And, given the intense competition,
one of the hardest.
So if the
editors of the NYT (108 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization;
30 million unique visitors per month to its website; the largest local
metropolitan newspaper in the United States – according to Wikipedia) give you the cover of the prestigious Magazine, it’s a massive vote of
confidence, a huge privilege, a platform of the most effective kind that (we're assuming) can't be bought for money.
It's a place the author calls “spirited”, where “on warm summer
evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage” to
this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European
activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.
How can you not be captivated?
* * *
But there is much
wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know because for years we've been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are livid with anger about what the article says. And what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.
Start with some background. The Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village
of some 550 people in notably gentle terms. Centred on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we encounter
in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the Turks ruled the
area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation that started in 1948; then declined
when Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967, and flourished and
multiplied in the past two decades.
Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language
version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants and for
no apparent reason.
But when you go to the Arabic-language
version of Wikipedia, you see a strikingly different emphasis. And note that it's not at all a direct translation of the English version.
Created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities, the Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two
Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the
altar of freedom”.
[August 2015 update: The link we embedded above to the Arabic Wikipedia page is to the archived version as it was on May 20, 2013. The Arabic Wikipedia page on Nabi Saleh, the village, has been substantially changed since then (see the revised version here), possibly in response to this post of ours. All references to the Tamimis and their passion for jihad, murder and martyrdom have been carefully removed. But they remain preserved in the archived version. We address this rewriting of history in a later post of ours: see "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"]
The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia's word) is a
woman called Ahlam. It's a surname shared with almost every other inhabitant
of the village: Tamimi. But it's Bassem Tamimi who is the focus of the article. He calls the Intifada launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000 “the big
mistake… Politically, we went backward”.
The writer helps us understand
what kind of backward he means:
"Much of the international good will gained over the previous decade was squandered. Taking up arms wasn’t, for Bassem, a moral error so much as a strategic one. He and everyone else I spoke with in the village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don’t think it works."
Or to say it another way: they are entitled to kill the
Israelis and have done so again and again, but it’s not that effective. A
different kind of warfare needs to be adopted.
Half-way through today's essay, he introduces a
figure who embodies that “big mistake”:
In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh.
That's all he writes about Ahlam Tamimi. But we can tell you more.
Ahlam Tamimi is a Jordanian who was 21 years old and the news-reader on a Palestinian Arab television program when she signed on with Hamas to
become a terrorist. She engineered, planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in
2001. She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb to its target.
The outcome (15 humans killed, a sixteenth still in a vegetative state today, 130
injured) was so uplifting to her that she has gone on camera again and again to say, smiling into the camera lens, how proud she is of what she did. She is entirely free of regret. A convicted felon and a mass-murderer convicted on
multiple homicide charges, she has never denied the role she embraced. She justifies it fully.
Yet the only thing this New York Times piece says about Nabi Saleh’s favourite
one-time resident is that she was an escort “who now lives in exile in
Jordan”. Period.
This is no mere oversight.
* * *
The editors at the New York Times showcased this same happy murderer once before, six years ago. Then, as now, we felt someone needed
to push back. We posted two blog articles: “7-Aug-07:
Hot House: Cold Truths” and “28-Jun-07:
About sweet-faced young women”, and got a little attention for a while. But it was clear to us that those who thought they perceived greatness of spirit in the woman continued to think it.
One of the lives she snuffed out was that of our precious daughter
Malki who was fifteen years old. Malki was the kind of young woman whose abbreviated life and its achievements
ought to have entitled her to at least a fraction of the media coverage
bestowed by the NYT editors and others on her killer. But that's not how things work.
Those editors, and the author of today’s NYT Magazine
piece as well, are evidently less moved by the innocent lives of the victims, lived and lost, than by the hypnotic power of symbolism.
Of the lethal rock-hurling
attacks directed at Israelis, the blood-drenched little village's Bassem Tamimi says
he didn’t worry over whether stone-throwing counted as violence. The question annoyed him… If the loincloth functioned as the sign of Gandhi’s resistance, of India’s nakedness in front of British colonial might, Bassem said, “Our sign is the stone.” The weekly clashes with the I.D.F. were hence in part symbolic. The stones were not just flinty yellow rocks, but symbols of defiance… The message they carried, he said, was “We don’t accept you.”
Creative. Stone-throwing as a symbol. People have been killed and (as recently as this past Thursday) critically injured by the rocks and cement blocks and boulders hurled by the 'stone' throwers. But we're being picky.
Perhaps "we don't accept you" is what people living far from the scene imagine goes through the minds of baby-killers and restaurant bombers. But from the vantage point of where we live, such innocent-sounding turns of phrase leave us dumbfounded.
* * *
Ahlam Tamimi’s post-massacre trajectory has been like
something out of Hollywood - or perhaps the New York Times Magazine.
On being convicted by an Israeli court in
October 2003, she was sentenced to 16 consecutive life terms in prison. The presiding judge speaking for his colleagues on the bench and having heard her proudly claim credit for the killings and maimings, added for
the record their view that Tamimi should “not be eligible for pardon
by the military commander, nor to early parole by any other means”.
He and
his fellow judges and my wife and I as well were coldly and very deliberately ignored when eight years later,
almost to the day, she walked free as one of the 1,027 murderers and assorted
other terrorists unjustly freed – not pardoned - as part of Israel’s
agreement to the extortionate terms of the Gilad Shalit transaction.
Tamimi who had been bussed to Cairo with many other delirious convicted terrorists flew
to Jordan the same day. That's where she was married in an event carried live on mainstream Jordanian television channels to another freed
and unpardoned murderer. He is her cousin, a Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, convicted of the cold-blooded murder we mentioned above when we mentioned Bassem Tamimi who was his mother's brother.
Ahlam Tamimi's handlers soon sent her off to address rallies in various Middle East capitals outside Jordan. She evolved into a media hero as the
presenter of a weekly Hamas satellite television program, devoted to the interests of imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorists, and broadcast from Amman to all corners of the Arabic-speaking world.
How the twists and turns of this life have impacted on her victims has never, as far as we know, been explored by any branch of the media, presumably for reasons of lack of interest. But within the Arab world, she is a celebrity.
Bassem Tamimi receives a salary from the foreign-aid-funded Palestinian
Authority. But, like many thousands of other Palestinian Arabs on the massively-bloated PA payroll, he admits to
the NYT Magazine that he almost never has to report to his office or do any work - while blaming this on the Israelis, naturally.
The
article might have pointed out, but did not, that massive servings of no-strings-attached funds
paid by European governments to the terrorism-friendly PA are the reason men
like Bassem Tamimi have the time and energy it takes to become a star of the New York
Times and a source of videos, interviews and opinions.
In reality, those images of defiance were captured by a horde of press agency photographers arranged by her parents. They followed the girl around as she walked up to one Israeli officer after another, hoping to provoke a camera-worthy (meaning violent) response. It never came, though not for lack of effort by the Tamimis.
Ahed Tamimi has been used and abused in this way again and again by her parents and community; there is no shortage of collaborators among the paparazzi. Any connection between this contrived set-piece and reality is entirely accidental.
* * *
Two years ago, in the
New York Review of Books, a writer launched into his experience of the same hilltop town (spelled differently, but the same place) with these words:
The first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in
Arabic and English: “We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?” It was World Peace
Day, and speaker after speaker reaffirmed a commitment to peace and to
nonviolent resistance to the occupation.
What kind of non-violence do these people actually espouse?
We wonder how often public opinion about the complex lives and unwanted war in which we and our neighbours live is formed by people who don't speak the local languages, and don't know much of its history or geography. Lacking the ability and sometimes the will to actually delve, they are left to read romanticized narratives, signs painted onto walls, political analysis crafted by full-time practitioners of public relations, staged photographs and other tendentious imagery.
The result is a kind of entrancement: messy, nasty complexity reduced down to simple pill form. Swallow this, and join us.
This process, of the kind that an astute observer has called
auto-stupefaction, has an antidote:
reality. We wish there were enough courageous and ethical journalists to deliver what has not yet been done: a blunt look directly into the face and deeds of Ahlam Tamimi and those who share her views, who admire her demonic actions.
That the New York Times Magazine focused on Nabi Saleh while barely mentioning the convicted child killer celebrated by the residents of the town as an honored daughter (for confirmation, see
Arabic Wikipedia) indicates how manipulated its readers are. Also: how far we are from beginning to blunt the ongoing threat of the terrorists.
UPDATE March 23, 2013: This post has gotten what for us is a very large number of views, and was republished on several other sites including
Algemeiner,
FrontPageMag,
The Jewish Press, and the
Check the Pulse and
Love of the Land blogs. Thanks for helping us get it out. Frimet submitted a letter to the editors at the
New York Times Magazine some days ago, and we are still hoping to see them decide to publish it, but no indication so far. [It's
here.]
UPDATE September 2, 2015: The post above is by far the most widely-read item we have ever published in this blog. There's evidently something about the extraordinary Tamimi clan and their extraordinary ugliness, brazen weaponization of their children and striking success at winning allies like Amnesty International that seems to capture people's attention. Also their passion for killing.
To read other posts of ours that are indexed with the search term "
Nabi Saleh" (there are already several dozen in our blog),
click here. We want to recommend these two posts in particular:
UPDATE December 28, 2017: The arrest last week of Ahed Tamimi, known widely (as mentioned above) by the not-exactly-complimentary name of Shirley Temper has provoked a storm of media attention. Here are three pieces we have put out in the past few days:
