13-Nov-19: Thank you, Mr Foreign Minister

Jordan's Foreign Minister [Image Source]

This open letter is written by Frimet and Arnold Roth. They are the parents of Malka Chana Roth, murdered at the age of 15 in the Jerusalem Sbarro massacre, a bombing attack organized by Hamas and spearheaded by a Jordan student/reporter who has been sheltered, shielded and honored in and by Jordan since 2011.

To: His Excellency Minister Dr Ayman Hussein Abdullah Al-Safadi,

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,
Ministry of Foreign Affairs,

Queen Alia Airport Street,
Amman 11180

Jordan

Dear Dr Safadi,

Thank you. In an exceedingly rare announcement yesterday as Jordan's foreign minister (as well as its deputy prime minister), you spoke publicly and for the record about how the Hashemite kingdom views the request it received officially in March 2017 from the United States to extradite fugitive bomber Ahlam Tamimi to Washington ["14-Mar-17: Sbarro massacre mastermind is now formally charged and her extradition is requested"].

As you know, the US began quietly and without publicity requesting this from Jordan four years before that, starting in 2013. Jordan has refused the entire time.

In simple terms ( and not using the words you used), here is what you conveyed:

Jordan has rejected the US request for some years. We confirm that Jordan still rejects it, no matter what the Americans want.

Tamimi, as you may know, faces charges in a United States federal court for her central role in the Hamas-inspired massacre that took the lives of many people, half of them children. One of those children, Your Excellency, was our daughter Malki who was just fifteen years old.

As her parents, what you have just done is, in a certain way, helpful to our efforts. Let us explain.

You and virtually the entire political leadership of Jordan have been careful to avoid all public mentions of the embarrassing and self-humiliating way Jordan harbors the confessed Sbarro bomber and FBI Most Wanted fugitive terrorist Ahlam Tamimi.

More than most people, and related to what we lost in the Sbarro atrocity, we know how willing you are to discuss Jordan's disavowal of its treaty obligations to the US in private meetings about which we have gotten reports. And how unwilling you are to talk about this important issue in public. 

It is quite a balancing act.

You might recall how we tried to draw out your response in an article we published more than two years ago, addressed like this current post, to you personally: "26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions".

And as you may remember, you ignored us totally. (So did and do your staff.) 

Special mention of Jordan's ambassador to Washington who right up until today blocks us on Twitter. We assume this is what feeling really embarrassed about an issue will cause even a polite and cultured person like Ambassador Dina Kawar to do.

In the last two weeks, the United States via an official announcement of its foreign ministry, the US State Department, has clarified in a gratifying way its rejection of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's claims that the 1995 Extradition Treaty signed by the late King Hussein and President Bill Clinton's administration is invalid. 

You are invited to read what we wrote about that US statement just yesterday: "12-Nov-19: On Jordan, the US and the children killed in a pizzeria".

This is also well reported in the online English-language edition of Haaretz. (You can click here to download the printed version.)

Also yesterday, possibly unwittingly, you spoke as Jordan's Foreign Minister to a public event and put Jordan's position - and presumably your own personal views as well - on the record.

We are pleased that you did. Pleased enough that we want others to know. As many others as possible. And especially the small tribe of US Congressional figures making frequent pilgrimages to Jordan and to its king ["09-Nov-19: Another delegation from US Congress at Jordan's royal court. Did extradition come up?"]

We found your blunt and deliberate words on the popular Jordanian news-site JO24. (We remember it as one of the Jordanian TV channels that lovingly provided Jordanian audiences with real-time, live video coverage of Ahlam Tamimi's wedding to her cousin Nizar on June 16, 2012).

Safadi: We have received US requests to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi. We confirm our commitment to the law that prevents it (JO24)

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants Affairs, Ayman Safadi, said that several US authorities asked Jordan to extradite Jordanian citizen Ahlam Al-Tamimi, pointing out that Jordan respects and abides by the law "and the law does not allow it".

Safadi said during a press conference to talk about the expiry of the annexes of the Wadi Araba agreement related to the areas of Baqoura and Ghamr, on Monday, that Jordan is a state that respects the law. Jordanian law does not allow the extradition of a citizen to a third country and there is no legal basis for the delivery of Ahlam al-Tamimi.
He pointed out that there are requests from US authorities requesting the extradition of Tamimi, "but Jordan deals in accordance with the law and the law does not allow extradition."
In late March 2017, the Court of Cassation upheld a decision by the Amman Court of Appeal to reject Washington's request for the extradition of Ahlam al-Tamimi, accused of involvement in an attack that killed two US citizens in 2001.
Tamimi spent 10 years in Israeli jails after being sentenced to 16 years [might be a machine translation error - see below] in prison for participating in a martyrdom operation of the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, in the Sbarro restaurant in West Jerusalem in August 2001 in which 15 people were killed and 122 others were injured.
The occupation [a reference to Israel] released Tamimi and handed over to Jordan in 2011 as part of a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.
[Source: "Safadi: We have received US requests to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi. We confirm our commitment to the law that prevents it", JO24, November 12, 2019 - the original article is in Arabic; the English text is via Google Translate]

(For background to the US extradition request, see "03-Nov-19: In Washington, a step towards bringing the Sbarro bomber to justice")

You are the latest in a line of foreign ministers - eight of them so far - to have served Jordan since its absolute monarch King Abdullah II ascended to the throne. You are the first to have publicly expressed, to the best of our knowledge, a frank and open disdain for an entirely proper request made by the United States, your country's most important strategic partner.

We confess to being surprised by how inaccurate your claims are, at least in the form reported by the Jordan media. Naturally, if they misquoted you (which sometimes happens to politicians), we assume you will see to it that the record is fixed.

Meanwhile, on the assumption that what we see does reflect what you said, allow us to point out some of what you got wrong. And some matters that ought to be more on your mind than they seem to be.

• You say "Jordanian law does not allow the extradition of a citizen to a third country". That's simply and absolutely not true of Jordanian law. 
• It's also not what Jordan's highest court said in its March 2017 decision to prohibit Tamimi's extradition. The court's argument has to do with a narrow, highly technical alleged flaw in how the treaty was accepted by Jordan. 
• And by the way, officials in the US State Department have told us the allegations of a flaw are simply untrue as a matter of fact. 
• As you surely also know, even if there was a technical flaw, it could have been fixed by Jordan's parliament (whose members are by and large selected by the king, according to this Wikipedia entry) at any time. Including this afternoon. Somehow no one in Jordan has gotten around to even trying.
• Leaving the dubious legal claims about the treaty aside, it's a fact that Jordan's still-active extradition treaty with the US went into full legal effect on July 29, 1995 and that both countries treated it as being valid and effective for the next 22 years. Jordan, as you know, has extradited several Jordanians to the US. We can give you the details of several of them who are currently serving long US prison sentences. Just ask.
• What's more, based on things we have learned from open source materials, Jordan has never once failed to extradite fugitive terrorists to the US when asked to do so - until the Tamimi case.
• Is there really any doubt (as you seem to claim) about Jordan having extradition treaties with other countries? The list certainly includes at least Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Algeria, Kuwait and Azerbaijan [all documented here, at page 11] as well as Lebanon and France. And to our personal knowledge via connections in Canberra, an extradition treaty is currently being negotiated between Jordan and Australia where our murdered daughter Malki was born. We are fairly certain the real list is longer than what we have managed to find.
• Then there's the money: Jordan, which struggles economically and has huge burdens, is monumentally dependent on US aid. The US provides far more foreign aid to Jordan than anyone else does.
• In fact, on scanning the same Arabic media source that reports your disappointing statement about disavowing your country's treaty with the US, we were startled to find a report ["$1 Billion Additional Aid Will Reach Jordan Next Month", JO24 and archived here] that underscores in a concrete way how hugely important US support and generosity is to the kingdom. Somehow this is not reflected in the tone or content of what you are quoted as saying.
• While you are not to blame for this, we noticed what the JO24 report on your speech said about Ahlam Tamimi. It's sadly typical of the chronically inaccurate journalism emanating from other sources in your country. Tamimi, it wrongly states, is "accused of involvement in an attack that killed two US citizens in 2001". Accused? Really? She may be accused but why not mention that Tamimi herself proudly boasts that she did it. Worth knowing as well that she was convicted by a tribunal of three Israeli judges who sentenced her to sixteen terms of life imprisonment. JO24 says it was 16 years which isn't close to the truth (but could be a translation error). But in any event, she was out of prison as a result of the catastrophic Shalit Deal after just eight years. 
• And while it's true that she is charged by the US with killing just two US citizens - our daughter and the pregnant daughter, the only child, of our dear friends, the Haymans - the number of lives Tamimi extinguished, including the non-US citizens among them, is 16. One of those is a young mother, a US citizen, who has been lying unconscious in all the years since then.
• Thanks to very uncharacteristic and misplaced Hashemite tolerance, Tamimi had her own television program called Breezes of the Free or in Arabic “نسيم الأحرار” [background: "6-May-12: What lies behind freedom of the Palestinian Arab press?"], produced by Hamas and recorded unhindered, week after week, in the Jordanian capital between 2012 and 2016. From there it was beamed literally throughout the world, everywhere that Arabic speaking audiences were found. This turned Tamimi into a global celebrity. As you know.
• How does Jordan's willingness to allow Tamim's weekly incitement to terror, her gloating over the joys of blowing Jewish children to pieces, sit with your claim that the kingdom "respects and abides by the law"? Why is she permitted to appear as a celebrity in public events in Jordan? On Jordan's commercial television? Why was her rapturous welcome back to Jordan in October 2011 conducted in a government court-house? (Here's the proof.) Why isn't she in a Jordanian prison? Why isn't she on a flight to Washington now, in handcuffs and chains.
• And why, in the name of all that's good and decent, do you express no concern, no discomfort, no embarrassment, no nausea over the reality that Jordan has given Tamimi, who has never denied the murders in which she was involved, a dream life? Do you have children? Do you know anyone who does? Are you aware that Tamimi has boasted repeatedly that it was children she set out to kill with her bomb?

Thank you for clarifying matters.

You have delivered a good basis for the US media to engage with you. Your short speech will help them understand at a deeper level what your published comments mean in the context of US/Jordan relations and the billion dollars that's coming your way in December.

Naturally, we would welcome the opportunity to discuss what we have just placed in front of you. 

We would also want to take the opportunity to share with you some things you might not know about the beautiful life of the child whose unbearable loss we continue to mourn.

Sincerely,
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel

UPDATE November 14, 2019: The reports of Ayman Safadi, foreign minister of Jordan, speaking clearly for the first time about how Jordan intends to deal with the kingdom's most famous terrorist (after more than two years of carefully maintained public silence) are now widely republished in the Arabic-speaking world. Some examples from the many we have seen this week:

• Report: Tension between Washington and Amman over Jordan's refusal to extradite Ahlam Al-Tamimi [Arabic], Russia Today, November 08, 2019
• Official... Jordan will not hand over Ahlam al-Tamimi [Arabic], Al-Madinah Al-Akhbariya (Jordan), November 11, 2019
• Safadi: There is no agreement between Jordan and the United States to hand over any wanted person and therefore we will not hand over Ahlam al-Tamimi [Arabic], Saraya News, Jordan's third-most visited website, November 11, 2019
• Jordan confirms its intention not to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi to America [Arabic], Alalam News Network, Iran, November 14, 2019
• Safadi: King made a decision to serve our national interests [Arabic], PETRA - Jordan's official government news agency, November 11, 2019. Significantly, the PETRA report concludes with this sentence: "Safadi reiterated Jordan's refusal to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi to the United States, adding that there is no agreement between the two countries to extradite wanted persons." (Archived version)

03-Dec-17: Understanding Jordan's king and his "holistic" approach to terror

Yesterday in Jordan [Screen grab]

Regular readers know we pay more than the usual amount of attention to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. It's where our daughter Malki's murderer lives free as a bird.

And even though

• she has boasted over and again for the cameras and the media of her central role in the 2001 bombing attack on the people inside Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria; and 
• she confessed in an Israeli court in 2003 to the calculated murder of 15 innocent victims, most of them children, and to having done this on behalf of the Islamist terror regime, Hamas, whose first-ever female terror agent she is reputed to be; and 
• the US government, the US Department of Justice and the FBI want her arrested and extradited to face Federal charges in a Washington court

Jordan's ruler King Abdullah II, aware of her celebrity status among his people, has stubbornly presided over a series of measures whose effect is to spit in the eye of the Americans, to deny the validity of the 1995 Jordan/US Extradition Treaty and to ensure one of his kingdom's - and the Arab world's - most admired females remains free to pursue her career of incitement to terrorism, Islamist values and the murder of Jewish children.

Nigeria's president and entourage hear from Jordan's
king on how Jordan has defeated terror [Image Source]

Jordan is currently hosting an event variously termed (depending on which media channels you consult) the Aqaba Retreat, the Aqaba Process or the Aqaba Meetings. (Aqaba is a resort town located at Jordan's southern-most tip, adjacent to the much smaller Israeli resort of Eilat.)

Jordan's semi-official English-language mouthpiece focused on who was there in an official-sounding report yesterday ["King meets with leaders, officials as Aqaba Meetings kick off: Gathering aimed as venue to bolster security, military cooperation in the fight against terrorism", Jordan Times, December 2, 2017]:

• "His Majesty King Abdullah on Saturday met with the presidents of a number of African countries and representatives of nations participating in the two-day Aqaba Meetings to discuss the global efforts to fight terrorism and extremist ideologies, especially in West Africa..." 
• "The participants [include] senior officials from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Cyprus, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Australia, India, Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Nigeria, Mauritania, Antigua and Barbuda, Mali, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Chad, and Burkina Faso, in addition to representatives of regional and international organisations..." 
• "His Majesty also held meetings with US Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis, Brazilian Minister of Defence Raul Jungmann, French Minister of State attached to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, UK Minister of State for the Armed Forces Mark Lancaster, and High Representative of the African Union Pierre Buyoya... On the sidelines of the Aqaba Meetings, King Abdullah met with President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari, President of Guinea Alpha Condé, President of Niger Mahamadou Issoufou, and President of Mali Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, a Royal Court statement said."
• "The Aqaba Meetings were launched by the King to maintain international and regional coordination and cooperation in the fight against terrorism within a holistic approach, and to discuss security challenges in regions around the world that are dealing with terrorism hotspots, with the aim of identifying shortcomings and coordinating efforts to fight terrorism."
• "The meetings are part of His Majesty’s initiative to reach out to countries around the world and coordinate with them on this issue, since the anti-terrorism fight “must be a joint, international effort, based on close coordination and consultations, to counter the global threats of terrorism and extremism”, the statement said... 

A brief Associated Press report makes plain what we find so perplexing about this:

Jordan's state news agency says King Abdullah II is hosting a high-level conference on fighting terrorism and extremist ideologies, particularly in West Africa... The agency says the conference is the latest in a series launched by Jordan's monarch to reach out to other nations and help coordinate the fight against terrorism... Jordan's king is seen as a key Western partner in the battle against Islamic extremism. ["West Africa is focus of Jordan counter-terrorism conference", AP, December 1, 2017]

For us, the elephant in the room is Ahlam Tamimi. 

Source: Al Jazeera

Abdullah has treaty obligations to the US. His father signed a 1995 Extradition Treaty with the Clinton Administration in 1995 and in its wake several Jordanian terrorists and felons were shipped off to face the US justice system. Though his media, aided by compliant reporters and editors outside Jordan, put up a facade that makes it seem extraditing Tamimi to the US is somehow problematic, it's clear that it's Tamimi and the specific crimes to which she has confessed that are the problem. And the real story. 

Though no one in the mainstream media seems to have picked this up yet, there's a clear analysis of the legal mess into which Jordan has inserted itself while giving its native jihadist killer safe harbor. See "Pressure on Jordan: Refusal to extradite mastermind of deadly 2001 Sbarro suicide bombing in Jerusalem contravenes international law and agreements" [Michelle Munneke JD of American University Washington College of Law, in National Security Law Brief, October 28, 2017]:

This analysis means the United States should not give up on attempting to extradite Al-Tamimi. If other countries place enough pressure on Jordan due to concerns of Al-Tamimi’s danger and susceptibility to planning another attack, Jordan may change its position. Al-Tamimi is above all else, a significant danger that Jordan should take seriously—if not for the world, for Jordan’s own citizens that live amongst Al-Tamimi.
Jordan should reconsider its position and permit extradition in the case of Al-Tamimi for the safety of Jordanians, and citizens of other nations that may be subject to another attack by Al-Tamimi. Thwarting extradition not only violates the principle of comity, but it also perpetuates the international danger presented by Al-Tamimi.

But for most people, this isn't about law but simply crime and punishment. Tamimi was sent by her Hamas masters in the summer of 2001 to kill Jews. Especially Jewish children. She succeeded by all of their perverted measures. And she's now free, extremely well-compensated, raising a family and a media celebrity.

She has never denied the facts. And she has been applauded - literally - time and again in her public appearances throughout Jordan as well as in her well-publicized VIP speaking visits/travels to such countries (listed alphabetically) as Algeria (December 2011), Kuwait (July 2012 and March 2014), Lebanon (April 2012 and January 2015), Qatar (April 2012, again December 2013), Tunisia (April 2012 and November 2015) and Yemen (April 2014). 

She hosted a popular weekly TV program called “نسيم الأحرار” [Transliteration: “Nassem al-Ahrar”] meaning “Breezes of the Free” between February 2012 until September 2016.  Devoted to Palestinian Arab prisoners and their families, it appears to have been designed to bolster their morale, act as a two-way conduit of information and to encourage more of the kind of the kind of acts that turned these terrorists into prisoners in the first place. Tamimi stopped being its presenter in September 2016 at about the time she was very briefly (for a single night) taken into custody by Jordanian authorities pursuant to an Interpol arrest order at the behest of the US Department of Justice.

Tamimi and her connections publicly thank Jordan's judiciary and
leaders for getting her off the hook with the FBI and the US
Department of Justice - though the pursuit continues [Source] 

Jordan is a family-run business that like so many other Arab polities presents itself as a nation-state and even as a constitutional democracy, which is a real stretch given the total domination exercised by the British-installed Hashemites that have run it since the 1920s. 

Thus it was no secret to Jordan's Royal Palace that Tamimi was recording a weekly tribute to terrorism-and-Islamism in an Amman studio (Amman, Jordan's capital, is where she lives). And that it was uploaded and broadcast around the world every week for years by the Hamas-owned Alquds satellite television network. Her appalling show was and still is rebroadcast by a multitude of Arabic and non-Arabic websites that stream all or some of the programming put out by Alquds. The king and his Hashemite Kingdom never had any problem with any of this. Their "principled opposition" to terror only stretches so far. 

In April 2017, an Australian TV journalist told us privately that Tamimi had been advised by the Jordanian authorities to lower her profile in the wake of a Jordanian Court of Cassation decision that Jordan's 1995 extradition treaty with the US was unconstitutional. In particular, he told us, the "Jordanian authorities have now banned her doing any media interviews". Our impression is she is taking the advice seriously for the time being. 

Before that, and for several years from her home base of Jordan, she appeared numerous times as the presenter on several Alquds TV specials - including a number of propaganda programs that went to air in the summer of 2014 as fighting raged between Hamas Gaza and the IDF. She may be the most influential and important female public figure in Hamas.

So what does the Royal Hashemite Palace and its central personage say to all this?

Nothing, at least not publicly. Nor can we expect them to respond for so long as he and they continue to be absurdly feted as central players in their "holistic" struggle to defeat the terrorists by the likes of the most senior politicians of the United States, the UK and Europe. 

Just so long as they're not Jordanian terrorists.

20-Nov-14: In the face of savagery, what do you do?

What do you do in the face of truly evil actions?

It's not a rhetorical question. When men and women do acts of beastial evil, and it happens just down the street or even closer, and to people you know, and when it appears to escalate in intensity, scope and frequency with time... what do you do? Not "what does one do" in the passive sense. But what do you do? What do I do?

The closer you live to Jerusalem, the more you will understand that these questions pertain to the horror that unfolded just two mornings ago: an attack by determined, well-armed men on a place of worship and the people inside preoccupied with prayer and learning. The victims, the targets of the attack, had no form of physical protection and the attackers had zero mercy; not the slightest hesitation in shooting, slashing, stabbing unarmed people with their eyes closed at point blank range.

The killings and maimings in Jerusalem's Har Nof quarter on Tuesday have barely been absorbed here. This will take time. Initial shock will give way to longer-term reactions on the part of the families directly impacted. Some of this will be visible to their neighbours and friends. Much of it will not. It will not be over and done quickly - or in many cases ever. On a single street of a small neighbourhood of this small city, there are now four new widows, more than two dozen orphaned children, and a pervasive air of horror, fear, anger, deep puzzlement, powerlessness.

How should we be thinking about the men with the knives, the meat-cleavers, the guns and the axes? How saddened should we be by the sight of their bereaved family members? By the deaths of two young men, both members of the Abu Jamal clan, both in their twenties, both with their lives ahead of them?

In Jordan's House of Representatives yesterday
[Image Source]

Here's one way: over the river in the Kingdom of Jordan, the parliament yesterday paid formal and public tribute to them. Just a few hours ago, the Elder of Ziyon blog quoted the praise expressed in the Hashemite Kingdom's legislative chamber:

MP Mohammed Al-Qatathh of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the assembly condemning the "Zionist attack on Jerusalem and its people" in the wake of "the heroic operation" on the synagogue... The Council also read the Fatiha on the spirit of the martyrs... at the request of Khalil Attieh MP... [Alrai Newspaper, Amman, Jordan, November 19, 2014]

Should it surprise us that Al-Qatathh and Attieh were not immediately arrested and removed from the parliament and charged with conduct demeaning the honour of the kingdom? Yes, it should surprise us. Jordan has special standing in the eyes of the United States. The Jordanian leadership is routinely praised in the West for aligning with the anti-terrorist side in the huge global war now underway. Rational people might expect the leaders of its government to do everything possible to preserve that. After all, the US State Department calls Jordan

a strong ally in combating terrorism and violent extremist ideology. Jordan's geographic location renders it susceptible to a variety of regional threats, while also making it a natural regional leader in confronting them... [At p.151] On October 1, the Government of Jordan signed a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with the United States... Jordan is a key participant in the State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance (ATA) program. [Source: The most recent edition of the State Dept's official annual  "Country Reports on Terrorism", published a few months ago]

Let there be no doubt that, in official US circles, Jordan and its political leaders are counted as being against terror and for truth, justice and the American way. In fact, on the very same day as its parliamentarians rose to their feet to praise the Abu Jamal savages, over at the United Nations Jordan trumpeted its active membership of the forces of good valiantly fighting the terrorists:

Jordan to launch initiative to curb terrorist groups’ media practices | Petra | Nov 19, 2014 | 23:04 | NEW YORK — Jordan is going to launch a regional initiative to curb terrorists’ increasing use of telecommunications and media technologies. During the UN Security Council (UNSC) session on international cooperation in combating terrorism, which convened on Wednesday, Dina Kawar, Jordan’s representative to the UNSC said Jordan intends to launch the initiative in Amman with the participation of international experts, community representatives, and concerned entities... 

The problem is that Jordan does not actually use the word "terrorists" in the way that most people hearing the diplomat's speech at the UN might have expected. Here is an authoritative Jordanian news source explaining Jordan's legislative approach to terror:

The Lower House on Wednesday endorsed draft amendments to the State Security Court (SSC) Law following extensive discussions over its provisions. The deputies excluded "resistance actions" against Israel from the court's jurisdiction, following a proposal to do so by Deputy Tareq Khoury (Zarqa, 1st District). The deputies agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be "terrorism" at all; hence, they approved a provision that excludes actions against Israel from terrorism crimes. [Jordan Times, December 11, 2013]

Other than in the Jordanian media (and they can be expected to know, right?) where else have you seen any mention of this in the mainstream news media?

Here are two more Jordan-related realities that are far too often overlooked or deliberately ignored. 

1. Jordan's army illegally occupied large swathes of Jerusalem for two decades up until they were removed by force in 1967, leaving behind massive wanton destruction of Jewish holy places, defilement of thousands-of-years-old graves and of synagogues, and the leveling of Jerusalem's ancient Jewish Quarter. No Palestinian Arab state ever existed, or was proposed, under Jordanian rule. Freedom of religious practice in one of the world's holiest cities was a nonsense so long as the Jordanians were there. 
2. Jordan is where the convicted and entirely unrepentant murderer of our daughter now lives in total freedom, free to make television programs, to speak in honour of terror and terrorists and to move about with complete safety. It is where one of the government's showcase institutions, the Family Court in Amman, played host to a gala celebration in her honour when she arrived back (she had lived most of her life in Jordan before engineering the massacre at the Jerusalem Sbarro pizza shop) in October 2011. In Jordan, they know what celebrating acts of murder means.

Thousands of Jews, Druze and others took part in the funeral of
Master Sgt Zidan Nahad Seif of the Israel Police, in  Yanuh-Jat, northern
Israel, yesterday [Image Source]

We asked: what do you do in the face of truly evil actions? We suggest

• Remember the victims; honor their innocence.
• Reduce - in whatever small measure that is possible - the impact on the world of the unspeakable hatred and evil that the jihadists executed, by means of doing simple good.
• Weap just a little.

Israelis from every walk of life honoured the memory of the five victims in funerals conducted in Jerusalem and in a Druze town in northern Israel.

A genuine hero of the bloodbath, an Israeli Druze policeman, died of the wounds inflicted by the Abu Jamals, His funeral yesterday was attended by a huge crowd of grieving strangers from every part of Israel's socio-demographic spectrum. One of those delivering a eulogy was Rabbi Mordechai Rubin the spiritual leader of the Bnei Torah synagogue community in Har Nof where the killings were done. In our opinion, he got the tone and message exactly right:

“We came from Jerusalem, from the place of the massacre... simply to be with you and to cry with you”...

(At about the same time, and for the record, Arabs in Gaza, Ramallah and other places, conducted their own tributes by handing out candies and dancing in the streets. No more details are necessary, and no more photographs; there are many of those on the websites of the various news photo syndication services, additional reminders of the active death cult at work on the far side of the barrier that divides us.)

Acts of good - given what we know about the Har Nof community, there will be many. People who choose to make their homes there know intimately the power of chesed, of doing simple good. Good for its own sake, and not for any reward. We created a foundation in our daughter's memory with that in mind. (Some background.)

Here's an instance of how good-for-its-own-sake works. And how utterly different it is from the evil that has so many of our neighbours in a vice-like hold - an evil that certainly includes bogus 'opponents' of terror like Mahmoud Abbas, the president (ten years after being elected to a four year term of office) of the Palestinian Authority and still the central figure in Fatah, the PLO and a large part of the Palestinian Arab terror industry. In the past several weeks, those of us who watch closely for this kind of thing have witnessed a crescendo of Islam-based calls from the organizations over which Abbas presides, calling for blood to be spilled in pursuit of an Arab Jerusalem.

• Hassan Al-Saifi, an official in the PA Ministry of Religious Affairs condemning "the continuing Israeli desecration of Al-Aqsa" and declaring that Jerusalem "needs the religious scholars in particular to fulfill their duty, rush to Jerusalem and offer sacrifices and blood" [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, the daily house newspaper published by Abbas' PA, November 14, 2014, quoting an official in the PA's Ministry of Religious Affairs, recorded by Palestinian Media Watch here]
• "They are the ones who heard the call of Yasser Arafat, while the Arab and Islamic nation ignored his call... They came out with their weapons, with their true belief that Jerusalem needs blood to purify itself of Jews." [A Fatah official, Muhammad Al-Biqa'i, invoking blessings on murderous terrorists, interviewed on the PA's wholly-owned and authoritative TV channel, November 7, 2014, and captured on video, translated into English by Palestinian Media Watch here]
• "Not a centimeter of  Jerusalem will be liberated unless every grain of Palestinian soil is soaked in the blood of its brave people... For Jerusalem doesn't need negotiations, because negotiations will not bring Jerusalem back to us." [Fatah official and member of its Central Committee Tawfiq Tirawi, speaking on camera at a public event in December 2013, translated to English by PMW here] Tirawi means it. This week, he said of the massacre in Har Nof: "I consider the Jerusalem operation to be a natural response to the occupation and the crimes of the settlers."
• "By the blood of the youth, Jerusalem will come back to us... We'll free every inch from the foreigner's clutch" - A child performing a song on government-controlled PA Television, September 8, 2012: the video clip with English subtitles is here.

Australia's ambassador to Israel, His Excellency
Mr Dave Sharma

Here is a very different take on the role of blood in today's Jerusalem. It focuses on a diplomat who we believe brings genuine honour to his country and his role. (We wrote about him back in September as well.)

Following the horrendous terrorist attack at a Synagogue during morning prayers in Har Nof, Jerusalem, some diplomats stationed in Israel expressed their countries’ condemnation. None of them however acted as quickly or as decisively as Dave Sharma, the Australian Ambassador. Wasting no time after the murders, he issued a strong statement deploring the terror outrage and then decided that something more than mere expressions of regret were called for on this occasion. The Ambassador swiftly arranged to make the one hour trip from Tel Aviv to Israel’s Capital and visit the wounded at Hadassah University, Ein Karem Campus in order to not only show solidarity with the wounded but to also express Australia’s outrage at this latest manifestation of irrational hatred against Israelis...  I caught up with him in another part of the hospital where Dave was demonstrating true Australian grit and solidarity. He was at the blood bank of the hospital, not only helping to provide badly needed blood but showing in practical ways that diplomacy can be more than just empty gestures... It gave him the opportunity to do something positive and practical in the face of fanatical evil... Groups of charedi young men, waiting to donate blood, came up to us and upon hearing that the Australian Ambassador had done the same, showered him with blessings and encouragement... [From a report by Michael Kuttner published by Jwire, an Australian online news service, today.]

What do you do? There's always something you can do.

23-Aug-12: Theology and sociopaths

Our daughter Malki

We are an ordinary family who, for more than a decade, have known the identity of the murderer of our fifteen year-old daughter, Malki. She is a woman who appears in her own television program each Friday night. She is the central figure in hundreds of YouTube videos.

From a distance (since our own government never communicated with us about this, never allowed us to be heard, never consulted with us), we watched as the woman who brought unspeakable pain into our lives was charged, convicted and sentenced to many terms of life imprisonment. 

Then with a rising sense of horror, we saw a media campaign unfold which presented her as a hero and warrior and that sought her release. We were confident the famous 'red lines' of our government would never be breached and mass murderers of Israeli children would remain behind Israeli bars until the day they drew their last breath. That illusion irretrievably fell away in October 2011.

Even then, having endured the worldwide news coverage of the rapturous welcomes given to the woman in Cairo and Amman, we were unprepared for the steps that followed: the official reception held at Jordan’s Family Court [Corbis image]; the self-hosted weekly television program beamed by satellite throughout the world; the tumultuous crowds in Arab capitals proclaiming their adulation during her visits; the grand public June wedding in which she was the shining, smiling star alongside the convicted, unpardoned and unjustly freed murderer who is now her husband. 

All along, we knew that civilized people everywhere, at least those outside the Arab world, were revolted by the deeds, the declarations, the triumphalism of the barbaric woman with the lying, smiling eyes.

Now meet James M. Wall. His is a name we had never heard until this week. It turns out to be a name worth knowing if, like us, your fifteen year old child was murdered in cold blood along with fourteen other innocent patrons in a restaurant.

As comforting as it might be to think otherwise, Wall is not marginal to the public discourse of the United States. Nor is he regarded (as far as we can tell) as a shrieking crank or a red-neck. He served as editor of a prominent journal called The Christian Century for 27 years, from 1972 to 1999. Wikipedia calls it "the flagship magazine of U.S. mainline Protestantism" [source]. He continued there as a regular columnist until a few years ago, even after his retirement. Though it appears he has stopped writing for it, his name remains on the masthead as Senior Contributing Editor.

These days, Wall writes a blog under the title “Wall Writings”. From where we sit, his output has some quite unpleasant tones. In a December 2011 piece on US politics, for instance, he characterizes pro-Israel Republican candidates as “wear[ing] the Jewish kippah”.

But as we learned, Wall is capable of advocacy journalism of a far more pungent sort. In October 2011, he posted a lengthy article to coincide with the extorted release from prison of Ahlam Tamimi, our child's murderer. We were referred to that article for the first time yesterday, in the wake of what we wrote here and here earlier this week.

At about the time he wrote it, in October 2011, an Arab newspaper dotingly quoted Tamimi making this statement: 

“I have never regretted what I have done, and if given another chance I’ll do it again” [source]. 

Yet extraordinarily, the Wall piece 'lionizes' her. (That’s the term used by the clear-eyed Christian analyst who pointed us to it). With loving attention to the human aspects of her story, Wall urges his readers to resist the Israeli view of the Jordanian woman's "crimes"; those quote marks around the word crimes appear in Wall's essay. Wall leaves readers in little doubt that the atrocities to which Tamimi confessed in court - atrocities to which she confesses afresh frequently, proudly and in public - were not crimes at all but something very different.

A small handful of excerpts from Wall's rambling article entitled “Ahlam and Nezar, A Palestinian CoupleReleased in The Prisoner Exchange” captures the logic of his case:

• “This bias against Palestinians [in the news reports about Israel freeing 1,027 killers and terrorists] was so blatant that… Noam Chomsky was moved to accuse the media of treating the released Palestinian prisoners as “unpeople”. It is time to tell their stories, and to do so without apology.”
• “The Palestinians who were sent to jail… saw themselves as resisting an occupying army, taking actions they believed appropriate to deal with that occupation. What Israel did is what all occupying, colonizing armies do. They punished those who resisted their colonizing... What this comes down to is a conflict of narratives, based on who is telling the story, the military occupiers or those who are resisting occupation/colonization.”
• “From Israel’s perspective, Ahlam played a role in causing a massive act of murder [but] she saw it, initially, as an act of war. And of course, war itself is organized, sanctioned murder.
• “[Tamimi’s] crime, for which she was sentenced by a military court for multiple life terms, was for “choosing the location and securing transportation to reach that location”.

Concerning that last bullet, Wall probably missed out on reading the court papers. Tamimi was indicted on 23 charges. One is for possession of explosives and three concern related offences. 19 relate to deliberate killing and conspiracy to kill. She pleaded guilty to them all. As prisoners in this country may, she addressed the court:

"The deed which I did… leaves me happy. Why? The anger expressed in your faces regarding what I did is the same anger that lies within me and within the entire Palestinian people and is surely even greater than that. 15 killed, 122 injured, this is a small number relative to the many, large numbers of those who are gone, because of you." [Our translation of the Hebrew transcript]

No one, certainly not James M. Wall, can have thought this woman was framed or tortured into confessing her crimes or misquoted. Wall must have known what every other news reporter and political pundit knew: that Ahlam Tamimi was - and is - unstoppably proud of causing the deaths of Israelis. She set out to find a corner of Jerusalem where the number of young Jewish lives that could be snuffed out by a bomb concealed in a guitar case was as large as possible. In this, she succeeded hugely. She says she will do it again if her god gives her the opportunity. We don’t know Wall, but we know he knew this. And yet what he writes about Ahlam Tamimi is imbued with admiration for her. 

What kind of Christian values inform the opinions of a man who cannot bring himself to condemn the murders of fifteen innocents? 

What theological insight brings a man with Wall’s prominence, intelligence, standing in the community, to look right past the overwhelming, explicit pride of a killer who says “I did well. I will do it again. And so should you”? 

If his appreciation of the deeds of this sociopath is not an obscenity, what is?

James M. Wall’s views are hardly the opinions of a nobody. They are uttered by one who speaks from the foremost ranks of Christian leadership in the US. As Senior Contributing Editor of The Christian Century and its driver for more than a quarter century, he and the journal lay claim to formidable credentials since it is

a progressive, ecumenical magazine based in Chicago. Committed to thinking critically and living faithfully, the Century explores what it means to believe and live out the Christian faith in our time. Founded in 1884 as the Christian Oracle, the magazine took its current name at the turn of the 20th century. Notable contributors in the early decades included Jane Addams and Reinhold Niebuhr. In 1963, the Century was the first major periodical to publish the full text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The Century continues to inform and shape mainline Christianity...  [More]

Wall engages in unambiguous advocacy for the self-admitted murderer and her deeds. He has the right to express himself freely, obnoxiously and even offensively. But what does it mean that The Christian Century still has him on its masthead nearly a year after the Tamimi article? Does the editorial board agree with his line? Do they disagree? Will they disavow him and them? Are his views Christian?

Is it Christian to embrace the unrepentant murderer of children who says she prays for the chance to do it again?

20-Oct-11: Enough already: A first-person reminder for those who think we objected to the release of a mere "driver"

Repeatedly over the years and especially during this past very difficult week, reporters, analysts, political figures and even friends, having noted our call to have the name of our daughter's murderer removed from the list of terrorists to be (and now) freed by Israel, have referred to the woman as "the driver" of the human bomb.

She was not the driver. She was sentenced to sixteen life terms in prison because she played the most central of roles in the Sbarro Jerusalem massacre. She murdered 15 people on the day, eight of them children, and a sixteenth - a young mother - remains in a vegetative state until today. And here, in the video below (hat tip to vladtepesblog.com) , she says it. So please - enough already with calling this murderer a mere "driver".



As for the convicted murderer's total absence of regret for the deaths she engineered, she continues to take full credit, no regrets, now that she is free as a bird in Jordan. See this report ["Tamimi: I have never regretted what I have done"] from a Jordanian publication, today. It includes original video with Arabic dialogue that we hope someone authoritative will translate into English. Here is how the editors at Ammon News in Jordan rendered her appalling message in their English:

‘I have never regretted what I have done, and if given another chance I’ll do it again’ she added. Tamimi expressed her believes in the rightness of what she has done. Tamimi said in an interview with Ammon News Tuesday that the hostility and aggression is the basic character of the Israeli officials, unless the are forced to negotiate. Ahlam Tamimi, 31, was serving 16 life sentences for her role in a suicide bombing, including taking the assailant to the Sbarro franchise in Jerusalem where he killed 16 people in 2001. deported to Jordan last Wednesday early morning. She thanked Jordan and stated that Jordan people are the heart beat of the Palestinians. [More]

While still inside an Israeli prison, the murderer was interviewed for a film that we saw some years ago. To understand the meaning of evil incarnate, watch her face in the video below as she hears for the first time the actual number of children who were murdered in the Sbarro massacre.



(Hat tip to Vlad Tepes from Canada. The source - under the title "Palestinian terrorist delights in the knowledge that it was eight children who died by her hand" - is here.)

Tamimi is the only one of the terrorists released on Tuesday to have been sent into so-called 'exile' in the Kingdom of Jordan. That happens to be where she was born and where her family resides. Some exile.

She was feted there in an official and well-publicized reception yesterday. We choked when we noted that the location was the Family Court of Amman. It's covered here.