17-Feb-22: Yes, we're exasperated

The Tamimi Wanted posters were issued by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation [Image Source] of the US Department of Justice in English and Arabic versions

In less than a month from now, on March 14, 2022, an incredible five years will have passed since the United States charged a Jordanian woman, Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, with murdering Americans by means of a weapon of mass destruction.

One of those murdered Americans was our daughter Malka Chana Roth, age 15.

Back in 2017, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security (at the time) Mary B. McCord, Channing D. Phillips U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia (at the time) and Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office (at the time) Andrew Vale made the announcement.

“Al-Tamimi is an unrepentant terrorist who admitted to her role in a deadly terrorist bombing that injured and killed numerous innocent victims. Two Americans were killed and four injured. The charges unsealed today serve as a reminder that when terrorists target Americans anywhere in the world, we will never forget – and we will continue to seek to ensure that they are held accountable,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General McCord. “I want to thank the many dedicated agents and prosecutors who have worked on this investigation.”

“We have never forgotten the American and non-American victims of this awful terrorist attack,” said U.S. Attorney Phillips. “We will continue to remain vigilant until Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi is brought to justice.”

“Al-Tamimi is a terrorist who participated in an attack that killed United States citizens,” said Assistant Director in Charge Vale. “The bombing that she planned and assisted in carrying out on innocent people, including children, furthered the mission of a designated terrorist organization. The FBI continues to work with our international partners to combat terrorists like Al-Tamimi and hold them accountable”... 

The investigation into this matter was conducted by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. The Office of International Affairs of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division provided significant assistance. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section.

The determination of the most important law enforcement agencies in the United States was clear and unambiguous. We wrote at the time ["15-Mar-17: Sbarro and justice"] that 

Obviously, justice is very much on our minds right now. In fact, that has been consistently true since August 9, 2001.

But we were also aware that much still needed to be done and we said so. However what followed, notwithstanding the use of the clear words “We have never forgotten the American and non-American victims of this awful terrorist attack”, was and remains far more challenging than we suspected back then.

First, as we wrote in a tweet earlier today, thanks to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the bomber, one of only 25 individuals named as FBI Most Wanted terrorists, remains free today. What's more, she continues to actively encourage more terror. 

Who allowed this to happen? Who, if anyone (apart from the families of the Jordanian woman's victims) is outraged by it?

As parents of one of the bomber's many child victims, we're exasperated by the passivity - sometimes calculating, often ignorant - of a long list of officials, politicians, community leaders and media figures. 

CNN's Fareed Zakaria is among the most puzzling of them, though far from the only news industry professional about whom we have serious questions that we prefer not to share at this stage. Let's simply observe that not one of his several exclusive interviews with Jordan's king has ever touched on the kingdom's harboring of the world's most wanted female terrorist.  

That kind of high-profile tip-toeing around an explosive issue, along with the kid-gloves treatment Jordan gets right across the media, is a large part of why justice in the Tamimi/Jordan case has been thwarted for so long. 

We're now serving notice, as we wrote in our Twitter account today, on those we have tried over and again to engage in this pursuit of justice. 

Our message: If you aren't demanding publicly now that Jordan extradite the blood-drenched @Sbarro bomber to Washington, you're standing with her. And standing with the woman who says she has never regretted what she did at the Sbarro pizzeria is disgraceful. 

I do not regret what happened. Absolutely not. This is the path. I dedicated myself to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and Allah granted me success. You know how many casualties there were [in the 2001 attack on the Sbarro pizzeria]. This was made possible by Allah. Do you want me to denounce what I did? That's out of the question. I would do it again today, and in the same manner. [Source Video]

And for those out there who don't run community organizations or departments of major governments or edit great metropolitan newspapers or their Internet-era equivalents, what you can do - and we seriously hope you will no matter what country's citizenship you hold - is sign our petition. 

Please - we seriously need all the help we can get.

13-Mar-20: It's been three years

Exactly a year ago, here on this blog, we posted a rueful summary of events that had taken place since the unsealing of US Federal charges against our child's killer on March 14, 2017, two years earlier.

You can view that post at "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?"

While it describes important speeches by US justice officials, along with some meaningful decisions (that were years in coming), the bottom line is the justice process was - and certainly still is - stuck.

In an affront to elementary notions of how justice should work, Ahlam Tamimi remains today, as she has since October 18, 2011, free in Jordan.

There, with the open and active support of the government and its legal system, she lives a dream life. She's unrestricted in her movements and able with ease to publish her terror-advocacy views widely. She and her many supporters are undisguisedly, even triumphantly, openly contemptuous of the efforts made by the United States and her victims to see her brought to American justice. She faces terrorism charges in Washington.

The grotesque savagery of which she openly boasts and to which she confesses has had not the smallest negative impact on her celebrity. Without doubt, the fame, celebrity and - yes - adulation Tamimi enjoys today in Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world today is because of the innocents she brutally killed - and not in spite of those killings.

That so many of her victims are children, our daughter among them, appears to have enhanced her fame and standing.

Three years have now passed. Here are some of the events of this past year as reflected in our blog postings:

• "21-Mar-19: The Secretary of State is in Jerusalem": We made efforts to draw Secretary Pompeo into a discussion about the lack of material progress in bringing Tamimi into a US Federal court to face charges. We were rebuffed.
• "21-Mar-19: The Sbarro Massacre mastermind worries she isn't getting enough sympathy": A US official, Jason D. Greenblatt, who has never responded to any of our attempts to communicate with him, saw fit (we don't wonder any more about public officials and their values) to personally address Tamimi via Twitter. This provoked her to respond via a lengthy op ed in the Arabic media. We fisked her piece which we called a mixture of "outright lies, self-aggrandizing exaggerations and a small handful of intriguing revelations". Here's how we ended it: "The real take-away here is her toxic influence. This dedicated murderer, now living free as a bird, not in hiding, not on the run, in the capital of an Arab kingdom reckoned to be a US ally, has standing, celebrity and access to the media. What Tamimi says in her explosive region of the world has the potent and quickly-out-of-control flammable impact of a lit match in a field of tinder-dry brush. And even though much of what she has to say is plainly distorted, dishonest and provocative, we have not yet seen even a single instance where her appearance in the Arabic-language media includes criticism or even any serious analysis of the woman, her narrative or her views. We wish this would disturb other people as much as it disturbs us."
• "25-Mar-19: On justice and decency for American victims of terrorism: When US indignation leads to a troubling comparison" This is about extradition. We delved into a little-reported but enraging story that involves a Turkish terrorist who had just been freed from his German prison cell and then, despite US efforts to take him into custody in Germany and then extradite him to Washington, was promptly flown to Turkey where he of course disappeared. The part that interested us more than  the preamble was the fury expressed by the State Department of the US at what Germany did. The parallels with what Jordan is doing are strong. The Anti Defamation League in New York took up the matter and wrote what we think is an inspirational letter to the State Department.
• "02-Apr-19: Setting facts, ethics, context aside, Aljazeera salutes a couple of murderers" We wish people paid more attention to what Aljazeera is and does. Its chairman Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani served as a minister in Qatar's government in the eighties and nineties and he is a member of Qater's ruling family, the House of Thani. Aljazeera has some 80 bureaux and more than 100,000 employees distributed around the world. And when they decided to go market a mass murderer like Tamimi, there is major impact.
• "30-May-19: Paris, Amman, Washington: Extradition and what it can reveal about governments and terror" The legal basis on which Jordan claims it is free to ignore the US request to extradite Tamimi is highly problematic. We don't believe those claims get much respect among lawyers or experts in extradition. France's experience with Jordan's legal system underscores this and makes for disturbing reading.
• "11-Jul-19: Keeping Ahlam Tamimi safe: A Jordanian case for double jeopardy?" If you're looking for arguments that bolster the Jordanian case, they're not here. It's puzzling to us that Jordan's claims are taken apart by the news industry so rarely (meaning never). A Jordanian journalist called Kuttab exemplifies how ineffectually the thwarted extradition effort is handled by the media.
• "21-Jul-19: Jordan, peace and how little has actually changed" Jordan gets lots of good press and, on the whole, is greatly admired by many of the good and open-minded Jews we know. But our involvement with the Tamimi extradition makes us feel they're ignoring a great deal of the evidence. In this lengthy post, we include this: "When they want to, Jordan's official representatives can be quite talkative. A shame that on the subject of extraditing Ahlam Tamimi, they have not uttered a single official word as a government, leaving it to the media and their highest court to say the relatively little that has been offered to explain their indefensible policy. As for their official spokesperson in the United States, Ambassador Dina Kawar of Jordan's Washington embassy blocks us on Twitter. That of course doesn't change very much and certainly doesn't mean we will stop our efforts to be heard. But along with plenty of other evidence of Jordan being today very far from its moderate image, it contributes to the sense that they haven't really come a great distance since the days of [Jordanians] blowing up ancient synagogues on a massive scale and maliciously denying Jewish history."
• "02-Aug-19: Arnold Roth speaks about what the media don't report - about what has and what has not been done to bring Ahlam Tamimi to justice (YouTube)": "Ahead of the August 9th commemoration of 18 years since the horrific Sbarro Pizzeria terrorist massacre in Jerusalem in which 15 people were murdered, eight of whom were children, this is an interview with the father of one of those children, Malki Roth, age 15." (We're grateful for the fine work done by The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), a Washington DC-based think tank and policy center headed by Sarah N. Stern who conducts this interview. 
• "11-Aug-19: What money can do: The Sbarro terrorists and the children of Ramot": Not much politics in this, but some serious thoughts on how money and the way it's used tells us a lot about where people stand on terrorism.
• "12-Aug-19: The pain of a child's murder: A burden of grief and injustice": Frimet Roth writes on the anniversary of the Sbarro massacre about how the pain of a child's murder is so inconceivable in our society that it is down-played. Swept under the carpet.
• "25-Aug-19: A rising sense of something awful started settling in": An excerpt from an interview of Arnold Roth conducted by Varda Meyers Epstein and published by the ElderofZiyon blog.
• "05-Sep-19: On thwarted justice and bearded women": A serious but rare article about our extradition efforts appeared in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, the paper edition. With a bizarre twist.
• "18-Sep-19: With Jordan's King Abdullah II visiting the United States again, things worth knowing": The first thing is to know just how often, and with how much respect, the absolute ruler of Jordan is received by his Washington hosts. 
• "29-Sep-19: As we prepare for the High Holy Day season": King Abdullah had breakast with a serious group of Jewish American leaders in New York. We have lots of questions. Most Americans don't because although this event, which has happened several times, got wide coverage in the Arabic media, it got almost none in the US. There are reasons for every aspect of what happened. But discovering what they are is a challenge.
• "03-Oct-19: What lies behind a decade of "progress" at an influential Jordanian graduate school": Knowing what has gone on at the Jordan Media Institute has been instructive to us but then we're troubled by so many aspects of how Tamimi stays free and Jordan remains in large measure uncriticized and unchallenged. Reporters and editors in the West seem both oblivious and uninterested. Read this if only to know where CNN's Richard Quest fits in.
• "08-Oct-19: Again: Jordan's inscrutable US relationship": Why do delegations of US politicians turn up every so often to make official visits to Jordan's king in his deluxe palace? This time it's principally about US Representative Jason Crow whose staff ignored us totally.
• "19-Oct-19: House Speaker Pelosi led an official visit today to the chief protector of our child's killer": Again: Why do delegations of US politicians turn up every so often to make official visits to Jordan's king in his deluxe palace? This time it's principally about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; whose staff ignored us totally. Along with Ranking Member Mac Thornberry, House Armed Services Committee; Chairman Eliot Engel, House Foreign Affairs Committee; Chairman Bennie Thompson, Homeland Security Committee; Chairman Adam Schiff, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; Congressman Ron Kind, House Ways and Means Committee; Congresswoman Susan Davis, House Armed Services Committee; Congressman Stephen Lynch, Chairman, House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on National Security; Congresswoman Elaine Luria, House Armed Services Committee. They all ignored all our questions.
• "03-Nov-19: In Washington, a step towards bringing the Sbarro bomber to justice": This is important. It starts with this opening: "We report here on an unexpected, modestly encouraging development in our efforts to bring to justice the fugitive Hamas savage who bombed a Jerusalem pizzeria because of the children inside it. Jewish children, as it happens. Exactly whom the bomber was targeting."
• "12-Nov-19: On Jordan, the US and the children killed in a pizzeria": Worth reading if you want a taste of the diabolical evil being shielded via the thwarted Tamimi extradition. But here for the first time, we write about the US explicitly rejecting Jordan's view of the extradition treaty. It's a major step forward.
• "13-Nov-19: Thank you, Mr Foreign Minister": An important article, if we say it ourselves. Almost totally ignored by the world's media (but not by the Arab world), Jordan now says openly and proudly (after dodging the issue for years) that it has no intention of respecting what the US calls a valid treaty. It will take the side of the Sbarro bomber, and it doesn't care who knows. Or objects.
• "16-Dec-19: Like talking to the wall": Once more: Why do delegations of US politicians turn up every so often to make official visits to Jordan's king in his deluxe palace? This time it's principally about Chairman of the House Armed Forces Committtee, Representative Adam Smith. And yes, his staff - after appearing to be ready to dialogue - ignored us too.
• "17-Nov-19: Jordan's king to be honored for profound commitment to peace and moderation" We remained as flabbergasted today as when this happened.
• "15-Dec-19: The Sbarro bomber trashes the ruler who protects her from the FBI" No part of the Western media reported this public insulting of Jordan's king by the Sbarro bomber. Why is that? 
• "31-Jan-20: Fox News break ranks with the mainstream media on Tamimi and Jordan" Starts with this: "For us, it's something of a milestone. On Wednesday, over on the heavily-trafficked Fox News website , there's an informative long-form piece that in large measure deals with our efforts to see Ahlam Tamimi, the Jordanian Islamist who masterminded the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001, finally brought before US justice. Written by Hollie McKay, the article is..." Please read.

Tamimi's freedom, celebrity and high public profile in the Arab world serve as a public and extraordinarily brazen encouragement to more acts of terrorism. The indefensible role of Jordan's leadership in clear violation of the country's treaty obligations to the United States magnifies the impact.

Our efforts to see Tamimi brought to US justice go on.

To stay in touch, we have a private (no one will ever see it except us) mailing list we use irregularly to keep supporters informed. To be on it, send your name, city and email address to thisongoingwar@gmail.com (click). And follow us on Twitter @ThisOngoingWar

Thank you.

03-Oct-19: What lies behind a decade of "progress" at an influential Jordanian graduate school

That's Princess Rym Ali in the center and special guest CNN's Richard Quest
on the left [Image Source]

The Arab world's most important and potentially most promising school of journalism studies is in the news this week - in Jordan, at least.

It gets a mention here because of what is not addressed at all in the coverage: the extraordinary act of self-identification by which its student body declared their professional role model to be a confessed killer of children.

We explain below who that killer is.

But first, the fluffy self-congratulatory side as reported by a government-controlled Jordanian news outlet yesterday:

HRH Princess Rym on Monday attended a celebration marking the 10th anniversary of the Jordan Media Institute’s (JMI) master’s programme in journalism and new media. The JMI is a not-for profit educational institution, founded by Princess Rym to develop the performance of journalists and media personnel in Jordan and the region... “The institute believes that journalism is not limited to defending freedom, rather building a culture of values and true democracy,” Princess Rym said. The Princess highlighted the importance of equipping journalists with skills needed to keep up with developments in communications, technology and the digital sphere... The princess shed light on various efforts to develop official media and the strides made in the field, reiterating the importance of these steps in creating an interactive environment that promotes dialogue and makes a change by relying on facts and eschewing false information... CNN's renowned business correspondent Richard Quest, the keynote speaker, highlighted his experience in presenting economic programmes on TV... [and] also referred to the results of a survey showing that "happiest countries in the world are those which have access to information." Dean of the JMI Bassem Tweissi said that “establishing the institute marked a turning point in journalism education in Jordan and the region and was a pioneering step that bridged a gap in the field of media education”.
["JMI marks 10th anniversary of master’s in journalism", Jordan Times, October 2, 2019 - archived]

There's a follow-on piece in today's newspaper of Jordanian record. In it, the founder of the JMI, Princess Rym Ali, a former on-camera news figure on CNN before her marrriage into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan's royal family, is quoted enunciating some lofty and admirable ideals:

The Jordan Media Institute (JMI) trains its students to the highest possible standards and human values, fights hate speech and provides them with a space where freedom of expression and respect for others are not contradictory... She said, during the event that was also addressed by CNN’s Richard Quest, that the JMI believes that journalism education is not only about defending freedoms, but also about building a truly democratic culture... Quest, CNN’s anchor and business editor at large, stressed the importance of freedom as key to good press. He noted how press freedoms contribute to people’s prosperity and wellbeing. He added that people trained by the JMI will be the “backbone of society” and therefore must understand that there are two sides to each story with a few exceptions, and must ensure society has access to information. During his interactive remarks, Quest also addressed the issue of neutrality and noted that while journalists are entitled to their opinions, they must leave them outside the newsroom. They have to be objective about their coverage and how to tell the stories... The celebration also included testimonials by some alumni about their experience at the JMI. They are part of more than 260 graduates who have achieved 91 per cent employment rate in a highly competitive market, according to the statement. The JMI is a non-profit academic institution that has also provided training opportunities to more than 6,000 people... ["JMI trains students to highest standards, human values — Princess Rym', Jordan Times, October 3, 2019 - archived]

What's not to love? Who could be mean enough to criticize what they do? We'll get back to the Jordan Media Institute in a moment.

Meanwhile.

Jordan happens to be the home of one of the most monstrous journalists to ever claim media credentials. She's the savage of whom we wrote in this post: 05-May-13: Self-confessed jihadist murderer: "With my media card, I was able to enter back and forth, undetected..." She's also our child's killer.

Here is Ahlam Tamimi, the first female terrorist in the history of Hamas, in her own boastful words. She's describing the life she led prior to masterminding and executing the blood-drenched human-bombing of Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001 and the resultant massacre:

I was a journalism student, in the political science track, and I was working in the media and the press. This allowed me to become a member of the Palestinian Journalists Union. The union card enabled me to enter Jerusalem in order to conduct interviews. This drew the attention of the 'Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades [of Hamas]. They realized that I could enter and leave Jerusalem, without the knowledge of the Zionists... This was one of God's miracles and facilitations. This made them ask me to join [Hamas - the first woman to do so] and I immediately accepted... I was assigned three missions. The first mission was to spot locations suitable for Jihadi operations. I would go to Jerusalem and walk around in the areas frequented by the Zionists... I would go around these areas, and as part of my first mission, I would surveil suitable locations, such as shops, malls, schools, and restaurants – any suitable target for a Jihadi operation. I would submit reports to the cell commander, and this report would be studied statistically: How many Israelis enter a certain location in one hour? I would sit there, look at my watch, and count the number of people who entered the place in an hour. I would calculate it and report that if the operation were to take place at a certain hour, the number of Israeli casualties would be at least 30 and could even reach 50, because during this specific hour, 70 Israelis entered the place. I would also check what the most suitable hours were. For example, a restaurant is frequented by Zionists mostly during lunchtime, a school in the morning... There was an optimal time to carry out the Jihadi operation, and I would write all of this in the report, which I sent to the cell commander [Abdullah Barghouti]... My second mission was to carry out Jihadi operations... [Source: MEMRI]

Ahlam Tamimi doesn't hide her responsibility for mass murder or the joy she derived from targeting and then murdering Jewish school-children who she says were her prime targets. To anyone following her, she's egregiously proud of what she did. If there was any tiny cloud to her happiness it was, unbelievably, that not enough innocents were killed: In her own words, "I admit that I was a bit disappointed because I had hoped for a larger toll."

Quickly removed (without explanation) after we published our critique,
the website of the JMI's privileged students of journalism
featured this tribute to Ahlam Tamimi as their "success model"
on every single page of the site. 

Guess who else shared her pride and satisfaction?

Visit the homepage of the JMI website and you see a button that links to a related website hosting the work-product of JMI’s own cadre of young journalists. It's in Arabic only, naturally enough; these contents are not meant for the Western sponsors and international partners. They're the work product of JMI's insiders... On every page of the site, under the headline “Success Models”, a journalist called Tamimi is profiled. She is the murderer of our daughter, Malki. They provide a large photograph of Tamimi and certain biographical details concerning her journalistic background. But important things about the “success model” offered up by this new centre of journalistic “excellence” are omitted: Tamimi brought a human bomb to the center of Jerusalem on August 9, 2001 to destroy the busy Sbarro pizzeria. She was instrumental in planning this major terrorist attack. Fifteen people were blown to pieces that day and 130 injured, many of them children and infants. The sixteenth victim – a young mother with her two year-old daughter – has never regained consciousness. The people traveling on the bus with Tamimi from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the hour after the explosion beamed with delight as the scale of the carnage was reported on the radio. Tamimi was barely able to contain her own happiness [video], the joy that came from secretly being the one responsible for the massacre and no one on the bus knew. Tamimi is a convicted killer, a psychopath who boasts on YouTube that she selected the site of her massacre so that the dead would include as many young religious Jews as possible. She famously smiled broadly with perverse pleasure [video] when informed of how many children’s lives were extinguished in the attack she masterminded. ["10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred"]

It doesn't get much more shocking than this: a privileged group of the Arab world's best and brightest, nurtured in a Western-influenced environment that emphasizes excellence, the highest professional values, respect for other people's rights. And they choose, freely and under zero duress, to designate a Hamas terrorist, a woman who set out to murder as many Jewish children as she could, and succeeded, as their principal figure of adulation.

Think about the implications of that for a moment.

No less shocking is how our serious efforts to get into a dialogue with the management of the JMI to explain to them what a catastrophic mistake they had made were comprehensively rebuffed. With the exception of a single response to us, worded rudely and offensive in a silly way, they ignored everything we said or published. Never acknowledged our existence. Never dealt publicly at any stage, right up until today, with the fully substantiated claims we made widely. Simply denied and lied.

What they did do, from the highest level within the JMI on down, was to engage in a series of calculated and deceptive misrepresentations to their various local and foreign stake-holders, including claiming that the JMI students' website had been suffering from unspecified technical problems necessitating that it be taken down, giving them a chance to hide the evidence - which we have of course archived. And claiming that whatever narrow and technical problems may have been behind Ahlam Tamimi being named their elite students' role model, they were now fixed, of no significance, never to return.

JMI management quickly (meaning after we publicized this and began letting some of the relevant people know) took care to erase the tribute to Tamimi without a word of public explanation or acknowledgement. As far as we know, they never addressed the serious matter with anyone - not their students, not their funders, not the government of Jordan, not their academic staff or international partners - in terms of what had actually happened.

The evidence was simply swept under the carpet. 

They published and distributed to their foreign funders and backers a lame pseudo-retraction which we dissected here. In fact, they did whatever they could without even once dealing with the disturbing issues head on. If you want to ensure a sociopathy that has invaded your organization remains active and viable, that's probably the most effective way to do it. But it's immoral, dishonest, dangerous and completely misleading.

We soon approached their corporate, non-Arab funders and persuaded almost a third of them to stop backing the JMI. We don't apologize for wishing we had managed to shut them down altogether.

We invested considerable effort in approaching several Amman-based foreign embassies to support our efforts. We were rebuffed by most, though not by all. We documented some of this (certainly not all) in a string of posts:

• 11-Dec-14: Is it newsworthy when journalists make a terror-addicted murdering colleague their role-model?
• 11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan
• 16-Jan-15: Incubating terror-minded journalists in Jordan but they have an answer to the criticisms
• 19-Jan-15: The dilemmas of funding and enabling terror
• 05-Jun-15: Beyond the politics, the business and the misunderstandings at Orange, a question of terror
• 30-Nov-15: Incitement to savagery costs lives on all sides so why doesn't everyone want to shut it down?
• 14-Feb-19: A prince, a princess, four Tamimis - and murderous violence

JMI claim numerous prominent entities as their parners, supporters and donors. They're listed here on their website. It's somewhat surprising - given the Ahlam Tamimi connection, the open adulation of murderous terrorism, the way Jordan flagrantly breaches its 1995 Extradition Treaty with the US in order to safeguard her - that these generous friends include the US Embassy in Amman and the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.

We're incapable of understanding how this can possibly be.

Other named donors and partners, according to the JMI website this morning, include the BBC, Australian Aid, UNESCO, The Swedish Institute, the German embassy in Jordan, and Reporters Without Borders. It would be convenient to assume they're unaware of the problematic nature of the Jordan Media Institute and have never heard of Tamimi or the Sbarro pizzeria massacre. But the truth is we have been in dialogue with most of them; we have explained the background and the Tamimi involvement. While it's clear we and they see life differently, there's no doubt at all that they are fully aware of the facts. It's a puzzle.

But here's the thing: In a kingdom whose news industry is tightly controlled, among the least free in the entire world even today, you can invent realities at will and never have to deal with the consequences of your own deceptions.

For instance, you can say that your extradition treaty with the United States, executed and ratified and fully implemented again and again in the years since it was signed in 1995, is invalid. That it breaches your constitution and therefore Ahlam Tamimi cannot lawfully be sent to trial in Washington for her crimes. That the US/Jordan treaty was drafted by the man in the moon.

But at the end of the day Jordan is a tiny place, of marginal significance from almost any perspective. On the other hand, from what we have learned after frustrating years of pressing its absolute ruler to extradite our child's killer, today's Jordan and its systematic deceptions and fabrications provides insight into deadly serious problems that are not uniquely Jordanian.

What we have learned about the real Jordan Media Institute - the one that's not conjured up in press releases and a captive media totally controlled by the royal family - is an ongoing scandal. It's compounded by an inexplicable cover-up by major foreign governments, by the complicity of some of the world's most important NGOs, and - to their shame - by the lack of spine demonstrated by many members of the mainstream media.

Anyone offended by our saying this is cordially invited to let us know where the factual mis-statements are. We of course won't be holding our breaths while we wait.

The scandal touches on multiple issues (funding, development, journalism, media duplicity, government among others). But on none more sensitive or dangerous than terrorism which is nurtured, encouraged and active in today's Jordan notwithstanding the pompous statements to the contrary.

12-Aug-19: The pain of a child's murder: A burden of grief and injustice

Malki Z"L was deeply devoted to her blind and profoundly
disabled youngest sister

It appears that the pain of a child's murder is so inconceivable in our society that it is down-played. Swept under the carpet.

Frimet Roth | This op ed was originally published on the Israel National News website, August 8, 2019

I don't mention my murdered child, Malki, often.

Over the eighteen years since the terror bombing at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria, I have learned that most people are bored, disconcerted or annoyed by my dredging up that "ancient incident".

Closure, moving on, forgiving are the trendiest notions circulating in the world of grief.

A few years back, my husband, who had just delivered a talk about terrorism in his hometown, Melbourne, overheard an old acquaintance gripe about him. "Hasn’t he gotten over that yet?"

I recall a CNN journalist reporting about a tragic mass shooting in the US involving children, commenting "The families of the victims certainly have several tough weeks ahead of them."

Weeks? Make that lives.

It appears that the pain of a child's murder is so inconceivable in our society that it is down-played. Swept under the carpet.

I vividly recall the silky feel of my Malki's hair, the way we swam the crawl together holding hands, the way we always walked up the ramp to our car arm in arm, the tears of pride I would shed whenever I heard her play the flute in a concert.

Her smile as she walked through our front door was infectious.

Her concern for anyone with disabilities was incomparable and unique for a teen. It was expressed not by vacuous words of compassion but rather active involvement with them.

Malki sought out places to volunteer as a caregiver even to the most profoundly affected children.

That included her youngest sibling Chaya who suffers from a rare genetic illness that includes severe epilepsy and blindness. Malki’s tenderness and devotion to her were incomparable.

And I remember the last time I heard her voice; she phoned me an hour before her life ended and we closed always, with the words “I love you.”

For the past eight years, our grief has been exacerbated by anger over injustice. The mastermind of that terror bombing, a Jordanian terrorist called Ahlam Tamimi, sentenced to 16 life terms in an Israeli court, was freed in the 2001 Shalit Deal.

She was “exiled” to her home – Amman – where she was reunited with her family. Some exile.

On March 14, 2017, the US Department of Justice unsealed charges against Tamimi and said it was requiring the Jordanian regime to extradite her to Washington. This was due to Malki and two other victims of that attack being US citizens.

But Jordan’s King Abdullah II has provided Tamimi with refuge, refusing to abide by his kingdom’s 1995 extradition treaty with the US.

My husband and I have asked that US officials pressure the king to hand over the monster he is protecting. Instead, the current US administration fetes him and his family, receives him in the White House as an honored guest, lavishes his shaky kingdom with massive cash gifts and other support.

The terror attack on Sbarro was unique in several ways.

One family was nearly decimated: a mother, father and three of their eight children perished.

Another couple lost their one and only child along with the baby she was carrying who would have been their first grandchild. I visit that bereft mother regularly as she now faces myriad health crises, confined to a wheelchair.

Sbarro is also unique in that Tamimi boasts to this day of “her operation". She has described in televised interviews how she scoured Jerusalem's city center for the perfect target - one that would be filled with women and children.

For years she hosted a weekly program beamed from Amman to viewers throughout the Arab world on Hamas' Al Quds TV station.

She smiled joyfully when she learned that her 15 victims included 8 children, not the mere three she claimed to believe.

She has been a constant presence on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter where she incites her fans to follow her example. She is undeniably the incarnation of evil.

And yet she is safe, free and raising a family. Every day of this reality is another stab in our hearts.

This week, grieving Americans were assured by Federal authorities that the El Paso shooter who murdered 22 innocent victims would be deemed a terrorist. He would receive “swift and certain justice.”

The victims of terrorist Tamimi are still waiting for that.

Frimet Roth's daughter, Malki, was murdered in the Sbarro terrorist attack at the age of fifteen. She had gone to enjoy a summer vacation pizza with her friend Michal Raziel, who was killed with her. Frimet is a freelance writer. She and her husband live in Jerusalem with their family. More from the author ►

14-Dec-17: Understanding what happened after Wednesday night's Gazan rocket attack on Israel

Haaretz says (rather blandly) three rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israel yesterday (Wednesday): 

Two were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system and one fell into an open area as alarm sirens sounded in southern Israeli districts and cities including Sderot. Magen David Adom emergency responders said that a 30-year-old man wounded his leg while running for cover, and two others were being treated for shock. The rocket fire on Israel from the Gaza Strip Wednesday evening is returning the residents of the Gaza border region back to a state of tension they haven’t experienced since Operation Protective Edge over three years ago. No less [sic] than 15 rockets have been fired into Israeli territory since U.S. President Donald Trump’s declaration on Jerusalem, and although the Israel Defense Forces has been showing restraint, it will have a hard time holding back for much longer. 

Others say there were four, not three, and the difference points to something significant:

On Wednesday night, four rockets were fired from Gaza at southern Israel. Two of them were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system, a third struck an open field and the fourth fell short of the border and hit a school in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli officials... [Times of Israel, today]

So that's five Arab-on-Israeli attack rockets intercepted in mid-air and brought down by the amazing, life-saving, defensive Iron Dome system so far this week. 

As far as we know, neither Haaretz nor any non-Israeli news source has drawn attention to how yet-another Fell Short rocket dispatched on its murderous path towards Israel failed to cross the border and fell onto the heads of hapless Gazan Palestinian Arabs.

This time it struck a school according to Israeli assessments:

Beit Hanoun’s Ghazi al-Shawa public school, according to Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry liaison with the Palestinians.

Given the late-night hour, it was probably empty of students. But who really knows? And just imagine the reaction if it was an Israeli attack that view up a Gazan (almost certainly meaning UNRWA) school. Does anyone think The Guardian (which has a documented interest in Gazan schools being attacked) will give its readers any insight into this latest school bombing.

Fell Shorts are never reported by the terrorist regime in Gaza. If they did, they might have to own up to the utter contempt they have for harming their own side. Fell Shorts are very rarely reported by major news agencies.

By way of response, Israel this morning (Thursday) imposed a closure of its Gaza crossings:

Israel announced the closure of its Gaza border crossings on Thursday in response to daily rocket fire from the enclave over the past week after US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital stoked Palestinian anger. [Reuters, this morning]

An Israeli source adds:

The army said the Kerem Shalom Crossing, from which goods enter and leave the Strip, as well as the pedestrian Erez Crossing would be shuttered beginning on Thursday, in light of “security events and in accordance with security assessments.” It was not clear when the crossings would reopen, the army said. A military spokesperson said that in “humanitarian cases” Gaza residents may be allowed to pass through the Erez Crossing, but that this would be contingent upon approval from Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, Israel’s chief military liaison to the Palestinians, known formally as the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). [Times of Israel, today]

CNN's reporting on this ["Israel closes Gaza border crossings", CNN, today - archived here in case they change the text] maintains CNN's not-exactly-stellar record for perspective and fairness:

The Israeli military said it will close border crossings into Gaza beginning Thursday until further notice "due to the security events and in accordance with security assessments."
The crossings being closed, Kerem Shalom and Erez, are the only two on the Israeli border left. Israel has closed border crossings when tensions are high, some which have not been reopened to date. The territory is also under a naval blockade by the Israeli navy. Kerem Shalom is the crossing point where goods and supplies are brought into Gaza; Erez is the point where people cross. Shutting the two points effectively cuts off Gaza from the rest of the world by land, save for its small Egyptian border, which is generally closed. The territory is also under a naval blockade by the Israeli navy.

(Yes, Israel's navy gets mentioned twice. There's something about sailors in uniform.)

CNN has an interesting way of looking at this. Gaza, which everyone knows views Israel as its sworn enemy and which is busily attacking Israelis with rockets and tunnels at this moment, is shut off "from the rest of the world" by Israel closing its border this morning. Oh, "save for its small Egyptian border" which is "generally closed".

The word agitprop was invented for silliness of this CNN sort.

09-Mar-16: A security barrier, reconsidered

Standing outside the International Court of Justice in The Hague in February
2004, Arnold Roth, holding a photo of his murdered child,
is interviewed by BBC News

In the midst of violent drama being visited upon us by our neighbors, the government of Israel seems to be on the verge of acting on a matter that we have wanted to see happen for many years.

For background, see "11-Oct-07: Reacting to 7 more frustrated mass-murders". And "5-Oct-08: Learning the lessons of the checkpoints". And "28-Apr-12: Security barrier proves yet again to be a life-saver". And this interview from 2004 in which Arnold Roth explained to CNN how security fences can look to people who have personal experience of life without security:

She [our murdered daughter Malki] wasn't caught in any crossfire. She wasn't a bystander. She was the target. People outside of this country have to understand that, that whatever we do to protect our lives has got to be seen as being our prerogative and perfectly legitimate. We want out government to do whatever is necessary to keep our lives safe and our children safe... ["Crisis in the Middle East - The Israeli Barrier", CNN, February 22, 2004]

Now today's news:

Israel will complete construction of the separation barrier in the Jerusalem area and the southern West Bank following Tuesday's terror attacks, the Prime Minister's Office announced.
During security consultations held by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister's Office said it was immediately decided to close gaps in the separation barrier in the Jerusalem area, and to complete construction of the barrier in the Tarkumiya area in the South Hebron Hills.
Gaps in the separation barrier are used by Palestinians to enter Israel illegally without the proper permits. The assailant behind the Jaffa attack entered Israel illegally, from a West Bank village near Qalqilya. In recent months, opposition chair MK Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) called on Netanyahu to close the gaps and complete construction of the barrier... [Haaretz, today]

Most Israelis know to ignore the inevitable shrill criticism accusing us of apartheid and land-grabbing, particularly when it emanates from people who can't quite figure out how to condemn the people doing the stabbing, the shooting and the vehicle-ramming.

But at the end of the day, if fewer innocent people are going to be hurt on both sides by the completion of a half-built physical fence, then let it be.

15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem

From the Israeli social media, a snapshot
of one of the automatic weapons used in
tonight's shooting attack at Damascus
Gate [Image Source]

Late Sunday night, after a day of seriously violent Arab-on-Israeli attacks [see "14-Feb-16: Sunday bloody Sunday"], a pair of Palestinian Arabs armed with automatic weapons opened fire on a cluster of police officers standing at a Jerusalem Light Rail station serving the Old City of Jerusalem.

The attack, first reported around 11:00 pm, was launched at the exact spot where an earlier Palestinian Arab shooting-and-knifing attack had taken place twelve days ago. In that February 3, 2016 assault, a Border Police trainee officer, Hadar Cohen, aged just 19, was killed. [See "Palestinians Kill Israeli Officer Before Being Shot Dead", Associated Press via ABC News, February 3, 2016]

Tonight's shooting attack was directed at a group of Border Guard police officers near Damascus Gate. The gunmen had what Haaretz calls home-made Carl Gustav-style rifles.

According to Times of Israel, the officers returned fired, hitting and killing one of the gunmen immediately. They chased after the second, who fled the scene while continuing to shoot. That second attacker was soon hit and killed by police fire. There are thankfully no injuries to Israeli officers or bystanders.

The escalation in the nature and volume of Palestinian Arab attacks is a worrying development. But not necessarily for consumers of CNN's brand of news. After hundreds of knifings, vehicle rammings and shootings directed at Israeli civilians and security personnel, tonight's attack is explained this way by CNN's editors:

Israel has experienced a spate of violence since October.

Great work, guys. Analytic depth to be proud of.

14-Jan-16: In Indonesia's capital, a mall and a Starbucks now under terror attack

From Australia's Channel 9 News:

A massive police operation is now underway in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta following a series of deadly explosions that has left at least seven dead. Several blasts rocked the area around a popular shopping centre, the Sarinah at the crossroads of Thamrin Road and Wahid Haysim Street, as suicide bombers and gunmen carried out attacks on a Starbucks café and a nearby police post about 10.30am local time (2.30pm AEDT). Jakarta police spokesman Colonel Muhammad Iqbal said the explosions had killed seven people, including four of the attackers.
Video from the scene shows at least one attacker detonating a suicide vest near the shopping centre, exploding as he approaches the building. Indonesian media has reported that three suicide bombers targeted the Starbucks in the shopping centre, while two gunmen attacked the police station, triggering a gunfight.
It is understood some of the attackers are now holed up in a nearby building, with police surrounding them. There has been at least one fresh explosion nearby as dozens of counter terrorism police moved in on the building. Counter terrorism police are searching several nearby buildings, including a McDonald’s, and occasional gunshots are still ringing out. Local authorities have confirmed a police officer died during the attacks.

Police crouch outside the Starbucks an hour ago [Image Source]

It's summer in the southern hemisphere and Australians travel in large numbers to holiday in Indonesia. Over at The Age (Melbourne), they are reporting on

at least seven explosions... in Central Jakarta on Thursday, including two suicide bombings... Explosions occurred near Sarinah, a shopping mall in Central Jakarta, near office buildings and fast food outlets... There are other unconfirmed reports of similar explosions in Cikini (Central Jakarta), Kuningan (South Jakarta), Simatupang (South Jakarta) and Slipi (South Jakarta), as well as reports of gunshots in the area of Palmerah (West Jakarta). 

CNN are quoting

one analyst (who) likened the timed attacks to the Paris massacre where ISIS struck several locations at the same time.

The disingenuous BBC, caught up as usual in a bout of self-muting corporate bashfulness about calling this attack what it is and what everyone knows it is, is currently confining itself to such purely-functional descriptors as "series of bomb blasts", "further explosions", "gunfire", "suspected attackers" (because you wouldn't want to prejudice the potential legal case against the men hurling the bombs and firing the automatic rifles by making assumptions, Heaven forbid). The editors at the BBC leave it to a local political figure, the Indonesian president Joko Widodo, to extract them from their politically-correct know-nothingness by providing a quote, naturally inside a pair of quotation marks, that this is an "act of terror". Thank you, Mr Widodo, and good luck in the challenging days undoubtedly lying ahead.

(Some of our previous Indonesia-focused blog posts are here.)

30-Nov-15: Incitement to savagery costs lives on all sides so why doesn't everyone want to shut it down?

Ahlam Tamimi: It's not every day you see the parents of a murdered child
posting an image as explicit as this one depicting the now-free-as-a-bird 
socipathic killer exulting merrily over what she did

If you saw another of our posts today ["30-Nov-15: Radio that kills: silencing it"], you will be aware that incitement to killing and violence has gotten some of the Israeli government's attention in recent days and for deadly serious reasons.

Now there's a related move, this time, perhaps surprisingly, attributed to the Mahmoud Abbas regime in Ramallah:

The Palestinian Authority on Monday instructed its broadcasting authority to indefinitely suspend Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV programming in the West Bank. “The PA’s security apparatuses have announced officially to all broadcasters in the West Bank that they are forbidden from airing the Al-Aqsa network,” Hamas confirmed in a statement on Facebook. Israeli watchdog groups have long-claimed Al-Aqsa TV promotes terrorist activity, teaches anti-Semitism and incites hatred of Israelis, especially in its programming for children. Monday’s move was seen as an attempt by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas to tackle Hamas “incitement” and in so doing to curb the almost-daily clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian rioters. ["PA orders Hamas TV off the air in West Bank", Times of Israel, November 30, 2015]

Incitement is expensive in terms of lives lost and ruined on all sides of the conflict. We know about the cost from up close. It might not surprise to know that we have a very personal interest in this.

Our daughter's murderer, a woman called Ahlam Tamimi who was in her early twenties at the time, was charged with 15 counts of murder for engineering the August 9, 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. For this, she was tried, convicted on her own comprehensive and unblinking admission, and eventually sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment. Along with the judgment, the panel of three judges saw fit to add an explicit recommendation: that no consideration ever be given by the Israeli authorities to releasing her early.

This was ignored.

In October 2011, she walked free, her life-sentences conditionally commuted (there were very real conditions), and went back to Jordan where she had been born and where her family live.

We warned whoever would listen [via the BBC for instance, as well as NPR, Canada's CBC, Haaretz, The Guardian, CNN, Le Figaro and dozens of other mainstream media channels] that she was not done with terrorism. This proved, of course, to be right and then some.

Tamimi's influence has grown greatly since her release. As we noted in this blog some months ago

[I]n December [2014] she was proclaimed the "Success Model" of the students at the Arab world's most important graduate school for journalists, an institution [called the Jordan Media Institute] modeled on the Columbia School of Journalism and founded by the woman previously known as Rym Brahimi who graduated Columbia and who then spent years working as an on-camera reporter for CNN. As Princess Rym Ali, she is now the king of Jordan's sister-in-law.

Tamimi travels freely and often throughout the Arab world. And she hosts a weekly television program on the Al-Aqsa TV. As we noted in an earlier post ["6-May-12: What lies behind freedom of the Palestinian Arab press?"], starting in February 2012, just four months after her release from an Israeli prison cell, her career

has been on a sharply-upward trajectory. She got her own glossy television program that is beamed by satellite every Friday night into all parts of the Arabic speaking world via the Al-Quds TV channel. That's one of two global-facing television channels operated by the Hamas terrorist regime; the other is called Al-Aqsa TV. Her weekly program, "Naseem Al Ahrar" (translation: “Breezes of the Free”) focuses on the injustices allegedly visited on Palestinian Arab prisoners languishing in Israeli custody... [A]t the age of 31, this woman possesses one of the most prominent and influential platforms that an Arabic-only journalist could ever dream of having. 

Tamimi hosting the March 23, 2015 edition of her weekly televised paean to
terrorism, Islamist-style, produced in Jordan for Hamas and beamed
throughout the world

Tamimi was the first female terrorist in the ranks of the blood-soaked Hamas jihad organization. Her undiminished enthusiasm for its barbarism is widely advertised on the web.

In 1999, under Jordan's then and current ruler, King Abdullah II and shortly after the death of his father King Hussein, the Hashemite Kingdom banned Hamas. Fearing the presence of "radical Islamic elements", it accused Hamas of engaging in "illegitimate activities within Jordan" and "clandestine paramilitary training and... of penetrating local fundamentalist opposition parties". Khaled Mashaal, who today heads Hamas, was arrested that year on returning to Jordan from a visit to Iran but - reflecting the tightrope-walking for which the kingdom is famous - the Jordanian king very soon afterwards flew him by private jet into "exile". That's how he came to live in Syria for some years, before trading that for considerably more-glossy Qatar where he currently resides.

A New York Times report at the time said the Jordanians

adamantly denied that the [Jordanian kingdom's] crackdown had been conducted at the behest of Washington or Israel. But they acknowledged that the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, had asked Amman to take action against what he saw as a dangerous source of rebellion against his peace negotiations with Israel. 

Quoting an Indian newspaper from November 22, 1999, one source said that Hamas leaders were warned by Jordan that "firm action would be taken if the Palestinian organization resumed its activities on Jordanian soil".

Our impression is that this "firm action" has never been taken very seriously. The reality is clear in the way the Hashemite regime has consistently turned a blind eye to the production in Amman each week of "Naseem Al Ahrar", the Hamas TV show that Tamimi fronts. That has been the case for nearly four years.

How difficult is it to see the evidence? It's not. The Tamimi show is easy to find and to watch, even for people living far from the Middle East. YouTube hosts an Al-Quds channel where more than 170 episodes [click to see an interactive list] of Ahlam Tamimi's weekly tribute to terrorism and terrorists are stored and viewable online, though without Arabic-to-English subtitles. We have watched many of them. With the help of Arabic-speaking friends, we have come to understand that this loathsome young woman with a cold passion for murder [view this 2012 video with English subtitles] may be one of the most powerful marketing tools in the entire murderous Hamas arsenal.

On the day she returned to Amman after being conditionally freed in an
extortion deal, Tamimi arrived at Jordan's Family Court for a reception in
her honour, one of many that followed throughout the
Arab world, but especially in Jordan [Image Source]

We pointed out above that all the Al-Quds programming is beamed throughout the world by satellite to wherever there are potential audiences i.e. Arabic speakers. This means there's almost nowhere on earth where ordinary Arabic-speaking folk with access to satellite programming can't watch their favorite jihadist.

But in the internet age, even that's more technology than a person needs. Click here to see a long list of streaming sites that will bring the same message of terrorist "heroism" and dead Jews onto the laptop, smartphone or home computer of anyone with a connection to the web.

That includes the Al-Quds website itself; it's streaming live Al-Quds programming into our home as we write this. Obviously most of our readers probably don't speak Arabic. But all of us live among many people who do. In the privacy of their homes or phone screens, access to this hateful, violent programming is just a click away. The success of the Tamimi show, running for four years and going strong, testifies to those global clicks.

The Tamimi story raises troubling questions. Among them:

• Why does Jordan, which even now bans Hamas from its territory, allow hateful extremist Hamas TV programming to be created and up-beamed weekly (at least) from downtown Amman? 
• If the Palestinian Authority has silenced Al-Quds and Tamimi, why does Jordan not immediately follow suit?
• Why do Jordan's friends, the countries with whom it has diplomatic relations (for instance the United Kingdom, Denmark, Switzerland, the Vatican, the United States, Sweden, the EU, Australia and many others) not whisper into the Jordanian authorities' ears and suggest this does not advance Jordan's interests? Ordinary folk who live in those places can easily notify their politicians and especially their foreign ministries of how repugnant it is to them that their country turns a blind eye to the Jordanian indulgence of lethal incitement.
• Why, knowing who Tamimi is and what she stands for, the pride she takes in the massacre she engineered, in the deaths she caused, don't those ambassadors accredited to Jordan explain to their diplomatic hosts what they already know: that the Jordanians, by turning a blind eye or (which is just as likely) encouraging Tamimi's missionizing for Hamas, are active participants in incitement to murder by their actions and by their failures to act? People are being killed.

From experience, we don't have much faith in the power of petitions. We managed to sign up more than 8,000 people from all over the world in the space of three days back in 2011 when we badly wanted to stop Tamimi, our child's killer, walking free. Other than an exercise in raising consciousness, the effort was mostly a painful and frustrating waste of time and effort.

We prefer on this issue to publicize our request by bringing it to the attention of the decision-makers in Jordan and in countries friendly with Jordan. We need help in doing that - help from people who understand how serious the issue of incitement to terrorism is and who care. 

Please comment below if you can offer some concrete suggestions, or email us at thisongoingwar (at) gmail.com

21-May-15: Why is this man still free? Human rights, the Qataris, dignity and football

2010 announcement by FIFA that Qatar was the successful bidder
to host the 20122 Mondial. That's the previous Qatari emir
beaming on the left.

Something about terrorism - it's clearer to us as the years go by - makes rational, otherwise intelligent people act irresponsibly and strangely. They may have a well-developed sense of right and wrong, of lawful and illicit, of moral and bestial. But once terror is added to the reality with which they cope, odd results follow.

And this is as true of governments and major international organizations as it is of prominent people and ordinary folk. And individuals throughout the length and breadth of the mass media and the news reporting industry. The engineer of the massacre that ended our daughter's life is living proof (see at the end of this post).

We focused some blog attention here on Qatar earlier this week. Our two posts looked at the outrageous arrest there of a BBC reporting team and the connection this had to one of the world's richest and most watched sporting events, the FIFA World Cup which (at least for now) is going to be hosted by Qatar in seven years. See "18-May-15: As the Qatari thug says, Disneyland it's not" and "18-May-15: Peeking behind Qatar's genteel, manicured and increasingly disastrous public relations".

Negative mass-media news about Qatar is not so common. Partly, this seems to be a function of the branding for which Qatar's management seems to have a considerable appetite. In itself, it's a subject worthy of close attention (and here's a good methodological starting point).

Qatar had been our minds before this too, mainly because of the way it's widely treated as a country while acting like a family business (there are numerous such states in the Arab world). And also because Qatar is perceived by people whose views we take seriously as a global player in the business of terrorism. It has stood close to the Hamas thugs for years, side-by-side, giving them protection, money, cover, a conduit to the civilized world, and a safe haven for its leading figures (who make no secret of it) to set up personal luxury residences and live - comfortably and well.

Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, is greeted by President
Obama at White House, May 13, 2015 [Image Source]

Yet watch some of the world's major television networks - especially CNN International and BBC World - and advertisements for Qatar itself, for its airline, for its tourist attractions (2006; 2011, 2012) and its businesses, seem to appear at a rate and frequency ridiculously out of proportion to a country that has a mere 300,000 citizens. Then of course there's Qatar's own home-grown global network, the fully-owned-by-Qatar Aljazeera. Confidential US State Department cables exposed by Wikileaks said [see The Guardian] it had "proved itself a useful tool for the station's political masters". The reference is to the owners of Qatar, the Al-Thanis.

Those advertising funds that find their way to CNN and other outlets seem to deliver nice returns on investment. See "On CNN International, the ‘news’ isn’t always the news" [Columbia Journalism Review, October 28, 2014] for an indication of how that process works.

Looking at Qatar and its acceptance in polite circles around the world gets a person thinking. Being frank, that's especially so when you are the parents of a child murdered by the pampered proteges of Qatar's owners and operators [see  "30-Jul-14: Is Qatar's stupendous wealth connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?"]. In fact, the more we learn about aspects of the role Qatar and its dealings play on the rest of the world, the sharper is the somewhat bizarre picture that emerges. 

Qatar's Al-Nu'aymi: Man of many parts,
still walking and living free

It's unlikely most readers will immediately recognize the name Abdurrahman bin Omair Al-Nu'aymi. (Eleven different ways to write it appear in this US government press release). He's a Qatari with a distinguished profile: a one-time professor of history at Qatar University (though we don't see his name there now); an advisor to the Qatar government and well-connected to its ruling elite; a one-time president of the Qatar Football Association; an activist for a certain sort of human-rights; and, in Islamic terms, a conservative. So much so that...

When the Emir decided in 1998 to give women the right to vote, protests were heard from Islamists. One of these was Dr. Abd al-Rahman bin Umayr al-Nu’aymi, professor of history at Qatar University. He was so vocal that the emir had him arrested and put in jail, although they were friends. After a thousand days without a trial, Dr. Nu’aimi was released, but he still expresses his conservative Islamic views and heads an important intellectual center. [Source]

Prison seems not to have been an obstacle to his rise. In 2004, Al-Nu'aymi went on to co-found al-Karama (from the Arabic word for dignity), a Geneva-based NGO that purported to "uncover human rights violations in the Arab world and to help victims", and became its top official. It has a strange Wikipedia page that clearly was written, in part, by its own officers, and claims that it sought:

to contribute to an Arab World where all individuals live free, in dignity, and protected by the rule of law. With this goal in mind, the founders decided to address the most serious violations of human dignity, physical integrity and freedom, namely extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and arbitrary detention... [and] contribute to a better understanding of human rights and raise awareness of the UN's human rights protection mechanisms in the Arab civil society... Alkarama's action, documenting and denouncing violations, has made many States in, or with interests in the region resent its work, which has led to reprisals against our organisation (smear campaigns, trials and arrests of members, accusations that the organisation was pro-Israeli, pro-Qatari, protecting terrorists or supporting political groups and other contradictory accusations)... Alkarama unambiguously and irrevocably denies all these accusations... [Wikipedia]

Along the way, Al-Nu'aymi became deeply involved with money.

The Al-Karama body went on to forge ties with the United Nations, with multiple UN organs, and with notable players in the human rights industry including Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Gulf Center for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others [one source; another source]. As the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor noted [here, December 23, 2013], this raises troubling questions regarding "the lack of due diligence and professional judgment of NGOs when selecting allies... [T]hese organizations have an obligation to review the status of the officials responsible for such collaborations, alliances, and affiliations."

When terrorism charges were leveled at its president, Al-Karama found itself profiled in a Swiss business magazine article in December 2013 ["President of Swiss foundation al Qaeda's banker?"] (The article claims Al-Nu'aymi stepped down as head of the organization once the allegations were out in the open. But the same Wikipedia profile cites a source ["Press Release by the Council of the Alkarama Foundation, 8 January 2014, retrieved 16 January 2014"] claiming the board rejected his resignation.)

What was he alleged to have done?

In November 2014, a detailed expose in the UK's Telegraph newspaper ["Terror financiers are living freely in Qatar, US discloses" | The Telegraph UK, November 16, 2014] called him one of "al-Qaeda’s most senior financiers". Al-Nu'aymi was added to the US sanctions list and identified as a terrorist at the end of 2013. The British only got around to doing the same ten months later [source].

The claims are [see "Money Trail: Terrorists for Human Rights", Eli Lake in The Daily Beast, December 20, 2013] that as a major source of funding for Islamist terrorists, Al-Nu'aymi

oversaw the transfer of hundreds of thousands of dollars to al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen over the last 11 years. In 2013, the [US government's announcement] says, al-Naimi ordered the transfer of nearly $600,000 to al Qaeda via the group’s representative in Syria... If the Treasury Department’s allegations are correct, the story of al-Naimi, who until Thursday was the president of al-Karama’s board, illustrates how sometimes human-rights advocacy can also be used as political cover for jihadist networks... [The Daily Beast]

Qatar's Emir Al-Thani, is greeted by Queen Elizabeth II
in London, October 29, 2014 [Image Source]

The Telegraph quotes some very damning statements about the man and even more so about Qatar, coming from David Cohen, the US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

Mr Cohen has accused Qatar and its near neighbour Kuwait of being “permissive jurisdictions for terrorist financing” but until now the fate of a number of money men — identified as Specially Designated Global Terrorists by the US government — has not been known.Qatar has refused to say what has happened [to al-Nuaimi and another terror-funder who are] accused of raising millions of dollars for al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups... The revelation casts serious doubt on the Gulf state’s insistence that it does not support terrorists, including jihadists in Syria and Iraq... Al-Nuaymi, a former president of the Qatar Football Association, is accused of being one of the world’s most prolific terrorist fundraisers, accused of sending more than £1.25 million a month to al-Qaeda jihadists in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of pounds to Syria. He was designated a terrorist in the US last December and added to a British sanctions list only in October this year. [Qatar] introduced a designated terrorist list but to date not a single individual has been put on it... The US treasury believes countries such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have clamped down on jihadist financiers in recent months whereas Qatar and Kuwait have failed to tackle the issue — much to the frustration of Washington. The US... is wary about the Qatari government’s overt support for Hamas and also for the Muslim Brotherhood... Mr Cohen added: “There’s more work to do both in Qatar and Kuwait. We have been deeply engaged with both countries for a number of years. We have seen others make really substantial progress in combating terrorist financing.

It then quotes a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, who believes Cohen's revelation

proves meaningful cooperation behind the scenes [between Qatar and the West] is virtually nonexistent. “It suggests maybe the Qataris are quite happy being a permissive jurisdiction for terrorist finance. It may also bear noting that the previous emir of Qatar has reportedly praised Nuaymi as his old friend. Arrests, indictments and convictions are only one dimension of whether Qatar is taking the fight against terrorism seriously, but historically it is one of several dimensions in which the [ruling] al-Thani family has miserably failed the test. [David Weinberg, The Telegraph UK, November 16, 2014]

Qatar's response to this is more interesting than we might have expected:

In his only broadcast interview the current emir, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, said “We don’t fund extremists” and explained that terrorism was “not acceptable in our culture and our religion”. [Then adds:] “There are differences between some countries, of who are the terrorists and who are the maybe Islamist groups, but we don’t consider them as terrorists.” [The Telegraph UK]

And that is what this is all about.

Qatar is not so different from most places. "You may say these people are terrorists but we disagree." The UK knows the man is central to the world of Islamist terror but finds it hard to actually do anything about it. Might this be connected to the phenomenal wave of Qatari investment that has found its way into the London property market, and into UK business in general?

A very partial description of Qatar's investment portfolio includes significant ownership stakes in British Airways, the Barcelona soccer team, Volkswagen, Porsche, Barclays Bank, Sainsbury's, Miramax, Canary Wharf, Royal Dutch Shell, London's Chelsea Barracks, London's Savoy Hotel, the luxury Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, One Hyde Park ("the world’s most expensive apartment block", the London Stock Exchange, as well as complete ownership of Harrods, Credit Suisse's London headquarters, the French football club Paris Saint-Germain, the famous London office tower The Shard, the US embassy building in Grosvenor Square, and a long list of London's choicest real estate trophies as catalogued by the Daily Mail UK. It funds religious institutions in Europe that propagate a message of "radical Islam", and is a major funder worldwide of the work of the Muslim Brotherhood. On the far side of the Atlantic, it provides lavish funding for the hugely-influential Washington-based Brookings Institution, and signed colossally-large arms-purchase agreements with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing and other US suppliers in March 2014. The list goes on and on.

Direct from friendly, supportive Qatar: Proud, unrepentant
celebrity terrorist interviews happy (and free) fellow
convicted murderers of Jewish children [Screen capture from video]

A recent item in New Statesman ["How Qatar bought London"] quotes a British trade union source warning that "Britain has to ensure that it never falls out with Qatar, or one day we might wake up and find this Gulf state has us at its mercy".

But as we have learned to our sorrow, it's not only in Qatar that people look the other way when Islamist terrorists walk freely in their midst.

For the record, our daughter's murderer had no difficulty going to Qatar in 2013 from her home base in Jordan and basing herself and her team there to film an episode of her weekly television show - the one that exists to rejoice in the killing of Jewish children and the 'heroism' of her fellow terrorist savages. Click on this YouTube clip to watch as she giggles and beams her way through an hour of interviews with other freed Shalit Deal murderers living in Qatar with their new, young families.

As with so much else in the Qatar story, the evidence is plain for anyone who wants to see.