12-Nov-19: On Jordan, the US and the children killed in a pizzeria

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Nine days ago, the US State Department made an announcement that has a significant impact on our ongoing efforts to have our child's killer brought to justice in the United States.

We wrote about it here: "03-Nov-19: In Washington, a step towards bringing the Sbarro bomber to justice".

Shortly afterwards, the Washington editor at Haaretz, Amir Tibon, did what we think is a fine job of giving the State Department statement some context. It appeared online (text below) on November 3, and in the paper edition. (Click for the PDF)

U.S. Rejects Jordan's Refusal to Extradite Hamas Terrorist Wanted for Trial

Development could lead to further American pressure on Amman to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who played a major role in organizing the Sbarro attack in Jerusalem in 2001

Haaretz - Amir Tibon, Washington, DC | November 7, 2019

WASHINGTON — The White House is rejecting claims by its Middle Eastern ally Jordan that a Palestinian-Jordanian terrorist who was involved in the murder of U.S. citizens cannot be extradited to face trial in the United States.

A new report published this week by the State Department says explicitly that the U.S. considers its extradition treaty with Jordan to be valid, despite a Jordanian court ruling from 2017 that said the opposite.

This development could lead to further American pressure on Jordan to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who played a major role in organizing the “Sbarro attack” in Jerusalem in August 2001, a suicide bombing which led to the deaths of 15 people, including two American citizens.

Tamimi currently lives in Jordan with her family. She was arrested by Israel in September 2001, convicted for her role in the attack in 2003, and sentenced to 16 life terms in prison; however, in 2011 she was released from prison as part of the “Shalit deal,” in which Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in return for the release of one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from captivity in Gaza.

After her release Tamimi moved to Jordan, where she was born and where most of her family currently resides. Ever since 2012, she has been living and working in Amman. Over the years, she has given many interviews, made public speeches, and has also hosted her own television show on a network affiliated with Hamas.

Ever since Tamimi’s release from prison, families who lost their loved ones in the Sbarro attack have been fighting to bring her to justice in the United States, where the justice system is obliged by law to pursue terrorists who killed American citizens abroad. Tamimi also appears on FBI’s most wanted terrorists list.

In 2017, progress was made toward bringing her to stand trial in the U.S., when the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled terror charges against her. Just days after that happened, however, Jordan’s highest court ruled that Jordanian law prohibited her extradition to the United States.

Jordan has since claimed that Tamimi cannot be extradited and that the extradition agreement that the Kingdom had signed with the U.S. in 1995 was invalid. No progress on her extradition has been made since.

Two months ago, Haaretz reported that two senior members of Congress were pressing the Trump administration to act on the subject. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the committee’s ranking member, sent a joint letter to the Department of Justice, seeking answers on the subject.

The two lawmakers noted in their letter that despite previous indications that legal action against Tamimi would move forward in the United States, no progress has been made for the past two years. The main obstacle, they wrote, has been the Jordanian government’s refusal to cooperate with U.S. authorities in bringing her to trial, based on a false claim that Jordan was unable to do anything to comply with U.S. authorities on this subject.

Nadler and Collins asked the department to provide “information regarding the current status” of the efforts to “overcome these objections.”

This week, for the first time since the Jordanian court ruling two years ago, the U.S. government officially stated that it rejects Jordan’s position on the subject.

This new development appeared in the department’s annual report on terrorism around the world. While it praised Jordan and its security forces for their actions against terror organizations, it also mentioned the country's harboring of Tamimi.

“A U.S. criminal complaint was unsealed in 2017 charging Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, a Jordanian national in her mid-30s, with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against U.S. nationals outside the United States resulting in death,” the report states.

The report further notes that “in 2018, Jordan continued to cite a court ruling that its constitution forbids the extradition of Jordanian nationals. The United States regards the extradition treaty as valid.”

Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki, 15, was one of the U.S. citizens murdered in the Sbarro attack, told Haaretz that “what has just happened at the State Department is a welcome step in the direction of overdue justice. It will reverberate, though we realize many steps still lie ahead before we see Malki's killer in chains and handcuffs.”

Roth added, however, that he and his wife, who is also a U.S. citizen, have “knocked on a long list of U.S. government doors since Jordan's highest court blocked American efforts to bring Ahlam Tamimi to trial in Washington.

He said that "Being ignored by senior public figures, members of Congress, their staffers, officials, diplomats - that's been startling for us. We've learned it's easier for them to pretend we're not there, to just not take our calls, to leave our emails unanswered. Who wants to bump heads with the bereaved parents of a murdered child?”

Roth explained that since the Department of Justice has pursued the criminal complaint against Tamimi, the biggest question was how the U.S. could get Jordan to extradite her, despite the Hashemite Kingdom’s refusal to do so thus far.

“My impression is that the Justice Department made an important step in 2017 by deciding to prosecute Tamimi and committing to bring her to trial in the U.S., but they have reached the limit of their jurisdiction,” Roth said in a phone call from Jerusalem, adding that the State Department’s handling of the case has been disappointing and frustrating for the most part.

“In the past few weeks and for the first time, a senior U.S. government figure has entered the picture and indicated to my wife and me that there are quiet moves to press Jordan to comply with the extradition treaty,” Roth said. “Though the years of inaction have been hugely frustrating, it has been good to hear they do indeed want to see Tamimi brought to trial in Washington. They say it’s a matter of how and when.”

Roth noted that Jordan’s King Abdullah regularly visits Washington and meets with senior U.S. officials, and that the Tamimi case has never been publicly raised in the context of those meetings. Just in recent months, the King had met with senior Trump administration officials while visiting the U.S. in September, and then hosted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when she visited Amman two weeks ago.

“Our family is completely not political,. We are not asking for anything except to see this person, who participated in the murder of our daughter, stand trial,” Roth said. “For us this is not about politics, it’s about justice.”

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No mainstream newspaper anywhere has taken up the Haaretz article or the development that it reports. Not even the Hebrew edition of Haaretz.

But starting this past weekend, there has been a wave of responses in the Arabic media. We have seen dozens of them already, all taking an essentially identical line.

That's reflected in the article we reproduce below, from an Arab source but in English.

MP calls for Jordan not to extradite freed Palestinian prisoner to US

Middle East  Monitor - November 11, 2019

Yahya Al-Saud, Jordanian MP and chairman of Palestine Committee in Jordanian Parliament, has called for Amman not to accept a US request to extradite freed female Palestinian prisoner Ahlam Al-Tamimi, Al-Resalah newspaper reported yesterday .

This call came in the wake of reports about tension between the US administration and Amman over the latter’s rejection of requests to extradite Al-Tamimi, who holds a Jordanian passport.

“The Jordanian government must protect its citizens and America cannot take on the role of international police officer,” Al-Saud said. “[America] has to take the side of the peace camp, not oppression camp,” he added.

“I think that I am representing the view of the Jordanian public in saying that the US is a partner in the occupation [of Palestine] through several measures it has taken in this regard.”

Al-Saud added: “Ahlam was sentenced and released. It is not acceptable to be sentenced twice. However, she did not commit a crime, but defended her country.”

In March 2017, the Jordanian Court of Cassation upheld a ruling of a lower court that Amman must not extradite Ahlam to the US as she is a Jordanian citizen.

Al-Tamimi was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces in 2001, sentenced and spent ten years in jail before she was released to Jordan in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap reached between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.

In 2017 she was included in the FBI’s most wanted list.

(For the record, Middle East Monitor routinely comes in for bitter criticism from well-informed observers (quoted in Wikipedia) who see it as "strongly pro-Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Hamas', a "conspiracy theory-peddling anti-Israel organisation" and "antisemitic".)

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We have not yet seen a single published comment or report in the Arabic language - not from a Jordanian source, not from any other part of the Arab world - responding to these developments by calling for Jordan to comply with its treaty obligations to its extremely generous foreign aid provider and critically important strategic partner, the US.

We find no Arab call demanding that this moral stain besmirching Jordan's place in the international community be removed. No expression of embarrassment by Jordanian thought leaders distancing themselves from the disgraceful enthusiasm for a self-avowed killer of Jewish children who has lived the live of a celebrity in the Hashemite Kingdom since returning to live there and raise her family, starting in 2011.

The massacre at central Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria took the lives of fifteen people, eight of them children including our Malki. A sixteenth victim, a young mother who was there with her two year old child, has remained in a vegetative state in all the years since then.

The government of Jordan in its customary fashion has stayed stoney silent about what the US has now said publicly about the treaty that Jordan disavows (i.e. that the US regards it as perfectly valid and enforceable). Jordan remains utterly silent as well about the appalling views expressed in its parliament about Tamimi and the US request to extradite her.

Jordan's years'-long public silence on every aspect of its illicit sheltering of confessed bomber and FBI Most Wanted Terrorist Ahlam Tamimi stands in shabby contrast to its many bold, principled and public declarations about its determination to fight terrorism. 

For instance, this news report below from a September 2019 oration by King Abdullah II. Notice its odd but characteristic use of the word "holistic" (see "03-Dec-17: Understanding Jordan's king and his "holistic" approach to terror"). 

"...Jordan launched the Aqaba Process in 2015. Our initiatives have aimed at building a strong global platform, enabling multiple stakeholders to share expertise and focus resources in the fight against terror," the King said. The holistic approach is a major feature of the Aqaba Process and the partnerships that it led to, His Majesty added. "It goes beyond security cooperation, to recognise the wide range of relevant efforts: law enforcement; education; inclusive, sustainable development, that gives people especially young people opportunity and hope; and conflict resolution, to achieve peaceful political solutions to the crises that terrorists exploit," the King said. His Majesty called for countering the extremist narrative, on-line and off-line. "This means fighting the ideological battle on behalf of core values humanity depends on: mutual respect, understanding, and coexistence," the King added. His Majesty urged more leaders to engage in this process. Speakers at the high-level meeting commended Jordan’s efforts in launching the Aqaba Process to bring stakeholders together with the goal of countering terrorism within a holistic approach. [From a Jordanian Foreign Ministry report on Leaders Dialogue: Strategic Responses to Terrorist and Violent Extremist Narratives (Source).]

Coming from the autocrat who keeps our child's killer, who confesses for the record to the bombing, safe and out of the clutches of the US Justice Department, the FBI and the Federal courts of the United States, the hypocrisy and sheer dishonesty on display here is disturbing.