From Sense-Making to Rage Baiting: What Hmoud Asks of the Jordanian State

Two days after the attack on Hmoud, I started my lectures by giving students one minute to express their empathy. I did not force a form of empathy. This was not a moment to prove a point. It was a moment to experience something together, however we chose to. The most important people in that moment were the victims, and all of us who felt grief, anger, or disbelief. The moment is what unites us, not how we express unity.

Then I gave space for students to express or ask. Some did. One question captured the moment: why? Why did they kill them?

It was a combination of disbelief, anger, and sadness. To me, it represented something more. Young people are rarely given a space to say what they feel, and then to explain why they feel it. Most spaces we offer them ask for the right answer, not the honest one. That question was the first step of a process we seldom let them finish: to process, understand, and question their reality.

It was also a search for answers in an environment that provides answers that no longer make sense. Scholars call the work of turning a shock into understanding “sense-making.” Citizens do it through grief. Institutions are meant to do it by explaining, inquiring, and holding to account.

“The public was given an enemy instead of an explanation.”

In a time of crisis, the state needs to get into the process of sense-making instead of “rage baiting.” The first days showed what was at stake.

His Majesty’s visit to the injured was a key moment. Beyond the optics, what I saw was legitimacy being contested. The anger was visible. So was the moral weight he carried as the King of all Jordanians, and as a Hashemite whose custodianship extends to Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. When the victims spoke to him, their words were about legitimacy at the core. One told him: we won’t leave Jordan. Another said, in effect: this is too much.

These were not words about security. They were about belonging. The Christian presence in Jordan and the region has been dwindling for years. That carries geopolitical weight beyond numbers. In a context like ours, safety does not only mean not being killed, or not fearing for your life. It means feeling welcome in what you consider home.

The victims were asking the state to make sense of this with them. The first official statements “pointed” that way. Ministers spoke of uprooting takfiri thought, of a “battle of awareness,” of arrests being “insufficient,” and of a national strategy.

Then the state changed the “register.” The attackers were arrested near Hmoud. Hours later, Jordanian jets struck southern Syria, in an operation reportedly named “Jordanian Deterrence – Hmoud.” Officials had said investigators found no links to other cells. Then it was said the attackers were linked to groups in Syria. Syria reported civilian deaths. No public explanation has bridged “no links” and “linked.” The state may hold intelligence it cannot share. The public was given an enemy instead of an explanation.

The government should not become a channel for anger, or the one directing it. When the state skips the sense-making process, it ends up “rage baiting.”

The victims asked to stay welcome at home. What did the state answer them with?

“Blaming it only on ideology is running away from accountability.”

The official explanation has settled on ideology. The attackers were “takfiri.” Their thinking was “alien to Jordanian values.” This is true, and it is not enough. Blaming it only on ideology is running away from accountability.

Terrorism is a complex phenomenon. The violence we use to define it is only its manifestation. It is structural. It is also part of the “human condition.” The capacity for violence exists in ordinary people, and what they live through shapes it. Ideology is the language the violence speaks. It is not the whole story of “how the violent were made.”

Since 2001, counter-terrorism has become an industry. Within it sit the efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism; PVE and CVE. Jordan has been central to that industry in the region. But the system kept the core of the file for itself. It left the PVE space to civil society, to play in a sandbox. Projects run workshops on resilience and dialogue. They do not reach the levers where the phenomenon is actually managed.

The system running those levers sits at the intersection of religion, identity, and security. It is at the core of the phenomenon.

If civil society plays in the sandbox, who answers for what happens outside it?

“The paradigm protects the state from the extremist. It does not protect the citizen from him.”

That system’s paradigm is built on purely religious foundations. It treats the relationship between the state and alleged violent extremists through religious concepts. At its core is one principle. Rebellion against the ruler, الخروج على الحاكم, is only permitted if the ruler is a kafir and his kufr is visible.

This shapes what “rehabilitation” means. The question put to the extremist is about the ruler. Is he a kafir? Is rebellion against him permitted? An extremist can be persuaded that it is not. He can leave convinced the state is legitimate. Nothing in that argument requires him to see his Christian neighbour as a fellow citizen. The paradigm protects the ruler from the extremist. It does not protect the citizen from him.(Note: Most terrorist attacks in Jordan since 2005 were against security)

One of the Hmoud attackers had already been convicted of plotting a terrorist attack. He had served his sentence and was free by the time of the attack. Whether he passed through any “rehabilitation” programme is not public. If he did, this is most likely the logic it ran on.

This creates a tension, and forms a confused approach to the phenomenon. Are we a nation state with citizens and constituencies? Or are we a pre-nation state based on religion, where “citizenship” is mainly defined through religious doctrine? In such a model, Christians are indeed أهل ذمة. They are a minority. Doctrine “defines” the social interaction among constituencies with different religious identities.

The state’s own response showed the tension. In Hmoud, a victim’s sister told the Minister of Awqaf about online calls not to ask God’s mercy for the dead because they were Christian. He answered that whoever says so is an extremist. He meant well. But the answer stayed inside the frame. The question became whether a Muslim may pray for a Christian. It should have been what a Jordanian owes another Jordanian.

“Owning the vocabulary is not the same as owning its meaning.”

We cannot ignore that this is where a significant majority of the population sits when it comes to how they view fellow “different” citizens. The system knows this. It assumes that owning the religious language means controlling what people think. It treats its own religious reading as the sense-making lens for everyone.

But ideology, and the language used to communicate and sustain it, are formed outside the system’s boundaries. Owning/using the vocabulary is not the same as owning its meaning. Religious sense-making happens in homes, mosques, phone screens, and group chats the state does not run. In those spaces, the language can be weaponised. Weaponised language evolves, almost inevitably, into dehumanising language.

Language then becomes the sphere of conflict. Its interpretation becomes a competition over who owns the narrative. That competition is tied to legitimacy, namely religious legitimacy. Whoever wins the interpretation claims the right to speak for the faith.

Restricted civic space deepens this. As civic channels narrow, citizenship is exercised more and more in “safer” spaces. Those spaces happen to be “moral” ones. They are mostly rooted in religious doctrine and interpretations that the “state” has less control over than it thinks it does.

What happens to citizenship when the only safe place to practise it is a space the state does not control?

“This is not a litmus test where you force religious forms of ‘empathy’ and ‘solidarity.’”

The result is a citizenry that is limited and constrained. In that environment, using Hmoud as “rage bait” most certainly created a backfire effect.

This is not a litmus test where you force religious forms of “empathy” and “solidarity.” Asking people to use religious language tied to their shaped identity to “prove” their patriotism is internally contradictory. More dangerously, it pushes people to more extremes, because their sacred values are perceived to be under threat. To many, the attack is now perceived as being weaponised to attack religiosity.

The strike compounds this. We operate in a hybrid warfare environment. Narratives travel faster than facts, and adversaries do not need to fire a shot to exploit them. Civilian deaths in southern Syria are raw material for anyone who wants to tell the story the attackers wanted told: a state that kills Muslims to avenge Christians. The closure of the border added an economic cost to the narrative one. Whatever the military logic, the state now has to manage these consequences in an information space it helped inflame.

The conflicting narratives citizens received pushed them into echo chambers. Each chamber amplified existing beliefs and values. Together, they brought to the surface schisms that reflect our inability to define what it means to be Jordanian.

“Countering” extremism after such an incident is not merely an anger management effort or a strategic communications campaign. It is not a playbook where we go back to how we dealt with the killing of Moath Al-Kasasbeh more than a decade ago. The context has completely changed, especially after October 7th.

“Christian presence is not a minority file. It is a moral reservoir.”

Here I return to legitimacy as the lens through which to look at this phenomenon.

Last year, writing in New Lines about the war of narratives in Jordan, I argued that “resistance” had shifted from a political strategy into a moral currency. Legitimacy was coming less from institutions and more from moral clarity. The danger was the widening gap between what states can control and what their publics now demand. Hmoud sits inside that gap. If the state wants to adapt to the context, it has to adapt its view to where people sit morally.

That leads to the Hashemite legacy and legitimacy. The attack hits at its core, historically, when it comes to Christians, not only in Jordan but across the region, مسيحيو المشرق. The Hashemite legacy is a covenant. It carries the weight of the past and must endure into the future. It holds this land as home to all who share it.

The state, led by His Majesty, is leading a resistance model based on diplomacy, countering the Israeli model. Christian presence in the region, and namely in Jordan, presents a contrast to that model, morally and from a narrative perspective. One model builds a state on a single religious identity. The other holds that Arab Christians are of this land, as much as anyone.

If we are serious about the extremism phenomenon, the state has to tap into this moral reservoir and build its strategy around it. Christian presence is not a minority file or a tourism one. It is a moral reservoir. Protecting it and encouraging it becomes part of our resistance. We need something to bring us together.

It also counters extremism by complicating the narrative. Extremism runs on simple binaries: believer and infidel, us and them. So does the clash-of-civilisations story the Israeli model depends on. Complicating the narrative means putting in front of people the facts those binaries cannot absorb. The victims of Hmoud did this themselves. One was a professor who wished that Palestine would return as the Arabs’ first cause. One was a Christian dentist named Mohammad, who treated the poor for free in Zarqa, Karak, and Amman. One was a member of the Communist Party. No takfiri script has room for them. Neither does the Israeli one.

This builds on a resistance movement that is global. It takes different forms in different countries, from elections to culture to sports. What connects these forms is the universality of justice, as a goal for peoples and for the systems that are supposed to represent them.

If justice is universal, can it stop at the door of a church in Hmoud?

“You cannot evaluate the effectiveness of a programme you run yourself.”

None of this works without accountability. It is the most important element, and it is the next step.

It is not only the perpetrators who need to be held accountable. It is the systems that produced them. Every touchpoint they had with those systems needs to be examined. One attacker had already passed through the system once: convicted, sentenced, and released. His record includes what is termed the “rehabilitation” programme, if he was ever part of it. You cannot evaluate the effectiveness of a programme you run yourself.

For policymakers, this means three things. First, an independent review of every touchpoint the attackers had with the state, before and after conviction. Second, an independent evaluation of “rehabilitation” and PVE efforts, including the religious paradigm they run on. The test is not whether they produce acceptance of the state as legitimate. It is whether they produce citizens. Third, accountability inside the system that sits at the intersection of religion, identity, and security. Anyone in it who does not see that this attack strikes at the core of the Hashemite legacy, and act on it, is detrimental to it.

“What if the attack had been on a party in West Amman?”

One last question. What if the attack had been on a party in West Amman? Would we have grieved together? Or would some have explained it as a “moral” consequence? And does the system have a language to refuse that explanation, one that does not first ask what th