“From the Jordan to the Sea of Red, the Hashemite Kingdom must be Dead!”

Anti-Hashemitism is the new thing! (A satire)

For decades, enlightened Western intellectuals have bravely challenged the legitimacy of states created through imperial partition, colonial cartography, externally imposed sovereignty, demographic engineering, and mandate-era political improvisation.

At long last, however, a courageous new generation has decided to apply those principles consistently.

To Jordan. Or, as activists insist on calling it, “the Transjordanian Construct.” Or the Hashemite monstrosity. Or the Hashemite Royal Theft.

Protesters at the University of Guelph, led by the firebrand faculty member Dr. Georgie Braguecia, have declared that although they want Jordan destroyed, they are simply anti-Hashemites, not prejudiced against Jordanians.

Baguerica explained that the Hashemites had no deep roots in Jordan—they were outsiders imposed by Britain, ruling over mostly Bedouin tribes with no prior unified “Jordanian” national identity.

Anti-Hashemite student organizers who insisted on speaking off the record noted that Jordan was a foreign monarchy gifted by imperial fiat, splitting what was supposed to be one territory, displacing local claims, and installing rulers from hundreds of miles away with no democratic consent.

“Death to Jordan!” Screamed University of Guelph sophomores at a recent protest outside the University of Guelph President Van Acker’s office. “Return the land to the Bedouins, give it to Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria! No gifts to royal families!”

Van Acker reportedly put on the now-ubiquitous red headband of the anti-Hashemites, which sent the protestors on their way.

The anti-Hashemite movement, with its now ubiquitous chant, “From the Jordan to the Sea of Red, the Hashemite Kingdom must be dead!” began quietly enough in faculty lounges and post-colonial studies departments, where professors with linen scarves and three-syllable surnames gathered to discuss what Professor Sebastian Wetherby-Fairchild of the University of Guelph described as “the lingering violence of Churchillian desert cartography.”

The movement truly accelerated at the famous January 2026 TED Talk by Wetherby-Fairchild.

“Jordan,” Wetherby-Fairchild explained, “represents one of history’s clearest examples of a manufactured mandate-era geopolitical fiction.”

Wetherby-Fairchild clicked a slide showing Winston Churchill beside a map from 1921.

“There,” he said solemnly. “The original sin.”

Soon, graduate students across North America became electrified by the cause.

Anti-Zionism, many explained, had become “a bit mainstream.”

“Honestly, anti-Zionism is so 2024,” said activist Chloe Rainwater-Bernstein while adjusting her crimson protest headband outside McGill University. “Anti-Transjordanism is intersectionally fresher.”

The headbands quickly became the defining symbol of the movement.

Inspired loosely by traditional Bedouin weaving patterns, the bands featured crimson geometric stitching against a white background, with repeating diamond motifs symbolizing what activists called “pre-colonial desert continuity pathways.” Most were manufactured in Portugal. But Shein had stolen the market by using slave labour in China.

By autumn, entire university encampments had appeared beneath banners reading:

ERASE THE MANDATE.
DECOLONIZE TRANSJORDAN.
NO JUSTICE IN STOLEN OTTOMAN ADMINISTRATIVE REGIONS.

One particularly emotional protester at Columbia explained:

“My great-grandfather once vacationed in Damascus, so this issue affects my family deeply.”

Professor Amelia von Ashbury-Cromwell of the University of Guelph’s Institute for Decolonial Spatial Justice recently spoke before the Iranian-led UN committee on women’s rights and argued that Jordan constituted “a British-sponsored settler-adjacent monarchy superimposed upon organically contiguous regional identities.”

The accelerating movement is now integrated with a Syrian activist collective calling itself “Greater Bilad al-Sham Now,” which argues that northern Jordan has been artificially severed from historic Syrian geography.

An Iraqi movement calling itself Mesopotamia Without Borders declared that eastern Jordan was merely an imperial fiction that disrupted the region's natural unity — a position soon reinforced by the Anti-Hashemite Front of Syria, which, in turn, was condemned by the Syrian Front for Anti-Hashemitism as half-hearted.

Meanwhile, Saudi nationalist influencers insisted the Hashemite monarchy itself was historically external to the territory it governed and represented “colonial dynasty implantation.”

“Israel is obviously a settler colonialist state that needs to be eradicated,” said one protester. “But Israeli colonialism is so lame,” she said.

TikTok videos explaining these theories have accumulated millions of views, especially when paired with melancholic piano music and drone footage of deserts.

Anti-Transjordanism has now become culturally irresistible.

“We acknowledge that this seminar takes place upon historically fragmented Ottoman-adjacent administrative terrain impacted by mandate-era spatial disruption,” was the opening line introduced by the moderator at the movement’s first annual conference to be held at the University/College of Guelph-Humber in Toronto (The U of Guelph Humber recently voluntarily downgraded itself to a college).

The conference was themed “Decolonizing Desert Modernities.”

Featured workshops included:

“Trauma and Cartography.” “Mandate-Era Emotional Harm.” “Beyond Borders: Healing Through Geopolitical Dissolution” and “The illegitimacy of Churchillian gifts!”

Attendance sold out within hours.

One undergraduate activist explained the movement’s philosophy carefully.

“I’m not anti-Jordanian,” she clarified. “I just don’t believe Jordan has a moral right to exist in its current form.”

“Then what should happen to Jordan?” I asked.

“Oh, something peaceful,” she shrugged. “Maybe regional reintegration. Maybe restorative cartographic justice. Maybe ethical border redistribution. Maybe a lot of people just need to move.”

And so the movement marches on triumphantly beneath its crimson woven headbands, denouncing the “mandate-era Hashemite construct” while carefully reminding everyone that they held no animosity whatsoever toward actual Jordanians.

None at all.

They merely believed the country itself should eventually disappear.

A completely different thing.

My humour rating / 17,000