Friday, August 27, 2021

27-Aug-21: Peace, terror and Jordan's under-reported attachment to anti-Jewish bigotry

Jordan's King Abdullah is received in President Joseph R. Biden's Oval Office, July 19, 2021

We anticipated the fawning reception King Abdullah II of Jordan would receive during his three week tour of the US in July. 

We were ready for the high-intensity five days of meetings he had with President Joseph R. Biden in the Oval Office, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and with a long list of Washington insiders both in the Congress and around it, very few of whom have shown the smallest interest in engaging with us. (Details to follow.)

Everything was more or less predictable,

Less expected and seriously unwelcome was how the Washington media remained, almost entirely without exception, docile to the point of self-parody, lacking all desire to seize on the obvious issues thrown up by the King Abdullah royal tour. 


The issues from which the intrepid reporters shy away as they have for years are dramatic, involving murdered American young women, a killer who boasts of the lives she destroyed, and brazen efforts to evade a long-standing treaty obligation. 

It's startling to us how wide a consensus there appears to be among reporters and their editors in America's news industry that Jordan's role in harboring the admitted bomber of a busy pizzeria filled with children (and targeted for that very reason) is untouchable. 

Turkish news report from 2016
We hoped right to the end that the Ahlam Tamimi case would get some degree of analytical attention in the public parts of July's unusually long and extensively reported Royal Hashemite state visit. But it got approximately none.

Those factors among others are behind an opinion piece Arnold Roth co-wrote with Dr Sharon S. Nazarian of the Anti-Defamation League that is published today on the Forward website ["Jordan has a public antisemitism problem. Why isn’t the U.S. holding them accountable?"].

It's hard for us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) to deny our perspective is subjective and affected by our personal experiences. We are the parents of one of the two American nationals murdered by Jordanian terrorist Ahlam Tamimi in the Sbarro massacre. Starting in 2012, we pressed for the fugitive to be charged under US law. And once that happened, we kept asking the US to explain to Jordan what it needed to do next; to extradite Tamimi to stand trial on those charges in Washington as the 1995 Jordan/US treaty requires.

This process has put us on a steep learning curve. 

Once Jordan - a country of 10 million inhabitants of whom almost none are Jewish - defied the US extradition request ["23-Mar-17: Looking for justice in Jordan, Jerusalem and Washington"], we began being treated to a long line of senior officials in three US administrations - Obama, Trump, Biden - practically falling over themselves to keep the whole mess under wraps. 

No less troubling, a strangely uncurious media failed - and continues to fail - to question what was going on. The failure is on show and damning right up until today. 

Being treated contemptibly by powerful officials, finding that all our questions go unanswered or get mechanical, thoroughly meaningless mantra-like responses has been for us a chilling experience.

Meanwhile we, a bereaved couple armed with few tanks and even fewer battleships, felt we were perceived, and still are, as some kind of hostile force. 

We recognize the principles of realpolitik that underlie the US-Jordan relationship. But what we understand a lot less well is why those charged with pretending they don't exist think that they alone can see the big picture that eludes grieving parents. We tried making that point in July as Jordan's king sailed through Washington's halls of power ["25-Jul-21: What we said in the media about King Abdullah's visit"]

But there's a flip side. The diplomatic seers seem blinded to a companion reality that is all too apparent to us and it's this: Jordan, despite the peace treaty with Israel, remains a hotbed of vicious Jew-hatred.

To be clear: Like most of our neighbors and friends, we want to see good and better relations with Jordan. It's a goal with which we totally identify. But justice is a powerful goal too. And it's clear to us Jordan has for decades been in the grip of a powerful hatred that will define the future unless its leadership takes determined steps to change direction. 

We have searched and we would welcome bring told how wrong we are. But there is simply no evidence that King Abdullah either intends those changes or has ever acknowledged the vast problem exists.

So we will be blunt. The ongoing Tamimi travesty illustrates Jordan's continued commitment to a culture of deep bigotry towards Jews. Its brazen breach of a strategic treaty with its most important ally and supporter is not a special case but an example of a much broader mind-set and systemic policy failure. 

Here are three more.

 Making serious trouble on the Temple Mount

Jordan secretly maintains its own “incitement force” on the Old City of Jerusalem's Temple Mount as part of a kingdom-driven policy of Israel-focused calculated violence and overt trouble-making. This emerges from a research paper published August 6, 2021 by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (known as the BESA Center), a think tank doing policy-relevant research on Middle Eastern and global strategic affairs and based at Israel's Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan. 

In "Jordan’s “Incitement Force” on the Temple Mount", the author, Dr. Edy Cohen, an Israel intelligence service veteran, quotes Jordan's current Minister of Religions revealing that some 850 Jordanians are working at the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on behalf of Jordan’s Ministry of Religion. 

Here's why this is startling. Jordan is an economic basket case that is the world's third-largest recipient of US foreign aid amounting to billions of dollars in US tax-payer-funded contributions each year. Yet it manages to find some NIS 56 million (roughly US $17.5 million) annually to keep this ugly strategy going, according to the BESA analysis. 

What underpins this madness is the little-publicized rivalry between Hashemite Jordan and Saudi Arabia which rules the desert kingdom from which the Hashemites were forced to flee a century ago. The Saudi/Jordanian rivalry centers on Jerusalem's sacred Islamic sites as a kind of counter-balance to the control the hold the Saudis have over Mecca and Medina as their 'guardians'. 

Jordan is known to fear moves that might end its term as guardian of the Jerusalem sites. The kingdom's minister of religion, Dr. Muhammad Khalaila, told a parliamentary committee that those 850 workers are registered as employees of Jordan's Ministry of Religion. Dr Cohen notes that this strikes an odd note for people tuned in to events in the Old City: 

"As anyone visiting the mosque can attest, no more than a few dozen Jordanian Waqf security guards are visible—not hundreds, and certainly nowhere near 850. So who are the others, where are they, and what are they doing? The most likely hypothesis is that those workers are used as mercenaries of a sort in times of crisis. Many significant gatherings have sprung up almost instantly on the Temple Mount in recent years whenever the site deteriorated into violence—during the recent Gaza war, during the magnetometer riots (July 2017), during the Mercy Gate crisis (March 2019), and in many other violent outbursts. The Jordanian workers might serve as a “rapid incitement force” that increases the volume of the event, stirs up the crowd, and stimulates it to conduct riots, or joins with the crowd to create a sense of “togetherness” against the “occupation.” If each of those Jordanians brings along one or two young men, in a short time thousands of rioters can be expected. This allows the organizers of the riots to put tremendous pressure on the Israeli authorities and render it difficult for them to calm the situation. The road from there to surrender is short."

Given the current fog of confusion and doubt that characterizes Israel's Jordan relations, the worrying questions these revelations throw up are unlikely to get any useful answers.

 Antisemitism in Jordanian Textbooks?

A carefully-argued report by the Anti Defamation League published four months ago (and almost totally ignored by the media) says that an ADL review of Jordanian middle school and high school textbooks finds the kingdom's textbooks fuel and foster antisemitism. Those books are official parts of today's educational curriculum.

The report's author, David Andrew Weinberg, ADL’s Washington Director for International Affairs, focuses his research and writing on antisemitic incitement in the Middle East. 

Among the messages injected into the minds of Jordanian school-children, he quotes these:

  • "The Israelites who did not believe in Jesus, peace be upon him, wanted to be rid of him and eliminate his call, so they tried to kill him" but because of a divine intervention "they grabbed someone who resembled him from among the people, and they killed and crucified the lookalike..."
  • A textbook that teaches “the historical roots of the Palestinian issue” presents an array of civilizations that inhabited the area but makes no mention of Jews or Israelites until the 19th century, at which point it notes the emergence of “Zionist greed in Palestine,” in league with imperialist powers.  
  • The Zionist movement is defined as “a racist, settler political movement aimed at establishing a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine, founded on historical claims without basis in truth.” 
  • Jewish links to Jerusalem are “founded on historical and religious claims without any actual grounds on which to base them”.
  • Treachery is a characteristic Jewish trait,
  • The deadly riots of 1929 were because of Jewish actions and religious claims. The riots “broke out because of the Zionists’ claim that the Buraq Wall [better known as the Kotel or Western Wall] led to "transgression on the Islamic holy sites, so they [the Arabs] attacked groups of participating Jews at the Buraq Wall”
  • Totally inverting the 1969 attempted arson attack by a mentally-unwell Australia Christian visitor on an Islamic holy site on the Temple Mount, a Jordanian text says "Israelis had the audacity to burn the al-Aqsa Mosque". The unsuccessful arson attack is listed under "Israeli Occupation assaults on the blessed al-Aqsa Mosque". 
  • It teaches that current Israeli archeological sites “seek to link everything discovered to fake Talmudic narratives... to claim that they have extended historical roots in Jerusalem and Palestine” and therefore to “forge historical facts.” 
  • Israeli excavations in Jerusalem "intentionally aim" to harm the Arab economy and to “secure the Jewish settlers who come to Jerusalem to practice their Talmudic rituals.”  
  • Treason and the breaking of pacts are among the characteristics of the Jews and the hypocrites.

There's a special irony in how the breaking of pacts is ascribed to Jews. Since March 2017, it has been Jordan itself ["26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions"] that spins a disingenuous tale about a narrow and highly technical flaw in the way its 1995 extradition treaty with the US. That alleged flaw is the sole basis on which Jordan fails to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who confesses to the the bombing massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria where our daughter's life ended. Jordan argues it isn't a breach at all because the treaty was never ratified, We now hold documentary proof that that this is untrue. 

The US has very quietly continued since 2017 to say the treaty is valid and in force. Throughout the years since then, it has incomprehensibly failed to make a single public call for Jordan to honor it.

The author of the ADL report in a summing up that to us sounds remarkably restrained says that

if Jordan keeps publishing official textbooks that demonize Israel, Jews, and Judaism in such a manner, the next generation may be less likely to support this relationship, nor the desirability of peace with Israel more generally. 

 Jordan is a hotbed of seriously antisemitic views. What if anything is its government doing to change that?

Some findings again from the ADL. No one comes close to its statistics-driven insights into the current state of antisemitic sentiment worldwide and the dynamics behind that make it possible. And while it's certainly an issue that deserves careful thought and wide attention, it's the Jordan aspect that we feel the need to highlight here and now.

On a published index they call the ADL GLOBAL 100: AN INDEX OF ANTI-SEMITISM®, the ADL's researchers ascribe a score to most of the world's countries. Their methodology is laid out in clear terms. It's a respected analysis.

Jordan, the last time the study was done there in 2014, weighs in with an index score of 81%. This isn't something to ignore. For comparison purposes, that puts Jordanians - relative to other Muslim and Arab countries - as more antisemitic than Morocco, Qatar, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. 

If you don't find this startling, you might not realize how much support Jordan gets in Washington.

Jordanians as a society are also substantially more antisemitic than the Middle East and North African countries taken as a whole (average index score of 74%). 

And Jordanians are between two and three times more antisemitic than (ranking them in order from most antisemitic to least) Eastern Europe, then Sub-Saharan Africa, then Asia as a whole, then the Americas and finally Oceania.

This blog post isn't meant to encourage hatred or criticism of Jordan or Jordanians. 

Source
But when its ruler spends most of the month of July traveling around the United States, being received with uncommon courtesy and often with striking enthusiasm by political leaders at the very highest level - and certainly including America's Jewish leaders - we wish they would pause before they launch into gushing praise. Something is seriously wrong with the current reality.

They could and should ask the man who owns and runs the Hashemite Kingdom. In our words:

Your Majesty, is this the way to bring peace? When will you acknowledge publicly that the devotion to hatred and violent extremism (by which we of course mean terrorism) among your subjects and institutions at every level of the society over which you preside is an embarrassment and a serious impediment to everything your friends want to help you achieve?

Ahlam Tamimi needs to be extradited now as the treaty made by the father of today's king with his American allies in 1995 demands. 

Changing course, handing her over to US law enforcement without further unconscionable delay, will be one step, but an important one, in the direction of addressing issues that sadly and avoidably push peace further away rather than draw it closer.

27-Aug-21: What we said to Secretary of State Blinken about our child's murder and how he replied

State Department Building via Wikipedia
It has been a miserable experience trying for years to convey serious, passionately-held, respectful views to a whole array of officials and politicians in our own country and beyond it. 

The process, not a political one in our view, has involved calling them to action where that action is to fulfill a duty they clearly would have even if the call had not been made. 

Sure, this shouldn't be a miserable experience. But it most certainly has been and continues to be for us. We and our views have been demeaned and ignored through three US administrations though they are all about the doing of justice, unrelated to advancing a political agenda of any kind, and unmarred by any personal benefit to us.

In political terms, it's an ongoing bi-partisan failure. To be clear as we can - the failure is thoroughly deserved by both major parties. Neither one, and only a small handful of their law-makers, comes out of this with even the smallest amount of honor. 


Right now, our focus is on the US. 

Ahlam Tamimi, 2021: Openly admits she bombed Sbarro
We emailed the letter below to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 15, 2021 with courtesy copies emailed to three of his key advisers. We received two separate acknowledgements from Blinken staffers to say the letter was received. We then responded with several follow-up emails asking that a substantive response be sent to what were clearly substantive comments and requests.

We have gotten none. We think it's time we shared some of the shabby background. 

State Department officials up and down the seniority chain have egregiously ignored us since long-sealed US federal charges were finally unveiled on March 14, 2017 against Ahlam Tamimi (they had been sealed, without our knowledge, since the summer of 2013.)

The Jordanian woman, a prominent Islamist, openly admits she bombed the Sbarro pizzeria causing the deaths of many innocents including our daughter Malki who was 15. Yet Tamimi lives free today in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a US ally that has had an active extradition treaty with the US since the Clinton era.

Jordan began brazenly refusing to honor the treaty six days after the charges were unsealed in Washington. Right up until today, it allows Tamimi to live in the kingdom as a free and unhampered citizen, embraced and honored by Jordanian society and the Arab world's media

This is a disgrace.
Frimet and Arnold Roth 
June 15, 2021

Hon. Anthony J. Blinken 
Secretary of State
Washington, D.C. 20520

Dear Secretary Blinken:

According to recent media reports, King Abdullah II of Jordan is coming to Washington, D.C. at the end of June for high-level meetings. We are writing to urge that Jordan’s harboring of FBI Most Wanted Terrorist, Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, be on the agenda.

More than eight years ago, a federal judge authorized Tamimi’s arrest on federal terrorism charges. Jordan refused U.S. requests to extradite Tamimi, breaching a 1995 bilateral treaty, a matter that was subsequently kept out of State Department briefings, virtually unmentioned in the media and for all practical purposes swept under the rug of the Obama and Trump administrations.

We are in a new era. President Biden has spoken of conducting diplomacy inspired by America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, treating every person with dignity. We are inspired by this very welcome approach.

Our daughter, Malki, a 15 year old U.S. national, was murdered in a mass-casualty terror attack on a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001 that specifically targeted children. Tamimi, as we believe you are aware, boasts of her principal role in the attack. After her release by Israel in an extortionate prisoner exchange in 2011, she received a hero’s welcome in her native Jordan. In March 2017, the U.S. made public its request that Jordan extradite her. Just six days later, Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruled that the 1995 extradition treaty between the U.S. and Jordan is a nullity, applying a juridical veneer to the kingdom’s determination to stand by the fugitive bomber.

Beyond losing Malki, a talented and vivacious teenager deeply immersed in helping others and especially children with disabilities, the curse of our lives is that the admitted murderer is a hero in Jordan where she is seemingly immune from justice. For reasons better understood by politicians than by us, there appears to be support in the State Department and other parts of the U.S. government for the idea that when it comes to Tamimi, Jordan and its ruler must be protected from demands for justice.

This is more than merely a personal nightmare for a pair of grieving parents. With the active connivance of the Hashemite royal palace and the government of one of the U.S.’ most trusted and financially dependent allies, Tamimi remains a lightning rod for hateful, even genocidal, sentiments that fester in Jordan and other parts of the Arab and Muslim world. Her freedom and celebrity validate the notion that if Jordanians will only push back hard enough against U.S. pressure, the legitimacy of extreme violence in the service of the Palestinian Arab cause will prevail.

As much as we have been able, we have reached out to Washington seeking to elicit support and action. The details are rich and dismaying. We get routinely told that people sympathize with us and with Tamimi’s other American victims. High-ranking officials reassure us that efforts – real, serious efforts – are ongoing and that seeing justice done is a major priority. We have heard this for years. But in more candid, moments, we are also told that if Jordan extradites Tamimi, the king will lose his throne, Jordan will fall to unspecified dark forces, and the Middle East will erupt in worse turmoil than there is already.

This cannot be the end of the matter. We have concrete suggestions for pressing Jordan to comply with U.S. law and policy, not to mention fundamental decency:
One: Congress adopted funding cutoffs as potential sanctions directed at Jordan in the 2020 and 2021 appropriations measures. Even as unrealized threats, they garnered serious attention in the Jordanian press and have perhaps had some salutary effect. But there are additional, less draconian steps that can adopted to send the essential message without upsetting strategic interests. We quietly shared several ideas with the previous administration to no obvious avail. We profess no special expertise or monopoly on ideas for finessing this aspect. But we will be pleased to share them with you. 
Two: In terms of how the U.S. responds to Jordan’s position, this cannot be a simple matter of “the court has spoken.” Not until Tamimi had been very briefly taken into custody in Jordan in 2017, some 25 years after the extradition treaty took effect, was its Court of Cassation called upon to find that the treaty is a dead letter on the grounds that its parliament never ratified it. Yet, in its ruling, the court failed to address the documented reality that on at least three earlier occasions Jordan complied with US requests to extradite fugitive Jordanian terrorists.
Three: Jordan explained neither before nor after the 2017 ruling why it has not solved the Tamimi problem by simply having its parliament ratify the treaty with its close ally and far-and-away most important benefactor. This failure is even more striking in view of how Jordan has entered numerous extradition treaties with other countries since 1995, including as recently as last month (Ukraine). If the parliament has not been called to fix the problem yet, that would seem to mean the king does not want the problem fixed. It is time to change that approach.
Four: The Court of Cassation’s 2017 ruling makes no mention of what we know to be true - that Jordan’s revered King Hussein did in fact ratify the treaty in 1995. Jordan formally communicated this to the United States in 1995 and we now possess the actual documents, recently obtained via FOIA. The bitter reality is Jordan abrogates King Hussein’s (literally) sacred pledge to the U.S. to abide by the treaty and pretends not to notice. What message does King Abdullah II’s government send by this? And why has the United States failed to speak out publicly? For their part, the media have failed to investigate or challenge the egregious thwarting of justice. It is time all the secrecy was ended. It is time for King Abdullah to hear the truth.
Our battle to see justice done has played out against a background where values and principles have been overwhelmed by classic realpolitik. We are compelled to ask how it can be that Jordan’s perceived weakness and vulnerability render the U.S. powerless in the face of Jordan's intransigence? Do Jordan’s perceived vulnerabilities truly mean America must stand by as Jordan educates its people to believe the murder of children because they are Jewish – and even if American - is acceptable?

There needs to be a will, and the way will follow. King Abdullah II should be made to understand that. With the greatest of respect and with utmost sincerity, we ask that these matters be raised in the upcoming meetings and pursued vigorously.

Respectfully,
Frimet and Arnold Roth

cc: Hon. Jake Sullivan
Hon. Barbara A. Leaf
Hon. Brett H. McGurk
So to reiterate, none of the recipients have so far seen fit to respond. 

The two brief and formal acknowledgements of receipt - and no one needs to tell us to be grateful for getting those since our emails to politicians mostly get no acknowledgement of receipt at all - came from assistants.

King Abdullah's week in Washington, which started with an official reception in the White House on Monday July 19, 2021, was packed with meetings, discussions, mutual praise. But was the Tamimi-Jordan-extradition-justice issue on the agenda at any of them? 

The answer to that simple question is absurdly complicated and requires an explanation which we are ready to give. 

But here is what the public record shows:
July 20, 2021 
Department Press Briefing – July 20, 2021 [Online here and archived here]
Ned Price, Department Spokesperson

QUESTION: Let me follow on that a little bit real quick. Can I ask you very quickly about Jordan, the meeting with the king this morning and the Secretary? I just want to know if the Tamimi extradition issue came up. As you’re aware, last year the then-ambassador nominee but now the ambassador told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that withholding aid or aid could be used as leverage to secure her extradition to the States to face murder charges.

MR PRICE: Well, I expect we’ll have a readout of the Secretary’s meeting with His Majesty the King later today. When it comes to Ms. al-Tamimi, she is on the FBI’s most wanted list for her role in the 2001 Hamas attack in Jerusalem. We continue to seek her extradition. We’ll continue to work to ensure that she faces justice.

QUESTION: Yeah. Well, did it come up?

MR PRICE: I’m not in a position to speak to the meeting, but we’ll have a readout —

QUESTION: Well, are you – I mean, are you – has this administration yet raised it with – raised the matter with Jordanian authorities, the King or not? Or is this something that would have just come up for the first time today?

MR PRICE: This issue has been raised with our Jordanian partners.
Clear?

We will lay out what we know in a separate blog post that we plan to post in the next few days.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

24-Aug-21: Twenty years after the Sbarro massacre: A Zev Brenner audio interview

Our thanks to Zev Brenner whose popular Talkline radio/audio show has been an influential fixture of Jewish life in the US, and especially the New York area, for decades.

Rabbi Brenner recently hosted Arnold Roth on his August 9, 2021 program to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Sbarro Jerusalem massacre which violently ended our daughter Malki's life

From the promotional notes:
Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was killed in the terrorist bombing of Sbarro Pizza 20 years ago talks about what happened. Mr. Roth is also seeking justice by having Malki's killer extradited from Jordan where she enjoys the good life. Unfortunately he's been stymied by politicians here and in Israel. Click to hear his quest for justice. This podcast is powered by Jewish Podcasts. Start your own podcast today and share your content with the world.

Click to listen to the audo of the Zev Brenner/Arnold Roth interview.

Or hear it via Jewish Podcasts.

Monday, August 23, 2021

23-Aug-21: Turbulent dimensions, years of pushing: Seeking justice with the help of StandWithUs

From an April 2021 Stand With Us announcement headed Bringing Our Child's Murderer To Justice:

In 2001, Malki Roth was murdered in the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem along with 15 other people. Now, Interpol has dropped the international arrest warrant for the mastermind behind this heinous terrorist attack, Ahlam Tamimi. Tamimi, who now lives in Jordan, has shown no remorse for her despicable crimes.

On this week’s episode of StandWithUs TV Live, Malki’s father, Arnold Roth will join us in conversation with Roz Rothstein, StandWithUs Co-founder and CEO, about terrorism, the impact Malki’s tragic death had on his family and the battle to have Tamimi extradited to the US to face charges.

Join us live on Facebook: Sunday, April 11, 11:00AM Pacific time.

Our great and sincere thanks to Roz Rothstein and her indefatigable team of professionals and activists for their many years of fine work.

Here's the video:

Sunday, August 22, 2021

22-Aug-21: Hosted by CAMERA, Arnold Roth explains a fight for justice

Arnold Roth was interviewed six months ago on behalf of Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, better known as CAMERA, by Andrea Levin, its Executive Director and President. 

Andrea writes and lectures widely on media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on public opinion.

This interview, under the title "Terrorism: Seeking justice for its victims" went to air live on February 11, 2021.  


In terms of interviews and media appearances, the past few months - and especially July - have been unusually busy for us. From conversations with supporters and friends, we realize it's hard to keep track of those media appearances, interviews, background reports and so on. 

Many of our most loyal allies haven't seen or aren't even aware of some of the still small but growing volume of media coverage of our campaign for justice.  

So we plan to post here on our blog - in most cases months after their original publication - at least some of those media events. 

Please stand by as we work through the backlog.