02-Jul-23: A festival, a funeral and failed leaders

Tamimi is a featured interviewee on Al-Aqsa TV (and Facebook) June 30, 2023

America's most wanted female fugitive made a featured appearance on global TV again this past Friday. 

Ahlam Tamimi, a designated FBI Most Wanted terrorist since March 2017, looked jubilant as the centerpiece of a 25 minute interview on the Al-Aqsa TV network. It's been beaming programs daily from Gaza to Arabic-speaking audiences in every part of the world since 2006. 

The background is worth knowing. In 2010, the US Department of the Treasury, calling it "a television station financed and controlled by Hamas", designated Al-Aqsa TV as 

a primary Hamas media outlet [that] airs programs and music videos designed to recruit children to become Hamas armed fighters and suicide bombers upon reaching adulthood. Treasury will not distinguish between a business financed and controlled by a terrorist group, such as Al-Aqsa Television, and the terrorist group itself... [link]

Treasury designations like this one are intended to freeze assets held by the station and to

prohibit U.S. persons from engaging in any transactions with these parties. Executive Order 13224 targets terrorists, terrorist organizations, persons owned or controlled by or acting for or on behalf of designated terrorists or terrorist organizations, and those providing financial, material, or technological support to designated terrorists or terrorist organizations, or for acts of terrorism [Source]

Sounds fearsome. 

But for years, video programming that originates with Al-Aqsa TV has gotten a considerable part of its global distribution and exposure from Facebook. Could this amount to giving "financial, material, or technological support to designated terrorists"? It's a question that was posed in the past.

Ahlam Tamimi, who has long called her central role in the massacre of Jewish children in Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 "a crown on my head", was interviewed live on Friday June 30, 2023 in a program marking the festival of Eid al Adha. 

The adulatory interview, entirely devoid of criticism and long on compliments and adulation, ran for 25 minutes on Al-Aqsa TV that day. It remains viewable now on Facebook [here].

Rambling and unfocused, with lengthy elements of theology, it calls for understanding of the greatness of what jihadists like Tamimi see themselves personifying. When Tamimi has the media's attention, it's generally about her dedication, her determination, her victimhood. And sometimes about her skillful cooking:

...I mean, I am a professional in making Jordanian mansaf [lamb cooked in fermented dried yogurt, served with rice or bulgur - considered the national dish of Jordan]... I mean, I make mansaf and feed everyone, God willing. I want to talk. Mansaf is also one of the dishes that Nizar and I love. Most Palestinian prisoners and editors also love this dish. On the other hand, I mean, if I want to compare to you, we used to make Mansaf in prison. No one asked me this question honestly. The method of making it in prison is completely different from the way it is made in. In freedom, God willing, in future episodes. If you want to talk about this talk, it is necessary, we would love it very much.

This, remember, is an interview with a confessed mass murderer.

* * *

Until a month ago, the death toll that resulted from Tamimi's August 9, 2001 execution of an act of violent savagery on behalf of Hamas was 15. 

Two of those killed were Americans. Our daughter Malka Chana Roth, 15, was one. And a young American Jewish tourist (and her parents' only child) visiting Jerusalem briefly while pregnant for the first time, was the other. Sveeral American nationals were injured.  

The number of murdered rose to 16 on May 30, 2023. Chana Tova Nachenberg had been profoundly injured in the Sbarro bombing when a splinter of shrapnel penetrated her skull, rendering her comatose - but sparing her toddler daughter. A month ago, she died in a Tel Aviv hospice, having never recovered consciousness throughout the nearly twenty-two years that ensued. 

Chana Finer Nachenberg's grave

Her closest family - parents, husband, only child - visited her for years, praying, hoping, weaping, wishing for a miracle that never came. 

Then the vigil came to an end.

We hope none of them ever hears Tamimi wail, as she did on Al-Aqsa this past Friday, about how

I am trying to be happy and get joy. But I mean, the family entity has been shaken because of this forced distance, because of constant demands, constant pursuit. However there is no listening ear to our cause as if [it were we who] committed the massacres of the whole world. They want to put the blame on my back and Nizar's back. [Source]

Her family entity has been shaken, says Tamimi, the proud murderer? It's a reference to how Nizar Tamimi, her husband and cousin, an unrepentant convicted murderer imprisoned for life and freed, like Ahlam Tamimi, in the notorious Shalit Deal in 2011, now lives free in Qatar after Jordan declared him persona non grata in 2020 ["Jordan deports Sbarro bomber’s husband, also a convicted terrorist, to Qatar", Times of Israel, October 13, 2020]

But the presenter, like every presenter of every interview Tamimi has done in all her years of obscene celebrity, doesn't once mention the children this barbarian blew to pieces. 

In the Arabic-language media, there is zero interest in addressing the humanity of Tamimi's murdered victims. Tamimi herself has said repeatedly she has no regrets. She would do it again if she could. 

In a startlingly large number of Arab media outlets, our beautiful fifteen year old daughter is repeatedly called "zionist rapist". So are all the other Sbarro pizzeria victims, some of whom never reached their teens. 

The horror is not limited to Tamimi.

* * *

The dedication ceremony at the fresh graveside of Chana Tova Nachenberg this past Friday included no references to more violence. No calls for revenge. No bitterness or anger. But much heartbreaking wistfulness, deep longing, love.

The FBI issued a Most Wanted Terrorist poster for Ahlam Tamimi in March 2017. It says she's dangerous and likely armed. You can see the English and Arabic versions here.

In the past week, evidently triggered by the increase after so many years of the number of dead, and of the Americans among them, the FBI with no fanfare has just issued an updated version which shows Tamimi looking 43 years old. It also updates the death toll.

King Hussein and President Clinton

What it doesn't say, at least not in the way we think should be said, is that Ahlam Tamimi remains free, a celebrity, safe under the illicit protection of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. 

Why illicit? 

Because a 1995 extradition treaty made between the William J. Clinton administration and the late King Hussein of Jordan, the father of today's Jordanian ruler, gives Jordan no discretion in the matter. 

If pursuant to the treaty America asks for the handover of a fugitive wanted by the US justice system which Tamimi certainly is, Jordan can really only ask "Which flight?" 

Jordan has issued a host of alibis and made-up rationales to conceal the truth of why it refuses to extradite Tamim to Washington where she began facing terror charges under seal in July 2013. (The charges were made public only on March 14, 2017 after years of unproiductive efforts by the United States to induce Jordanian compliance with its undoubted treaty obligation.)

From speaking with a wide selection of authorities, it's clear to us that Jordan's self-excusing acrobatics aren't taken seriously by anyone. 

It's also worth noting that in the formal ratification document signed back in 1995 (we obtained the documents by personally suing the State Department), King Hussein expressing himself in formalized language (and understandably using the Royal "We") says that Jordan pledges

to carry out its provisions and abide by its articles and... shall not allow its violation. Accordingly We have ordered that Our Seal be affixed to it and We have signed it properly 

Jordan did in fact observe the provisions and articles of the treaty appropriately and conscientiously every time the US requested an extradition, as a treaty partner of course must. That however came to an end with the Tamimi case, years after King Hussein's death.

* * *

It's hard to ignore how Tamimi's continued freedom, her encouragement of more terror, her glorification of the murders she carried out, her inciting of others to do the same, all get buried again and again by those who ought to have taken action years ago. 

Since this is about justice, there's plenty of disgrace to go around.

* * *

This post, like many others before it, has been translated into the Polish language ("Święto, pogrzeb i nieudane przywództwo") by Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.

02-Oct-15: Google the name of the young Israeli parents murdered in their car last night...

After the attack [Image Source]

Understanding the mindset of Israelis on the morning after a murder-by-shooting attack on an anonymous vehicle traveling one of the roads of the Samarian hills doesn't come easy to certain sorts of onlookers.

Those for instance who responded within minutes to the cold-blooded killings on Thursday night by casually, thoughtlessly, coldly dismissing the victims as "colonists" in the way that one especially loathsome commentator, an Arab with a vile track-record of similar publicly-expressed hatefulness did.

And as did another, the self-possessed privileged son of an American family with Jewish roots (whose father has for years been one of Hilary Clinton's closest advisers) and who recently was awarded the special 'honor' of being banned by the speaker of the German federal parliament from trying again to enter the Bundestag; in Germany they have an acute sensitivity to, and relatively little patience for, boorish anti-Jewish extremism of the kind he practices.

Outside Israel, the fact of the murder is barely known. The usual reason - very little interest by news channels in reporting it. We assume this will change if and when some act perceived as retaliatory can be identified and blamed on Israelis.

Meanwhile, having just Googled the name of the murdered couple - Henkin, an unusually distinguished family - it's terribly sad, but not at all surprising to anyone aware of how these things work that almost no non-Israeli news sites come up. Here's an archived copy of the search result as at 10:00 am, Friday morning. It speaks for itself. Or perhaps better to say it weeps.

Google News search result for "Henkin"

We don't know the Henkin family personally, though their extremely positive reputation goes before them. But while we doubt many people outside Jewish circles are going to notice or care, we want to point out that they are not going to lead riots in the streets of Arab towns. They will not be calling for murderous attacks on the parents of Palestinian Arab children. It's unlikely they will summing up ancient curses or bad-mouthing those who give succor and support to the killers. Burning rubber tyres in public squares is not going to be on their minds.

As with so very, very many Jews and Israelis who have endured the unspeakably destructive intrusion of hateful, extreme violence into their lives, they are going to be looking to connect their tragedy to positive actions, likely in the realm of education.

This is going to be hard for the likes of the hideous "activists" we mentioned above to understand. Nonetheless, it's a rock-solid reality of Jewish values and Jewish life.

Such Jewish responses don't relieve the bottomless pain or the sense of total irrecoverable loss. They don't heal the sense of injustice and grief. They surely don't bring back those stolen lives. But engaging in them allows us to look ourselves in the mirror in the aftermath of unthinkable catastrophes like the carefully calculated one that last night that created four new orphans and say to ourselves: Thankfully, we're nothing like the people who did this, or those who provide them with cover and shelter. We never have been. We never will be. There is neither symmetry nor two sides of a coin.

May the memories of the Henkins be a blessing, and a source of inspiration for more positive acts of goodness, kindness and light.

24-Jul-15: Terror here? 'Ridiculous' say Kenyans, deploying their largest ever security blanket

CNN as depicted on a Kenyan tweeter's stream

As the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the free world gets started with a visit to East Africa (check out the Twitter hashtag #ObamaHomecoming) today, aspects of the media messaging are getting up some Kenyan noses.

Kenyans ridicule CNN for calling the country a “hotbed of terror” |  Quartz Africa | July 23, 2015 | Kenyans are demanding an apology from CNN after the news network described Kenya as “a hotbed of terror” in a report on US president Barack Obama’s visit this week. “If CNN is civilized enough, they should apologize,” interior minister Joseph Nkaisserry said today, in response to anger on social media. Under the hashtag #SomeoneTellCNN, Kenyans have been voicing both impatience with being branded as a country rife with violence as well as pride in their country...

A Nairobi, shopping mall after a random event September 2013
[Image Source]

No reason to especially blame the Kenyans, who are looking beyond the idea of an Islamist terror war against unbelievers to make a case of a more nuanced kind.

They are doing pretty much the same as many Americans did after 9/11; as many Brits did after 7/7; as many Spanish did after 11-M; and as President Obama himself did when he called the people behind an attack on a French kosher food store in January 2015

"a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris... But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we've got to make sure we're right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn't counterproductive." [Obama speaking to Matthew Yglesias in a VOX interview]

Obama has never publicly commented on the post-massacre disclosures about the passions of Amedy Coulibaly, who did the killing, for ISIS and the lethal savagery for which it stands. Perhaps, like the Kenyans, he or his advisers would ridicule those claims too, and carry with them a large slice of American public opinion. Or call them "random" as his spokesperson did in front of the media right after the killing of those French Jews.

Today's Kenyan state of excitement [Image Source]

Calling what has been happening in Kenya something other than terror or imagining that the violence upending thousands of East African lives during the past two decades (and especially the past two years) has been routine and unworthy of any special attention is tragic if it leads to paralysis of the security authorities.

Fortunately for the traveling US president, the authorities in Kenya don't play that foolish game:

Parts of the Kenyan capital Nairobi have been locked down and airspace will be closed during the president's arrival late Friday and his departure late Sunday... At least 10,000 police officers, roughly a quarter of the entire national force, have been deployed to the capital. Top of the list of security concerns is Somalia's Shebab militants, who have staged a string of suicide attacks, massacres and bombings on Kenyan soil, including the bloody attack on the Westgate shopping mall in the heart of the capital nearly two years ago that left 67 dead. ["Kenya lockdown as Obama comes to talk security, trade", Reuters, today]

It's not only the Kenyans who are (rightly) concerned:

Hundreds of US security personnel have arrived in Kenya in recent weeks and three hotels have been examined by the secret service, according to local media... Kenya is treating the visit as a chance to shine, akin to an Olympics or a football World Cup, and is all too aware how catastrophic another terrorist attack would be for its image. Three months ago Islamist militants murdered 148 people at a university in Garissa, while an attack on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall left at least 67 people dead less than two years ago... ["Kenya kicks off biggest ever security operation for Barack Obama welcome", The Guardian, today]

For short-of-memory readers, a random selection of some of our recent Kenya-focused posts:

• 3-May-13: Kenya discovers it is hosting a "vast network" of terrorists; convicts two Iranians and hopes for the best
• 23-Sep-13: Root cause of terrorism? Shopping malls, says Guardian columnist
• 27-Sep-13: Freeing terrorists and the Nairobi massacre
• 23-Sep-13: The fog of Nairobi
• 9-Oct-13: A very bad month, says New Yorker mag, with worse probably ahead
• 16-May-14: More jihadist killings in East Africa today
• 20-Sep-14: Iran is not commenting but Kenya may have just thwarted another Iranian terror attack

President Obama on the right, with father [Image Source]

How likely is it that the mainstream media will give attention during the Obama Kenya visit to his brother?

The extended Obama family is not small (here's an overview). We specifically mean Abon'go Malik Obama (known as Abongo or Roy), a University of Nairobi graduate who spent a decade and a half in the US working in the back-offices of Lockheed, Fannie Mae, and the American Red Cross [source]. He served as best man at Barack and Michelle Obama's wedding, and BHO did the same at several of the brother's weddings (there have been twelve). He runs a charitable foundation whose website calls him "founder" and which is

committed to a wide array of development and humanitarian projects which will help mitigate social-shortcomings in areas of education and literacy, health and well-being, poverty, and lack of community infrastructure in such basic needs such as water, electricity, shelter and sustenance... [source]

The Barack H. Obama Foundation (entirely unrelated to the Barack Obama Foundation) earned US tax-exempt status in 2011 in record-breaking time - about a week when for most applicants it takes many months, and for some, year. (Why this happened has been the subject of speculation.) It had claimed to be tax-exempt years earlier; fortunately once its approval came through [source], it was made retrospective for several years back. Talk about lucky.

Barack H. Obama, president of the United States, on the left of
a family snapshot held by his brother Malik (and other names),
a leader in a deeply troubling, terror-friendly organization
[Image Source]

But there are some puzzling aspects. Its US address is located in a UPS store. The address given in its IRS filings, namely 4201 Wilson Blvd., Suite 110-152, Arlington, Virginia, turns out to be the location of a marketing center for a drug-and-alcohol treatment organization, A Better Today Recovery Services.

When questioned about BHOF in May 2013, not a single employee in A Better Today's office had ever heard of the foundation... [source]

Most likely because of a misunderstanding.

As for Abon'go-Abongo-Roy-Malik Obama himself, the president's best man and an invited guest at the presidential inauguration, the allegations appearing across the web are considerably less benign.

He, it appears, serves as executive secretary of the Sudan-based Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO), an arm of the jihad-friendly government of Sudan, whose ruler since 1989, president Omar al-Bashir, has for years been the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, as yet not executed. IDO, under the president of the United States' brother, is said to stand for the expansion of Wahhabist Islam throughout Africa.

Though his political activities have been almost totally ignored by the global mainstream media, Haaretz ran a piece ["Obama's half brother photographed wearing Hamas kaffiyeh"] in January 2014 that focus on the Presidential Brother wearing an item of Arabic clothing on which are inscribed the random words "Jerusalem is ours – we are coming" and "From the river to the sea".

But the most troubling? That for the most part, the disturbing ties between the president of the US and a brother with serious question marks over his head are, along with the photos, almost totally ignored and unpublished by the mainstream media. (Parts of the conspiracy-friendly web and especially some parts of it conventionally labeled right-wing in outlook, seem to be the sole exceptions. Why?)

Troubled and troublesome brothers are nothing new for incumbents of the White House (Carter, Clinton), but we can't think of another instance where the sibling benefited from so extensive a media blackout. Makes a person wonder.

18-Jun-15: Saudi advice on showing love and compassion and dealing with others nicely

The political figure bending forward from the waist
(the White House is very definite that he was not bowing) before
the Saudi Arabian king in 2009 is President Barack Obama [Image Source]

What you think of Saudi Arabia – an entity that resembles a family business as much as it does a sovereign state - seems to depend, as with many things in life, on who you are and what you do in life.

How its owners think of their property and the people living in it can be gauged from a somewhat bizarre article that appears in a news report published a few hours ago by Arab News [“Saudi Arabia's first English-language newspaper... the daily's website gets hundreds of thousands of hits every day from Web surfers worldwide…”]. It’s headed “Shun violence, terror! King reiterates rejection of sectarianism”:

JEDDAH: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman on Wednesday urged Saudis and other Muslims to uphold the values of tolerance, love, unity and mercifulness, and reject violence and terrorism. In a message on the occasion of Ramadan, he reiterated Saudi Arabia’s total rejection of sectarianism based on different schools of religious thought, saying sectarianism would weaken the country’s unity and solidarity. “We have unlimited confidence in Saudi citizens and we’ll not show any leniency toward those who try to weaken the unity of Saudis and undermine the Kingdom’s security,” he said. The message, which was read out on Saudi Television by Culture and Information Minister Adel Al-Toraifi, the king described Ramadan as a month of goodness and blessings when God forgives sins of believers and saves them from Hell. “Islam is a religion of love, compassion and tolerance, and its message was sent by the Almighty as a mercy to the whole humanity,” the king said… The king stressed that Saudi Arabia’s humanitarian activities were not aimed at achieving any mundane benefits but to win the pleasure and reward of God. “We are happy to serve Muslims all over the world.” The king added: “Islam works for goodness and reform and promotes constructive activities. It follows moderation, backs dialogue and brings people together.” King Salman continued, “The holy month generates in our minds the feelings of empathy and compassion toward the fellow human beings. It also teaches us great lessons.” He called upon Muslims to make use of the great blessings of Ramadan through fasting, prayers and righteous deeds. “Muslims should do their duties in the best form and deal with others nicely.”

While those exhortations about moderation, goodness, reform, constructive activities, righteous deeds are still ringing in our ears:

A man was beheaded in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, with the convicted murderer's execution becoming the 89th case this year, according to an AFP count. The death toll has already overtaken the total for all of 2014. [RT, May 27, 2015]

For our part, we have written about Saudi Arabia here several times. We wonder whether Saudi Arabia’s actions exemplify (as its Custodian says above) Muslims dealing with each other nicely. We think not so much, but sometimes it’s better not to be judgmental. 

Here are some randomly selected slices of what we see when we look at the Saudis from our terror-centric standpoint:

• 25-Jan-15: Summing up the life of an absolute monarch in the mainstream media: “The Saudi political system, a blend of absolute monarchy and Islamic extremism, has one of the world's worst human rights records. There is no democracy and basic freedoms are limited… It punishes dissidents, including currently with multiple rounds of publicly lashing a blogger, amputates hands and legs for robbery, and enforces a system of gender restrictions that make women not just second-class citizens, but in many ways the property of men…”
• 19-Oct-14: Saudi Arabia's sense of where it fits in the war against the terrorists: “…All in all, the notion that the Saudi government claims to be at the "forefront of combating terrorism" raises some questions about what the word forefront could possibly mean when they use it.”
• 2-Apr-14: Charm, offense and antagonism-avoidance: “The country most closely identified with the 9/11 terrorists gets a flying visit from the world's most powerful political figure because America's policy makers see themselves in a charm offensive directed at a regime that calls its atheists terrorists. We're not sure about how much charm it generated. But offensive? Surely.”
• 11-Mar-13: Know the neighbours: Saudi Arabia: “A recent report about the jailing of human rights activists in Saudi Arabia got us thinking about what sort of country it really is. So allow us to share some of what we found in a brief hunt on the web…”

British prime minister David Cameron being invested with
the Saudi Order of King Abdul Aziz from King Abdullah in 2012. It's given
to foreigners for "meritorious service" to the Saudis [Image Source]

Then there’s the matter of how Saudi Arabia looks to its powerful customers, competing with each other for Saudi business and especially for Saudi investment.

The paragraphs below come from the official report of a debate in the UK Parliament’s House of Lords about the fate of (believe it or not) a blogger who has incurred the wrath of the Saudi insiders and may pay for this with his life. Lord Avebury, speaking last Thursday, asked

Her Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the government of Saudi Arabia about the confirmation of a sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison against Raif Badawi.

And got this answer from the UK’s Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Baroness Anelay of St Johns:

My Lords, we are extremely concerned about Raif Badawi’s case and have discussed it at the most senior levels in the Government of Saudi Arabia... The case is under active consideration and we will continue to watch it closely.

Not so reassured, another peer, the Lord Bishop of St Albans, pressed on with a pretty sharp question:

My Lords, your Lordships’ House will not be unaware of the discrepancy between the attitude to human rights displayed in Saudi Arabia’s public condemnation of the Charlie Hebdo atrocities and this case, where somebody is being punished on the basis of religion. Does the Minister agree that there is a considerable dissonance between the public image that Saudi Arabia is seeking to present and the country’s internal affairs?

Not a bad enquiry.  But the reply from the Baroness is a stunner:

My Lords, I think we have to recognise that the actions of the Saudi Government in these respects have the support of the vast majority of the Saudi population. Against that background blah blah blah

HRH Prince Charles, the prince of Wales, in Saudi
Arabia 2013 [Image Source]

and on she droned. 

Now think about her observation for a moment. One of the UK government’s most senior makers and executors of foreign policy says yes, we are watching, yes, we know as well as you what the Saudis do, but let’s not forget most Saudis support their leaders’ views.

Really? How she, or anyone, can know this is a puzzle. We tend towards the view, exemplified in an article by someone who studies such matters at the Washington Institute: 

What issues are of concern to ordinary Saudis? How does the average citizen view the state of the domestic economy? What are the prevailing public attitudes toward religious extremism? …Even in the short term, the Saudi government, while far from democratic, is no doubt sensitive to social crosscurrents and diverse reactions to its initiatives. As a result, understanding Saudi public opinion is an important part of gauging the country's likely future direction. Opinion polls, however, are almost unknown in the kingdom, and anecdotal or indirect measures of these very delicate subjects are notoriously unreliable.

A British commentator, writing about this two days ago in The Independent UK, asks what every Brit ought to consider shouting into their TVs or at their MPs:

How medieval does a regime have to be before ministers pause to consider the relationship? Three years ago today, Saudi Arabian police arrested Raif Badawi for the crime of running a website “that propagates liberal thought”. His blog had put the case for secularism in observations such as this: “States which are based on religion confine their people in the circle of faith and fear.” As if to prove his point, a Sharia court hauled Badawi back into the fearful circle, sentencing him to 600 lashes and seven years in jail for “going beyond the realm of obedience”. Last year, deciding that he had been let off too lightly, a judge upped the punishment to 1,000 lashes and 10 years’ imprisonment plus a fine of one million riyal (about £170,000). What does our government think of this? …No answer has yet been forthcoming. Perhaps the “vast majority” of Saudis are indeed fanatical sadists who rejoice to see liberal bloggers whipped. Or, then again, perhaps they aren’t. No one knows: this is an absolute monarchy, not a marginal in the West Midlands being polled by Lord Ashcroft. Even if you were a Saudi who deplored the flogging, you wouldn’t say so publicly… It’s almost as if the House of Saud is showing off to Isis, the new kid on the block: “Publicly beheading apostates? Pah. We were doing that when you were in nappies…” How medieval does a regime have to be before British ministers pause to consider whether it is one with which we can do business? So long as the regime in question remains our most lucrative export market for arms, the answer is: “My Lords, I think we have to recognise…”

Now keep in mind what it means when Her Majesty's British government supports policies that have the support of the vast majority of this foreign population or another. For instance, more than 70% of Palestinian Arabs, according to scientific and respected Arab-run opinion polls, support Hamas' blood-drenched approach to violence against Israelis. And more concretely, fully 80% support (and 20% oppose) attempts by individual Palestinians to stab or run over Israelis in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank as of December 2014. On any serious view, the Mahmoud Abbas PA regime honours those acts of terror and their perpetrators. So is Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office OK with those acts of murder-by-car too? 

(We have had some recent personal experience of trying to extract a rational response to terror-related questions from the British foreign policy establishment. We want to write about this in the next few days.)

Finally, a brief comment on how Saudi views are projected outside its own borders, in particular its views on terror. A senior figure at a serious-sounding Washington/London think-tank in a published January 2015 article sums that up for us:

[F]or decades the Saudis have also lavishly financed its propagation abroad. Exact numbers are not known, but it is thought that more than $100 billion have been spent on exporting fanatical Wahhabism to various much poorer Muslim nations worldwide over the past three decades. It might well be twice that number. By comparison, the Soviets spent about $7 billion spreading communism worldwide in the 70 years from 1921 and 1991... [A] Wikileaks cable clearly quotes then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." ...Other cables released by Wikileaks outline how Saudi front companies are also used to fund terrorism abroad.

Might be interesting to know Baroness Anelay of St Johns' view of that. 

19-Oct-14: Saudi Arabia's sense of where it fits in the war against the terrorists

Today's forward-looking Saudi Arabia [Image Source: BBC, October 2013]

Saudi Arabia "is at the forefront of combating terrorism" and believes strongly in "the need to take steps to spread the spirit of peaceful coexistence across the globe".

These and other startling revelations appear in an article entitled "Kingdom backs tough steps against terror" in Saturday's Arab News ("Saudi Arabia's first English-language newspaper... founded in 1975"), published in Riyadh. The report summarizes a speech delivered by by Dr. Ahmed Al-Salem, undersecretary at the Saudi Ministry of Interior, to the Crans Montana Homeland and Global Security Forum in Geneva this past week. (Here's a partial list of attendees.)

We don't mind admitting that we don't know much about Crans Montana or the Forum itself. It was established in 1986 and, though it is a Swiss entity, it is run from Monte Carlo, Monaco. The website of the organizers says:

Do not be surprised if after so many years you have not heard of the Crans Montana Forum – or very little. Indeed we do not invite the press and do not want media coverage in order to preserve the freedom and the quality of exchange of ideas that we organize... The Crans Montana Forum offers an alternative way to create, expand and deepen knowledge and business relationships in a unique and friendly atmosphere you will appreciate... Forums are not publicized. ["Crans Montana Forum: What makes us different"]

Notwithstanding the absence of the press, here is what the Saudi press says about the Saudi delegate's speech on the Saudi approach to terror. Given Saudi Arabia's deep, long and rich involvement in terror, these are comments worth noting (all direct quotes):

• “From our experience, it has become crystal clear that terror has no religion, no ethnicity and no nationality,” said Ahmed Al-Salem, undersecretary at the Ministry of Interior. “Fighting against terror ideology is as important as any other method adopted to combat terror... Terror is the scourge of the 21st century that has left a catastrophic impact on the security and prosperity of human societies across the world...”
• The Kingdom is at the forefront of combating terrorism as it has been the target of a number of violent attacks, he pointed out. Since 2003, the Kingdom has suffered 147 terror attacks in which 95 innocent civilians lost their lives and 569 people were wounded. Foreign employees and visitors were also among the casualties. Security forces foiled 250 plots to blow up domestic and foreign facilities and murder citizens and foreigners... He put the number of the security officers who were killed in terror attacks at 74, adding that 657 officers sustained serious injuries. 
• “The situation demands that all countries intensify their efforts to combat and root out the menace and bring terrorists to justice wherever they might be,” he said. This can only be achieved with reinforced international, regional and bilateral cooperation, he said.
• He also stressed the need to take steps to spread the spirit of peaceful coexistence across the globe.
• ...The Kingdom had developed a comprehensive strategy over the past years to combat terrorism, focusing on the prevention of terror activities and rehabilitation of reformed terrorists. These efforts, he said, aim at fortifying and protecting the community from extremist ideologies by way of anti-extremist campaigns through the media, lectures and seminars. A unit to deal with terror has been set up in collaboration with educational, religious and social establishments, he said. 
• The Kingdom’s efforts against terror also include signing a number of regional and bilateral agreements to cooperate in the combat, participation in the drafting of the comprehensive charter to fight international terrorism, besides urging other countries to set up a center to combat terror with a donation of $100 million.

A recent op ed in The Guardian takes a robustly different view of where the Saudis stand on defeating terror. Its title somewhat gives away the author's thesis: "To really combat terror, end support for Saudi Arabia" [Owen Jones, The Guardian, August 31, 2014]. Among his sharply critical points (all direct quotes):

• Much  of the world was rightly repulsed when Isis beheaded the courageous journalist James Foley. Note, then, that Saudi Arabia has beheaded 22 people since 4 August. Among the “crimes” that are punished with beheading are sorcery and drug trafficking. Around 2,000 people have been killed since 1985, their decapitated corpses often left in public squares as a warning. 
• Shia Muslims are discriminated against and women are deprived of basic rights, having to seek permission from a man before they can even travel or take up paid work. Even talking about atheism has been made a terrorist offence and in 2012, 25-year-old Hamza Kashgari was jailed for 20 months for tweeting about the prophet Muhammad. 
• This human rights abusing regime is deeply complicit in the rise of Islamist extremism too. Following the Soviet invasion, the export of the fundamentalist Saudi interpretation of Islam – Wahhabism – fused with Afghan Pashtun tribal code and helped to form the Taliban...
• Chatham House professor Paul Stevens says: “For a long time, there was an unwritten agreement... whereby al-Qaida’s presence was tolerated in Saudi Arabia, but don’t piss inside the tent, piss outside.” 
• Although Saudi Arabia has given $100m (£60m) to the UN anti-terror programme and the country’s grand mufti has denounced Isis as “enemy number one”, radical Salafists across the Middle East receive ideological and material backing from within the kingdom. According to Clinton’s leaked memo, Saudi donors constituted “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”.

He's writing for a British publication, so it's not surprising that he reminds Guardian readers how "Saudi Arabia is the British arms industry’s biggest market, receiving £1.6bn of military exports. There are now more than 200 joint ventures between UK and Saudi companies worth $17.5bn." His point, in our words, is that while ending terror ought to mean breaking off with the Saudis, that's just not going to happen.

And about that reference to "rehabilitation of reformed terrorists", the photo below was published by the Saudi government in 2009. The faces in it are of Saudi Arabia's 85 “most-wanted” terrorists. They include 11 former Guantánamo detainees, all of whom were in that Saudi Arabian rehabilitation program: plainly not such a huge success.

Saudi Arabia's "Most Wanted" List, February 2009 [Image Source]

That mention of "Clinton's leaked memo" probably means "WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists", a report published in The Guardian  on December 5, 2010. It opens with these blunt claims:

"Saudi Arabia is the world's largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. "More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups," says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan. "Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide," she said.

A leaked State Department document published on that same date, "US embassy cables: Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists raise funds in Saudi Arabia", asserts that Lashkar-e-Taiba "fundraises in Saudi and the Gulf though charitable donations and front companies". Lashkar, generally thought to have been the party that executed the bloody 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, is "one of the largest and most active terrorist organizations in South Asia, operating mainly from Pakistan".

All in all, the notion that the Saudi government claims to be at the "forefront of combating terrorism" raises some questions about what the word forefront could possibly mean when they use it.

16-May-11: 63 years on, they have their celebrations, we have ours

Israeli children celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the events of 15th May 1948 in the manner taught to them by their families and their society

Palestinian Arab children celebrate the 63rd anniversary of the events of 15th May 1948 in the manner taught to them by their families and their society

The diametrically opposed ways in which we and our neighbours mark 63 years of the events of 15th May 1948 are illuminating, especially in light of the violent events of yesterday. An editorial in the Jerusalem Post ("Repeating the Nakba mistake") from last week when Israelis joyfully celebrated Yom Ha'atzma'ut or Independence Day hits the right note:

For Arab Israelis and Palestinians, the creation of Israel was a “nakba,” a catastrophe. On Friday, Arab towns across the nation will kick off three days of Nakba commemorations with marches, conferences and rallies. Though these ceremonies take place every year, this year is different in a significant and positive way. The absurd practice by which organizations and municipalities were allowed to use state funds to pay for Nakba events has been stopped. Legislation approved by the Knesset in March, known as the “Nakba law,” empowers the state to fine those who finance their commemoration ceremonies with public money. 

The Nakba law will not, and was not intended to, prevent Arab Israelis or anyone else from commemorating Israel’s Independence Day in any way they wish to, as long as they do so peacefully. Rather, the legislation has put an end to the folly in which Israel underwrites activities that undermine the very foundations of Zionism by falsely presenting it as an imperialist movement that engaged during the War of Independence in ethnic cleansing and the intentional, wholesale transfer of the Arab population outside the borders of Israel.  

However, while it is Arab Israelis’ and Palestinians’ right to commemorate the Nakba in a way that not only incriminates Israelis for crimes they never committed but also places all the blame for failure on the Zionist movement, it is self-defeating and a major obstacle to peace for them to do so. 

If Palestinians were to look clearly and objectively at their behavior around the time of Israel’s founding, they would realize that today they are repeating many of the same mistakes. “Jihadism” – or the hatred of the infidel and a desire to kill him – to a great degree underlay the Palestinian assault on Zionism through the 1920s-1940s period. The leader of the Palestinian national movement during these years, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a rabidly anti- Semitic Muslim cleric with close ties to the Nazis. 

Similarly, today, many Palestinians have chosen to embrace the most extreme form of Islamist leadership. In the West Bank-Gaza elections of 2006, Hamas trounced the ostensibly secular Fatah. And the national unity deal signed on May 7 in Cairo, which enjoys broad Palestinian support, has brought Hamas – a rabidly anti-Semitic Islamist terrorist organization that has launched dozens of suicide bombings and thousands of mortar shells and rockets against the Israeli civilian population – back to the heart of the Palestinian leadership in all its rejectionist, reactionary glory. 

It was this sort of religious extremism and intransigence that exacerbated the plight of the Palestinians back in 1948. In the first weeks of the War of Independence, for instance, Jaffa mayor Yousef Heikal tried to reach a non-belligerency agreement with neighboring Jewish Tel Aviv, to allow the citrus crop to be harvested and exported. But Husseini vetoed this and called for “jihad against the Jews.” As a result, many of Jaffa’s Arabs were expelled during the ensuing war. 

Another repeated Palestinian blunder over the past century has been the rejection of a two-state solution. 

Offered successive compromises – in 1937, the Peel Commission partition of Palestine with a Jewish state on only 17 percent of the land; in 1947, the UN partition with the Arabs getting 45% of the land; and in 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak and US president Bill Clinton’s partition with Arabs getting 20%) – the Palestinians consistently said no. And each uncompromising refusal was accompanied by violence and terrorism. 

IN THE 1948 War of Independence, after they had rejected the UN partition plan that would have given them a state, Palestinians launched a bloody offensive to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state. If they had won the war, the result would have been a massive slaughter of Jews just a few years after six million Jews had been massacred in the Holocaust. 

The violent, unsympathetic and ungenerous Arab population of Palestine repeatedly attempted to destroy any hopes that the Jewish people would return to their homeland after nearly two millennia of exile and after suffering the worst genocide ever known to mankind. 

Thankfully, they failed. 

The world’s only Jewish state is now surrounded by 21 Arab nations and has shown a willingness to help establish a 22rd state, for Palestinians. Yet in large part due to their distorted view of history – the Nakba being just one example – Palestinians continue to focus on their victimization and suffering while ignoring personal responsibility for their predicament. One of the crucial psychological barriers to peace today is Arab Israelis’ and Palestinians’ stubborn insistence on ignoring their own role in creating the refugee problem and in the failure to obtain Palestinian political autonomy. 

Instead of devoting so much energy to emphasizing their victimization, Arab Israelis and Palestinians would do well to learn from their mistakes. At present, they seem bent on repeating them.