09-Jul-15: When incitement to murder is financed by foreign aid, where will the accounting come from?

Sitting in an Israeli court, the bomb maker who has murdered 66 people
until now says he wants to kill some more. Makes his father
so proud. [Image Source]

Our daughter Malki - graceful, pretty, smiley, a musical prodigy, a social activist on behalf of children with severe disabilities - will never reach her sixteenth birthday.

That privilege was stolen from her (and us) by a gang of Islamist men and women on August 9, 2001. A thunderous, sickening flash of explosives and thousands of flesh-ripping nails destroyed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria and with it the bodies and lives of fifteen innocents, the majority of them children. Malki (whose photo is over there on the right of this page) was one of them. Her best friend, the girl who lived next door and was standing at the counter with her, was another.

The explosive device was concealed inside a guitar case carried on the back of a man. He was a human bomb, brought to the center of our city - Israel's capital, Jerusalem - by the engineer of the massacre ["17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices"]. He is of course dead, but the planner of the massacre is not. She hosts a TV program that is produced in Amman, Jordan, and since 2012 has gone to air on Fridays to an eager global audience of Arabic speakers.

Rejoicing in streets of Lebanon as news of the
massacre in Jerusalem is announced, August 9, 2001 [Image Source]

The man who constructed the diabolical guitar-case bomb, and several others similar to it, has haunted our thoughts through the years since we first learned of his monstrous savagery. Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti with Jordanian citizenship, sits in an Israeli prison cell today, serving 67 life terms to which he was sentenced in a 2004 trial. 

From inside, Barghouti has reminded every possible audience of the bestiality that underpins his murderous nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough, he declares - explicitly. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world, Barghouti notoriously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

The panel of judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. (The only time a death penalty has been carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman in 1962.)

What he did was horrifying. But hardly less horrifying are the reactions of wide parts of Arab society who stood solidly with the killers, rejoicing at the deaths. Major news services carried photos that day of macho men expressing their joy in Arab streets (like the one above). Children were provided with platters of candies to hand out in celebration of the massacre of Jewish youngsters. 

Every last member of that gang of jihadists became a celebrity in the societies in which they live. And the Mahmoud Abbas-controlled Palestinian Authority ("chronically short of funds... perpetually requesting handouts") has been paying the bomb-maker, along with all the others in the gang, a rich salary since at least April 2011 ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"]

Having researched this, we know of not a single article in the Arab language published anywhere in the world that condemns the perpetrators and their act, or bemoans their corrosive impact on Arab and Moslem societies. If anyone among our readers can point us to even a single instance (an offer we have made numerous times already), we would showcase it here and let people know. 

CBS promo for the still-online 60 Minutes platform it gave
our child's killer in 2006. The voice, the pain, the anger of victims 
like us interests them much less [Image Source]

We pointed out eight years ago ["10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti"] that he pleaded guilty to all charges at his trial on 66 counts of terror-inspired murder. He told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible".

Reporter Bob Simon fronted a segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program in 2006 which did much to elevate Barghouti to celebrity-dom outside the Arab world (he was already a global Arab hero).

"I get my best piece, the guitar. I have it, I like it, I respect it... I open it, make a bomb inside it, close it, send it with the guy. And he make the bomb. And it's done." [Abdullah Barghouti boasting on CBS News' 60 Minutes program, April 2006]

We wrote an open letter at the time to his TV network, CBS, in New York (published here) expressing our deep pain and fierce anger in calm and fairly reasonable terms. CBS ignored us.

There is no room for doubt about this: the massacre at Sbarro, along with the untold number of similar acts of murderous barbarism carried out against Israelis and Jews in the past decade and a half in the name of Palestinian Arab 'resistance' have had the widest support right across the Arab world. We offered some evidence here, referring to Barghouti: "1-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?"

We learned of another public display of this today.

The self-styled 'independent' Palestinian Arab news network Ma'an broadcast a television program in June focused on Barghouti. Ma'an TV broadcasts its content live via the web [here] and by satellite throughout the Arabic-speaking world. The tone of this particular Ma'an show is plain from the text, rendered into English by Palestinian Media Watch.

PMW's report begins with this brief introduction:

The independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an, on the TV program In a Prisoner’s Home, interviewed the father of the terrorist in his home. Both the TV host and the father referred to the killer of 67 as a “hero.” Barghouti’s father added he was “proud” of his son, who he sees as a “noble fighter” who acted “generously” for “Palestine.” He encouraged “every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem”:

The convicted, confessed, proud, hungry murderer has a father
with a message [Image Source: Video clip via PMW]

The original Arabic of the interview, as rendered by PMW's translators into English:

• Independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an’s TV host: “We are now in the home of the heroic prisoner Abdallah Barghouti, in the month of the blessed Ramadan.”
• Father of bomb maker Abdallah Barghouti: “Abdallah Barghouti, I am proud of him, because everyone knows of Abdallah Barghouti and what he generously did for Palestine. I am proud of him and I say: Praise Allah who gave me this hero, noble fighter for Palestine and its cause. I say: Praise Allah, Lord of the Universes, Abdallah fought for Palestine and left his family, his father and mother, and left behind three children, two girls and a boy, and sacrificed everything for the Palestinian cause. I ask every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem.”

We feel no need to say anything to the father or to the host. They are what they are. The message they intend to convey via the interview is about as clear as messages get: Barghouti the son murdered dozens of Jews, and Barghouti the father says it's something noble to do the same, again, now. 

Barghouti: Serving 67 life terms in an Israeli
prison. His advocates call him a 'detainee' and want him
freed. The 66 murders? No big deal.

Incitement to murder, and glorification of the killer, rarely come much clearer than this.

Now we have some questions for those who fund Ma'an, an organization entirely dependent on its foreign supporters. They include (according to NGO-Monitor and to the Ma'an website):

• The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
• European Commission Technical Assistance Office (ECTAO) 
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• The Danish Representative Office to the Palestinian Authority (PA) 
• The Netherlands Representative Office to the PA

None of these bodies ever spends private money. In every case, it comes from taxpayers - by far the easiest form of money for ideologically-motivated people to spend (as we have observed here over and again). Our questions:

• Do Danish, Dutch and other European tax-payers know that civil servants funded by them are passing along serious money, millions of Euros and of dollars, also funded by them, to encourage murder? For turning a confessed killer of 67 innocent people into a figure to emulate?
• Does this shock them? 
• Do those civil servants and public officials have anything they would like us - the parents of a victim of the beastial killer at the heart of the interview above - to know about their complicity in Ma'an's incitement to ongoing and new acts of murder? 
• Do they need to know our email address? Here it is. We're waiting.

24-Nov-14: What it takes to be a real man in a society of sociopaths

Courtesy IDF Blog [here]

Fathi Hamad, once the Hamas minister of the interior and a man who has a way with words - ugly words, conveying violent hatred, often directed at putting the lives of children at risk - got a mention in a post we published here earlier today, and not for the first time: click here for other Hamad appearances in our blog.

Just this afternoon, by coincidence, someone over at the IDF Spokesperson's Office gave Hamad the ultimate accolade: a poster of his own, and a quote that reminds people of what a man's man this man is. 

Ah, but this Hamad is so much more than just a pretty face. 

Six years ago, Frimet Roth quoted him in a post ["27-Mar-08: Palestinian infanticide"] on our blog that got a fair amount of attention because of the way Hamad's rant completely upended some outrageously dishonest statements famously made some years earlier by Hanan Ashrawi, the long-time apologist for the now-deceased, corrupt despot, Yasser Arafat. 

Frimet quoted a Hamad speech delivered on February 29, 2008 that had been broadcast on the Hamas Al Aqsa television channel, reaching an exclusively Arabic-speaking audience, unfortunately. MEMRI fixed that; they translated it to English, under the title "We Used Women and Children as Human Shields" and put it where the world could see and pay attention:

"For the Palestinian people", Hamad boasts in Arabic, "death has become an industry at which women excel and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this and so do the mujahideen and the children... This is why they [the Palestinian people] have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine."

Frimet recalled how Ashrawi had appeared on the CBS "Sixty Minutes" program back in October 2000 [transcript here], injecting heat but not so much light into an interview with the show's Bob Simon:

"To me this is the essence, the epitome, of racism... They're telling us we are – we have no feelings for our children? We're not parents? We're not mothers or fathers? This is just incredible." 

As Frimet wrote in that 2008 post: Indeed it is. But we in the Middle East learned long ago that reality can be incredible.

01-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?

Mahmoud Abbas' official television station expresses what they want

us to know about the convicted and unrepentant killers

in our prisons [Image Source: PMW]

The Jordanian parliament is so keen to have Palestinian terrorists freed from Israeli prisons where some of them are serving multiple life-terms for hideous atrocities that they are seeking to expel Israel's ambassador and cancel the Israel/Jordan peace treaty if they can't get their way.

A report posted on a Jordanian government website last night (Sunday) says they are demanding that Israel

respect the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty and to respond to the Jordanian demands and release all Jordanian prisoners. They stressed that "soft diplomacy" with Israel can not solve the issue of prisoners, therefore, the government is required to use all political and legal papers its has to ensure the release of the prisoners. 

The notion that Israel must "release all Jordanian prisoners" because of "the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty" is nonsense. No such obligation has ever existed: not legally, not morally, not diplomatically. We are aware that the notorious "chief negotiator" for one of the two Palestinian Arab statelets, Saeb Erekat, claims it does. But as IMRA explains here, he achieves this only by twisting the plain words of the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum which in reality says something quite different.

So whom are the Jordanians so keen to free? Well, it's a long list, but it includes the man sentenced to the longest term of anyone in the Israeli prison system. 

We're speaking of a person about whom we have written in the past [see here]: Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti who is the self-confessed murderer of 66 people including 9 in the July 2002 bombing at the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; 11 in the March 2002 bombing of Jerusalem's Cafe Moment; 10 in the December 2001 triple-bomb outrage on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall; and 15 (most of them children, including our 15 year old daughter Malki) in the August 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in August 2001.

The judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. This is a not common occurrence in Israeli jurisprudence. The one time a death penalty was carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

From prison, Barghouti has done an exemplary job of reminding anyone listening of the bestiality that underpins his psychopathic nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world by CBS television's '60 Minutes' program, Barghouti famously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

To emphasize the point, in an Israeli court in 2010, he reiterated his dedication to killing more if (when?) he is freed again.

Hard to imagine anyone seriously trying to turn this sick killer of children into something heroic and worthy of emulation. But of course that is precisely what has been happening during the past decade.

Case in point - the official public television station of the Palestinian Authority headed by the 'moderate' Mahmoud Abbas. Just four days ago, it broadcast a program which Palestinian Media Watch has now translated to English and is streaming from its own site [here]. The host, a woman called Manal Seif, launches with visible enthusiasm into a paean of worhip and praise for three figures - all of them sitting in Israeli prisons, all of them convicted of acts of mass-murder. Let's listen:

I want to tell the Israelis that our prisoners are heroes and not terrorists. What I saw reminded me of an Israeli website called PMW or Palestinian Media Watch, a site that monitors the Palestinian media. Of course every visit that we film for a prisoner gets them angry. I was surprised a week ago that [regarding] brother Ibrahim Hamed (54 life sentences), brother Abbas Al-Sayid (35 life sentences), and brother Abdallah Barghouti (67 life sentences), they [PMW] objected, they were upset, they slandered these heroes and claimed that they are terrorists. If they see Abdallah Barghouti as a terrorist, Abbas Al-Sayid as a terrorist, Ibrahim Hamed and Nasser Awais (14 life sentences), if they see all these prisoners as terrorists, we see them as heroes... I salute you, all you heroic fighter prisoners, and of course I always wish you freedom. [PMW]

The good people at PMW told us that Manal Seif hosts a weekly PA TV program called "For You", where 'you' means 'prisoners'. Each week, she visits homes and families honoring/glorifying prisoners as heroes. She is a civil servant, paid a PA salary that is principally funded, as we keep reminding readers here, by the EU, Norway and the US. Without that funding, the hateful and distorted bile she delivers into the airwaves could simply not get there.

In those night-is-day, evil-is-good parts of the Arab world, Seif is not alone.

From a 2006 article on the Keren Malki website

• A December 2012 profile of Barghouti on a Palestinian website provides an astounding example of the self-delusion fueling the hatred industry in their world. Barghouti "was charged with organizing a series of attacks against Israel, which resulted in the death of up to 70 Israeli soldiers" they absurdly write. And so Israel "sentenced him to serve seven life sentences", which is also nonsense; he was sentenced to 67 life terms. In reality, there were few if any soldiers among those killed by Barghouti's bombs, all of which were deployed in deliberately mundane places: popular restaurants, mostly. The engineer of the Sbarro massacre, the woman called Ahlam Tamimi, makes plain that her explicit goal in delivering a Barghouti bomb to the center of Jerusalem was to kill and maim Jewish religiously-observant children [video]. Soldiers never came into the calculation. These people are terrorists, and that's how terror works.
• In May 2013 [source: PMW], mass-murderer Barghouti's family was honored with a media-drenched visit by a delegation of government officials from the Abbas regime headed by PA Minister of Prisoners' Affairs Issa Karake and District Governor of Ramallah, Laila Ghannam. It was termed a 'solidarity' visit, from which we deduce (but of course we knew this already) that significant parts of the PA government feel solidly connected to the killer of our daughter.
• Ten days ago, in a post here ["21-Jun-13: In dark corners, remorseless killer of 66 innocents is called 'administrative detainee' and 'captive'"] we quoted reports that Barghouti has been on a hunger strike since May. He is being treated in Ha'emek Medical Center (aka Afula Hospital) in northern Israel. 

A report published today by another Palestinian Arab website, Alray, calls him a "Palestinian-Jordanian detainee", but not a Kuwaiti for some reason even though Kuwait is where he was born. It reveals that Barghouti is sadly now

"in a critical condition... Barghouti‘s heart rate is very weak; only 40 beats per minute and he suffers from a liver failure which might lead to liver cirrhosis. Doctors of Internal Committee of Red Cross expressed their concern over Barghouti’s health deterioration, warning that his heart might stop at any time." 

Some years ago, on the Keren Malki website we created to honour the memory of our daughter, a victim of Barghouti and of others like him, we wrote this at the time the CBS interview went to air:

As ugly and repugnant as the words of Barghouti will likely be to the viewers of "60 Minutes", we urge them and CBS not to focus on the man. He is irrelevant, except that he creates a context. Barghouti's evil deeds are the concrete expression of the desires of a government which wants to be accepted as an equal by the community of nations. The anger and revulsion which his interview creates should be redirected at them - at the terrorists in business suits who plot and scheme every day to increase Barghouti's 66 to the largest number they can think of. 

20-Jun-13: Abdullah Barghouti, terrorist, bomb-maker, killer of 66 innocents, has some demands

Barghouti

The Palestinian Arab news agency Ma'an News is reporting that a terrorist, currently serving 67 life terms for his central role in a series of hate-based mass murders, has announced some new demands which he and his lawyer are directing at the government that convicted and imprisoned him.

Abdallah Barghouthi on hunger strike until transfer to Jordan  | Published yesterday (updated) 19/06/2013 19:04 | RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A Jordanian citizen imprisoned in Israel will not end his hunger strike until he transferred to a Jordanian prison, a lawyer said Thursday. Abdallah Barghouthi, who was transferred to the Haemek Medical Center in Afula in northern Israel, has been on hunger strike since May 2. Hanan al-Khatib, a lawyer for the PA Detainee Affairs Ministry, visited Barghouthi and said he was chained to his hospital bed by his legs and his left hand.  Prison guards have turned Barghouthi's hospital room "into a kitchen" to harass him, al-Khatib said. They also provoke him by having noisy gatherings in his room. Barghouthi told the lawyer he felt isolated from the world as he is not allowed to receive newspapers or listen to news bulletins. In May, Barghouthi, 41, was taken to the al-Jalameh prison for four days where he was interrogated about his hunger strike, a lawyer from the Addameer prisoner rights organization said. A Palestinian [sic] with Jordanian citizenship, Barghouthi is demanding his release from Israeli prison to serve the remainder of his sentence in a Jordanian jail, under the Wadi Araba agreement between Jordan and Israel. Barghouthi is also demanding that Israel disclose the whereabouts of 20 missing Jordanian prisoners, he told Addameer lawyer Faris Ziyad. Further, he is calling on Israel to remove the bodies of Palestinians who died in Israeli custody from nameless graves. Barghouthi is serving 67 life terms, the highest sentence ever handed down by an Israeli military court. He has been detained since March 2003. A Hamas leader, Barghouthi was convicted of involvement in multiple attacks in Israel. 

We almost have sympathy for the people who write the Ma'an news reports. They describe how he is harassed, chained, feels isolated, detained and convicted of involvement in multiple somethings. But Ma'an's editors know that both Hamas and the morally-bankrupt Palestinian Authority of the non-moderate Mahmoud Abbas routinely and publicly call this Barghouti a hero. They bestow honors on him and on his family. 

He is in the news in other places too. The government and parliament of Norway are currently embroiled in a debate over how, in the name of moral decency, they could have provided the funding for a 'rewards for terror' scheme hatched by the Abbas regime that places this same Barghouti at the highest rung for payments made out of the PA's overdraft account at the bank. See "22-May-13: Asking Norway to face up to the lethal consequences of its funding decisions". And "14-Mar-13: Shock! Horror! Norwegian politicians awaken to discover they were played for fools by the terrorists"

Perhaps this explains the difficulty Ma'an's editors have in actually articulating what this Barghouti did. They say he holds the record for the longest sentence ever imposed by an Israeli military court. Why is that?

Six years ago, we wrote about him here ["10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti"]. We said Barghouti built the bomb that ended the life of our daughter, Malki. A Kuwaiti who settled in the West Bank village of Burqa in 1999, he has been frequently described in the media - and from his own mouth - as the brains behind the Sbarro restaurant massacre on 9th August 2001. Arrested and put on trial in Israel, Barghouti pleaded guilty and told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible". 

In December 2004 he was sentenced to 67 life-terms in an Israeli prison (report). In a later interview, he said: "I do not accept responsibility for their deaths. I feel pain, of course. They are little children. But the government of Israel is solely responsible."

Below is an open letter we wrote in 2006 about Abdullah Barghouti. It was originally published on the website we created in our daughter's memory. We wrote it as an open letter in response to the screening of a Bob Simon segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program. That segment focuses on three Palestinian mass murderers - Barghouti and two others.

An Open Letter from Frimet and Arnold Roth [April 21, 2006]

This coming weekend, the high-profile television program "60 Minutes" is going to give public exposure to a convicted murderer and terrorist called Barghouti. Speaking from an Israeli prison, the interview will show him taking credit for a massacre at a restaurant in the center of Jerusalem in August 2001 and another at the Hebrew University's cafeteria a year later. In front of a huge audience throughout North America, he will say of the number of people killed in the attacks he masterminded: "I feel bad because the number is only 66."

Our daughter Malki, fifteen years old, was one of Barghouti's 66.

We, together with our neighbors living here in Jerusalem and throughout Israel, belong to the much larger number of living people about whom Barghouti feels so bad.

We have nothing to say to Barghouti, and he has nothing to say that deserves to be heard. His opinions are worthless to us and to anyone with a sense of morality. His life is a disgrace to the society which nurtured him.

But while we have no interest in him, we are very interested in the leadership of the society which has turned Barghouti into a hero - in their opinions and even more in their actions.

The political leadership of the Palestinians was decided by a process that seemed democratic when their elections took place two months ago. Whether or not a democracy can truly function when gangs of heavily armed Arab thugs rule the streets of their towns and villages is a fair question. But the legitimacy of the Palestinian government is not for us Israelis to determine. The Palestinians and most of the media called it a democratic process, and no one seriously suggests today that the Hamas leadership lacks political legitimacy. Their stated viewpoints therefore have to be heard and analyzed.

For those like us with a special sensitivity to terror, the Palestinian leadership today is the world's outstanding embodiment of unadulterated terrorism: a government which actively supports terror, promotes terror, honors terror and justifies terror. We hear them speak, and we hear the voice of terror. The current minister of the interior in the Hamas government says he will not arrest those who carry out terror attacks against us. His actions make clear that he should be believed.

As ugly and repugnant as the words of Barghouti will likely be to the viewers of "60 Minutes", we urge them and CBS not to focus on the man. He is irrelevant, except that he creates a context. Barghouti's evil deeds are the concrete expression of the desires of a government which wants to be accepted as an equal by the community of nations. The anger and revulsion which his interview creates should be redirected at them - at the terrorists in business suits who plot and scheme every day to increase Barghouti's 66 to the largest number they can think of.

Back in 2006, we wrote that it was hard for us to imagine the government of Israel giving serious consideration to handing Barghouti his freedom and a license to go out and kill more innocents. But that was some years before they made other decisions that we would have thought impossible to make, starting with giving the woman who plotted the Sbarro massacre, and who brought the bomb to the center of Jerusalem, her freedom. On the other hand, it's not at all hard for us to imagine politicians and media analysts calling on Israel to do just that.