reasons, preventing him from attending a rally to express solidarity with East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.”
In May 2003, Salah was arrested along with other Northern Islamic Movement officials on suspicion of transferring funds to Hamas under the pretense of humanitarian aid. He was released after two years under the terms of a plea bargain. In August 2007, Salah was indicted for “inciting racism and violence” for calling for a “third Intifada,” or uprising, to defend the mosque and in 2008 Israeli security forces raided the offices of the Islamic Movement in northern Israel accusing it of aiding Hamas. In May of 2009, Salah said that Israel has a ‘diabolical plan” to cause the Al–Aqsa Mosque to collapse “in a way that would appear as is happening as a result of natural causes, such an earthquake.” A previous post discussed his 2010 conviction for assaulting an Israeli policeman and participating in a violent demonstration. In February of this year, it was reported that Salah was arrested on suspicion of setting forest fires in the south of Israel.