By RANA F. SWEIS FEB. 15, 2015

AMMAN, Jordan — The deputy head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan was sentenced on Sunday to 18 months in prison for criticizing the United Arab Emirates in a Facebook post.

The state security court, a special body that has jurisdiction over Jordan’s internal and external threats, found the Brotherhood leader, Zaki Bani Rushaid, guilty of “acts harmful to the country’s relations with a friendly nation.”

On his personal Facebook page, Mr. Bani Rushaid wrote on Nov. 17 that the Emirates, an important ally of Jordan and one of several countries in the region, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that have engaged in a campaign to wipe out the Brotherhood, plays the role of the “American cop in the region, supports coups and is a cancer in the body of the Arab world.”

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan condemned the verdict in a statement released on Sunday. The arrest of Mr. Bani Rushaid, under a recently strengthened antiterrorism law, was “politically motivated and demonstrates a deliberate escalation by the state against the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan,” the statement said. “It is a blow to freedom of speech and the rights of citizens.”

Standing inside a black cage in the courtroom, Mr. Bani Rushaid reacted stoically to the verdict. His lawyer, Saleh Armouti, looked at his client and said, “May God bring you no harm.” Mr. Armouti added that he planned to appeal. Mr. Bani Rushaid has been detained since November, and the time he has served will be deducted from his sentence.

“This is a shame, a shame,” shouted a small crowd outside the court after hearing the verdict. Some held posters of Mr. Bani Rushaid. Mr. Armouti angrily pointed his finger in the air and, referring to King Abdullah II of Jordan, said: “Where is justice, your majesty? This is death for freedom of expression. The government is to blame. Where is the government?”

Ali Abul Sukkar, a Brotherhood member who was among the protesters, said, “This court is a military court for the most heinous crimes against the country, not for a well-known figure who expresses an opinion on Facebook.”

“There is no logical and just decision to this,” he added. “It is purely political.”

It was the first arrest and conviction of an opposition leader in recent years, although a Brotherhood member, Mohammad Said Bakr, was taken into custody in September and given a six-month sentence after he harshly criticized the Jordanian authorities for what he suggested was a tepid response to the Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip last summer.

The Muslim Brotherhood is Jordan’s main opposition party, but unlike Egypt, Jordan has long tolerated the organization’s presence. In recent months, the Brotherhood movement here has had its own internal disputes, chiefly between the moderate and conservative factions. The movement’s more liberal wing has called for internal reform and changes in policies.

The movement is known for its passionate advocacy of diminishing the relatively unchecked power of the king. Yet it has never called for the overthrow of the monarchy, even during the headiest days of the Arab Spring.

After Mr. Bani Rushaid’s arrest, the government noted the importance of the country’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, where about 250,000 Jordanians work and which have provided considerable financial aid to Jordan. The Emirates have also used Jordan as a base to conduct airstrikes against the Islamic State.

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By RANA F. SWEIS FEB. 13, 2015

AMMAN, Jordan — Whether three young students were shot and killed in North Carolina this week in a parking dispute or, as their families believe, because they were Muslims, online commentators here and outside the Middle East say the victims’ religion makes it a hate crime.

Failing to treat it as such, the commentators say on social media, indicates that Americans and the Western news media just do not understand the region.

Even before learning that two of the three victims — Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19 — were Jordanian citizens, their compatriots on social media called for wider coverage of the killings.

The shooting occurred Tuesday afternoon in Chapel Hill, N.C., but most news media outlets in the United States and abroad did not report on it until later the next day. This led some on social networks to suggest that the news media was slow to cover the story because the victims were Muslims.

Jordanians on social media added that the reluctance to report the story as a hate crime was evidence of Western bias.

The front page Friday of Al Ghad, an independent daily newspaper, read: “Two Jordanians victims of hate crime in the U.S.”

The police initially described the shooting as stemming from a parking dispute with a white middle-aged neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, who later turned himself in and was charged in the killings. Late on Thursday, the F.B.I. said it would look into whether the shooting was a hate crime.

Still, Mahmoud Shabeeb expressed his outrage on Twitter at what he perceived to be inconsistent standards when either the suspects or the victims of a crime were Muslim.

The satirical Jordanian website Kharabeesh posted angry expressions from across the Arab world, and included a translation of a Twitter message by the CNN political commentator Sally Kohn with a hashtag, in Arabic, “#Western_Media_Standards.”

A comment to the post by Kharabeesh alleged “hypocrisy, media that sees with one eye only.”

A cartoonist for Al Ghad, Naser Al-Jafari, posted on Facebook a cartoon of Mr. Hicks, the suspect, standing beside a militant of the Islamic State who is dressed in black with his face covered. It is titled, in English, “The Visible & Invisible Face of Terror.”

Another popular Jordanian cartoonist, Osama Hajjaj, posted on Twitter a menacing depiction of Mr. Hicks in the colors of the American flag — red hair and ears, white eyes and a blue nose. His black beard and mouth resemble an Islamic State militant dressed in black. Many social media posts attempted to liken Mr. Hicks, 46, a former auto parts dealer who had been studying to become a paralegal, with Islamic extremists accused of killing Americans.

Dr. Mohammad Yousif Abu-Salha, the father of the two slain women, also questioned the attention his daughter's killing had received in comparison with crimes committed by Muslims.

“If a Muslim commits a crime, it’s on the news 24/7 for two months,” Dr. Abu-Salha, a psychiatrist in Clayton, N.C., told The Associated Press. “When we are executed in numbers, it’s on the news for seconds.”

On Friday, Jordan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling on all Jordanians in the United States to be cautious and on alert after the shooting.

Queen Rania of Jordan, using the popular hashtag #muslimlivesmatter, sent her condolences to the victims’ families to her 3.6 million followers on Twitter.

And Natasha Tynes, a Jordanian-American media consultant, wrote on Facebook, “I guess there is no ‘Je Suis’ hashtag for the three Muslims gunned down in Chapel Hill,” and wondered if world leaders would march in the streets to condemn the killings as they did after the attacks in Paris on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store last month.

Some Jordanian social media activists have called for a rally in Amman on Saturday, declaring: “Charlie is not more valuable than them.”

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