21-Aug-18: A global day of tribute to terror victims? Yes, we were a bit surprised too.

Image Source: The UN

A media release from the United Nations explains that it has decided that today, August 21, 2018, should be known as the International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism.

Unless you're a diplomat accredited to the UN in New York City or one of the speakers in the multimedia presentation that is at the heart of the commemoration, you might not know.

We're not in those categories. So we knew nothing about the whole thing till we stumbled across a link this morning.

The goal, as explained by the UN Secretary General, is uplifting:

For the first time, we have gathered in one place the testimonials of individuals whose lives have been affected by terrorism, to hear first‑hand how this has impacted their lives, and what they have achieved.  I applaud the courage and resilience of everyone represented here.  I thank those who are with us here today and who are willing to speak out against terrorism, and I thank the thousands of others who stand up and speak out every day, everywhere. We are here for you and we are listening to you. Your voices matter.  Your courage in the face of adversity is a lesson inspiring us all. Commemorating the forthcoming International Day of Remembrance, and of Tribute to, the Victims of Terrorism on 21 August is an opportunity to recognize, honour and support victims and survivors, and to lift up the voices of those left behind. The United Nations stands in solidarity with you.

How to say this politely? As terror victims, the parents of a child murdered by an Islamist terrorist in the service of Hamas, our experience hasn't brought us to feel that the UN - or really anyone else in the world of major organizations - stands in solidarity with us.

Actually, quite the opposite. We're working hard to get the mastermind of the terror attack that took our Malki's life to be extradited from her cosy, well-funded comfortable life as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's leading celebrity jihadist and brought to a federal court-house in the United States. So far, that process has been moving slowly as readers of our blog probably know.

We have not viewed it and don't know yet whether it's accessible online. But the multimedia presentation described in the UN's promotional materials reminds us of an opportunity we were given a few years ago to testify about what being victims of terror does to a person.

Arnold Roth was a guest of a European association of terror victims which undertook a project to record the experiences and thoughts of a couple of dozen assorted terror victims with very different outlooks. The film-making took place in Madrid, Spain, in March 2014. The timing coincided with major Spanish events commemorating what they call 11-M, referring to the events of March 11, 2004 when the catastrophic Islamist terror attack on Madrid's trains took place [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"].

It wasn't, and still isn't, entirely clear what the eventual goal of the project was. It does appear that demonstrating 'resilience' against 'radicalisation' was involved. In some respects, it might still be a work in progress.

The 2014 project's English language portal is here, under the title "The Voices of the Survivors Against Radicalisation". (There's a fine summary video here.) As far as we know, not much marketing effort (and we're trying not to sound unkind to the good people involved in its making) was ever devoted to creating serious awareness. Or else we just missed it.

Since video presentations about being victims of terror are getting attention in New York City today, here in the clip below is what that project of four years ago did with Arnold Roth's testimony. It seems it was posted to YouTube about a year ago.



All the videos in that 2014 set were translated into a variety of languages. Not all the speakers spoke in English (most probably did not) and the intended audiences can choose from among Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, German and Italian sub-titled versions. Not a small undertaking.

While Arnold is comfortable speaking in public, and had a good idea of the points he wanted to convey - especially about how poorly terrorism is understand by commentators and politicians, and the sometimes disastrous ways terrorists are treated - the video doesn't quite deliver what he had in mind.

Once we saw the final product, we realized his aims were probably not a terrific match for what the sponsors of the project sought to achieve. For instance, he explicitly mentioned Hamas and Ahlam Tamimi - who plotted the assault on the Sbarro pizzeria - at several junctures for the obvious reason that they are central to the difficult times we have endured and they continue to play an embittering role in our lives today.

Those parts of the interview, however, did not survive the editing suite. This probably explains the slightly choppy nature of the final product and its abrupt changes of tone and subject matter.

If this momentous day, and the things it seeks to remember and to pay tribute to, got some attention where you live via the media or in other ways, we would be glad to hear about it.

07-Mar-16: In the UK, the jihadist threat now has Scotland Yard's full attention

Ms Dare's older son, aged 4 [Image Source]

The child in the image on the right is four years old. Speaking with a British accent and dressed in military fatigues, he is the central figure in a ten-minute-long ISIS propaganda video that got considerable media coverage in January 2016.

Without exaggerating, it's a hideous production. The little boy points off in the distance and says, “We will kill kuffar [infidels] over there.” Before it's over, the clip shows five shackled men dressed in orange boilersuits who are said to have “confessed” to spying for the UK. They are then killed.

The boy is the son of a notorious Islamist zealot, Khadijah (nee Grace) Dare, the daughter of a Christian family from Nigeria who raised her in Lewisham, UK. Despite her good Catholic school education, she transplanted herself to the killing-fields of Syria in 2012 in order to marry a Swede with the adopted nom-de-guerre Abu Bakr and who is now thought to be dead. Mrs Dare-Bakr "used social media to gloat about the beheading of the American journalist James Foley and said she wanted to be the first British woman to kill" a hostage, evidently by removing his head. A serious-minded person, she "missed junk food and Chinese takeaways, but said she would never return home" [Telegraph UK, January 4, 2016].

As well as the little boy in the photo above, she has a second son who is younger still. It's not clear when he will be pressed into serving the Islamist cause, but the path ahead of him seems to be clear.

How serious is the existential threat posed by the unchecked spread of ideological terrorism? We think the answer is "very" and have been saying so for 14 years. The masthead of this blog includes some language intended to express that deep concern.

Not everyone agrees with us. 

Madrid, March 11, 2004 [Image Source]

In the next few days. Spain will mark the anniversary of 11-M, the name they give to the March 11, 2004 jihadist massacre at Madrid's Atocha central train station [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"]. 

In the dozen years since it happened, the atrocity has been the subject of a kind of partisan tug-of-war over how it ought to be understood. 

Compare, for instance, an article in The Guardian ["The worst Islamist attack in European history", October 31, 2007], with Wikipedia's survey of the Spanish voices - notably including El Mundo and La Razon newspapers - that claim it was not the Islamists at all but a consortium of other malevolents, among them the police and the Basque separatists of ETA.

For some people, warnings about how badly the battle against the terrorists is going are treated as noise and dismissed as causing more confusion than clarification. Some others pay lip-service (this includes public figures from among the many we have personally encountered) but their actions show they are not convinced and don't regard the dangers as serious or the warnings actionable.

Today, the "UK's national head of counter- terrorism" gave a media briefing from which we have extracted some bullet pointed quotes below. His views are being translated into action, and though we are not close enough to the UK to appreciate how seriously this is being taken by the wider public, his views seem to be mainstream.

Mark Rowley has been the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations in the Metropolitan Police Service for the past four and a half years. That's the body that, with its tens of thousands of employed officers, police staff, Community Support Officers and volunteer police, provides greater London with policing services. When people speak of Scotland Yard, they mean the MPS. The Guardian calls Rowley the policeman who "leads on counter-terrorism for Scotland Yard".

[Image Source]

Some of what he said today:

• The nature of the threat from ISIS is changing. "Going from [a] narrow focus on police and military as symbols of the state to something much broader. And you see a terrorist group which has big ambitions for enormous and spectacular attacks, not just the types that we've seen foiled to date..." [Telegraph UK, today]
• Where, in the recent past, ISIS was thought to be trying to incite small-scale attacks by individuals, using knives or vehicles, their goals seem much broader now, In the wake of the Friday 13th massacre in Paris during November, Rowley and other counter-terrorism chiefs believe ISIS has "the capability and intent to stage a mass-casualty attack in the west".
• Rowley said ISIS "is trying to get supporters who have received military training in Syria into northern Europe to stage attacks". What sort of alarm bells ought this insight to be ringing in those European countries currently swamped with waves - hundreds of thousands - of newly-arrived and still-arriving "refugees" said to be fleeing the blood-letting in Syria?
• Abdelhamid Abaaoud, regarded as the ringleader of the Paris terrorism attacks [we have some interesting things to say about him here], is now known to have visited Birmingham and London during 2015. "Found on his phone were pictures taken during his visit to fellow jihadis. Rowley declined to comment on this." [The Guardian, today]
• ISIS recruiters are increasingly targeting (a) people with mental illnesses (b) women and (c) teenagers, and they are successfully drawing them in. In terms of 2015 arrests under counter-terrorism laws in the UK, 77% were British nationals, 14% were female and 13% were 20 or younger. The Guardian quotes him saying "Over half of those arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences ended up being charged with a terrorism offence."
• Dozens of children were “safeguarded” (a police expression) during 2015. These interventions arose because their parents tried to take them to Syria or Iraq, or because of suspicions that they were being radicalised.
• The overall view taken by the authorities is that the terrorists still want to kill soldiers or the police but are increasingly focused on "attacking western lifestyle targets".
• About those re-education and community-based efforts to intercept would-be jihadists before they get completely weaponized, this sobering comment from The Guardian: "Privately, counter-terrorism officials see no sign of ISIS’s internet propaganda campaign being thwarted by community and government efforts and believe the group still has the same ability to attract devotees."

If the police analysis is even half right, there's good reason for the UK's citizens to be seriously agitated.

8-May-14: Madrid moments

Two bereaved fathers with more
in common than the differing backgrounds might have
suggested: Michael Gallagher and Arnold Roth
at the Madrid photo exhibition

I visited Madrid for the first time (writes Arnold Roth) ten years ago. I was invited to go there as one of a small delegation of Israelis participating in a conference of terror victims, the first international gathering of its kind. In many ways, it was an extraordinary experience, mostly positive.

Three weeks later, on March 11, 2004 and after I was back home, Spain was shocked to discover that its terrorism problem involved more than just a decades-long conflict with its Basques, and that the curse of jihadism and of Islamist terror had other countries on its agenda beyond the US and Israel.

I have been invited back there several times since as an invited speaker addressing issues of terrorism. It's not surprising to me that Spanish audiences have real interest in the subject. But the political antipathy of large parts of Spanish society to Israel - among the worst in Europe - has remained a puzzle to me. Israel and Spain first established diplomatic ties in 1986. That's when Spain finally recognized an independent state of Israel (independent in fact since 1948).

Relations since then have been proper but (as far as I can tell) not especially warm. Israelis have noted how, in Pew Research Center’s 2008 Global Attitudes Project, an astounding 46% of Spaniards were found to hold an unfavorable view of Jews. (In 2005, it had been 21%.) Spain's Jewish community numbers about 12,000 making it roughly 0.03% of the Spanish total. Notwithstanding the microscopic presence, it's said to be the European nation with the poorest view of Jews.

Memorial mass: view of the cathedral entrance from the far side of the street

Two months ago, Spain observed the tenth anniversary of the Madrid train bombings. The European Union sponsored a project in which a dozen or so terror victims from Spain and beyond came to Madrid for the commemoration and to speak to the cameras about how they have dealt with life in the wake of their personal encounters with terror. I was invited to be one of the interviewees, and I traveled back to Madrid.

For me, Madrid is the most spectacularly beautiful city in Europe. My encounters with Spaniards, with some small exceptions (political figures, mostly), have been warm and rewarding.

But this time there were some mildly discordant notes too. A very moving photographic exhibition - to the opening of which our group was invited - sympathetically depicted victims of terror from many parts of the world - with one obvious exception which readers of this post will need no help in identifying. And at the Atocha railway station where a striking memorial to the 191 people killed, and the 1,800 injured in the terrorist bombing, incorporates hundreds of messages of support, solidarity and condolence in a large number of languages including Arabic, one particular language is not in evidence. No prizes for guessing which.

On the morning of March 11, the date Spaniards now call 11M, the anniversary of the train massacre was marked with a Mass in the Almudena cathedral next to the royal palace. I chose to remain outside on the street and watched as a small handful of protesters, placards at the ready, gathered on the boulevard under the watchful gaze of the police, while a stream of VIPs including the royal family arrived and eventually left the magnificent church.

Onlookers and protesters outside the 11M memorial
religious service

I overheard one of the protesters, standing right in front of me, being asked by an English-speaking tourist to explain what brought them there.

Two things, it turns out. One, they were offended by the fact that Spain's official religious commemoration of the jihadist attack had an entirely Catholic character, when it ought to have been more respectful of certain other religions.

And two: the evidence is that it was not the Islamists, as the government claims, but NATO that was the true culprit. He launched into a multi-point rationalization with some of the usual depressingly-familiar components of 21st century conspiracy theories.

At about that moment, a passing Spaniard gave me a close look and stopped right next to me. Here's trouble, I thought to myself. He spoke: Shalom, he said. Then said it again: Shalom. Instinctively, I responded in Hebrew but quickly saw that "shalom" was the only Hebrew he knew. He had evidently noticed the kippa on my head  as he walked by and wanted to share with me the one aspect of Jewish culture that he could summon up on a moment's notice. We ended up smiling pleasantly and a little stupidly at each other and then he went on his way.

The following evening, a Spanish friend who is a prominent lawyer in Madrid invited me out for drinks just before I had to leave to catch a midnight flight back to Tel Aviv. He chose a stunningly elegant venue for our conversation, the Villa Magna Hotel, across the street from the far more modest (but very adequate) hotel where we terror victims were accommodated.

Ricardo and I were deep in conversation in the gorgeous cocktail lounge when I became slowly aware of something that seemed somehow out of place. It took me some moments to figure out what. The piano in the background - the pianist was playing... Hatikva. I didn't recognize it immediately because he was interpreting it in dramatic fashion.

But that's what it was, and I asked my friend to pause while we both paid closer attention to the delightful music. Then the pianist, seated some way off at his grand piano, gave a small smile of acknowledgment and switched gear - playing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav. There was no sign among the business people in the vast lounge that anyone else was aware of the significance of either piece of music.

When it became possible to do so, I got up and walked over to the piano and thanked the young pianist. We exchanged business cards. His opening words in our brief conversation were "I love Israel" followed by a few seconds of explaining that after centuries of turbulent history many Spaniards have Jewish blood running through their veins and they know it. Then he moved on to his next piece and I returned to my host.

Members of the terror victims group in the Atocha
train station experience the "cylinder of light"
memorial to the victims of the March 11, 2004 Islamist atrocity

This week on Israel's Independence Day I received an email from the Spanish pianist, David Marín Ariza.

I have to say I am so sorry about that terror atact. I feel so closed to Israel in its fight against terror. My father is Guardia Civil (police man) in Spain, and we were always object of terrorists, we had just luck. I was as well born in 1985, and I am a musician, like Malki. I feld so sad while I was reading her story. I think there will be never enough tribute to victims of terror, they and their families are the most important value in open and free sociaties, they are, as well with our police and army, our heroes. It is what I think, and the reason because I tried always to go to demostrations of terror victims in Madrid, against negotiation with terrorist. I am no great pianist, but if you need some day one, for beneficial concert or whatever here in Spain, let me know. Here [click] is a version fo mine of Hatikvah, in a concert wich I played in Madrid one month ago. (The quality of the video is not very good)... Excuse my English, please... I am actually musicologist but I have worked as pianist at Villa Magna since I finished my studies. I would like to work actually as composer for video, films, etc, and music manager. But there are not many possibilities right now in Spain. So I want to go to the Unated [presumably means the United States] to practish English, look for a job and perhaps study music (film, management...) Do you live in Israel? I was there once, and loved it. I want to visit it again. I wished could soon.

Click below for his YouTube rendition of Hatikva. It's unfortunately captured in a rather ordinary cell-phone video but it conveys a taste of the music behind it. And if readers have some constructive ideas that might help David advance in his career, please drop us a line.

The human, individual response to terrorism always seems to me to be more interesting, more nuanced, more humane and generally more constructive than government statements and political declarations.