08-Aug-16: When they crave attention, where do the practitioners of Pal Arab barbarism turn?

A monster among monsters: This Tamimi woman engineered
the 2001 massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria, was set free and enjoys
unabashed adulation wherever Tamimi clan members gather
[Image Source: Screen-shot from a 2012 MEMRI video]

August is a hard time in our family.

The Hebrew month of Av, which is now, is traditionally a period associated with some of the hardest moments in Jewish history down through the ages. But then, as it crescendos on the 9th day of Av (that's this coming weekend), the collective mood quickly eases and the month takes on an altogether different, comforting character.

Not for us. The 20th day of Av is when our daughter Malki was murdered in a Hamas terror attack, along with her closest friend and thirteen other innocent victims inside the Sbarro pizzeria which was located back then in the very center of Israel's capital city. The anniversary comes out this year (since we observe it according to the Hebrew calendar date) on August 24 as we noted here. That's when as a family and a community we remember our losss.

According to the civil calendar, however, the fifteenth anniversary of that cruel act of savagery is tomorrow, Tuesday. A number of articles have emerged today, marking the day and what it signifies.

Two of the best happen both to focus on the work of an American journalist who has lately made a name by airbrushing out the nauseating sides of barbarous Palestinian Arab jihadism, leaving behind a fabricated confection of brave, blond, innocuous fighters for freedom, justice and rights.

First, over at Tablet Magazine, the modern historian Petra Marquardt-Bigman has a featured article "Was Ben Ehrenreich Bamboozled By a Palestinian Terror Clan?", referring to the vicious Tamimis and their self-promoting booster, publicist and propagandist whose Jewish-sounding name serves to give a certain edginess to his views with in some circles.

Ehrenreich's work, which has gotten boosted by backers at the New York Times [see 
["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"] takes a despicable line, ignoring those aspects of this remarkable family of in-bred jihadists he finds inconvenient, while promoting them, Amnesty International-style, as fighters for freedom, self-determination and Apple Pie. His admiration for their values and their violence amounts to a kind of obsequious fawning that seems to infect the ranks of self-styled progressives. No one should be surprised that we find his views and his manner of pushing them repellent.

We shone a torch into some of the especially dark and ugly aspects of his oeuvre, focusing on a recent Ehrenreich book which has gotten favorable reviews at LARB, The Economist and Telegraph UK. We gave expression to those aspects in a post of several weeks ago, "24-Jul-16: Sociopaths, savagery and the seductiveness of Palestinian Arab victimhood".. 

Ehrenreich is hardly alone in bringing together unabashed enthusiasm for jihadist thuggery while masquerading as a holder of progressive-ish views. We think of them as card-carrying members of the pampered moral narcissists brigade. Often treated as belonging to the forces of peace and human rights, thos among them whose work focuses on the Arab/Israel conflict tend to be driven by a sense that they are in a struggle towards victory, where winning means the defeat and destruction of another people's state by whatever means, legitimate or foul, are available to them.

Ehrenreich speaks at a Palestinian Arab event in
Nablus, May 2016 [Image Source]

The second artiucle, in which historian Petra Marquardt-Bigman again plays an enabling role, is a blog-post-and-video assembled by the indefatigable Elder of Ziyon and streamed from his busy blog site. It's entitled "Ben Ehrenreich shares his love for the Sbarro massacre mastermind’s family".

It begins with these words:

This Tuesday will be the 15th anniversary of the infamous Sbarro pizza shop bombing, masterminded by Ahlam Tamimi. The attack, on August 9, 2001, killed 15 people and injured 130. Among the dead were a pregnant woman and seven children – some counted eight, including an 18 year-old who had just finished school; the injured also included one young mother who was left in a permanent vegetative state.For the families of the victims, this year’s 15th anniversary of the attack may well be particularly grim, because of a fawning book that has been recently released by Ben Ehrenreich, lionizing the murderous Tamimi clan. Who would have ever imagined that an American writer would come out with a book that presents the family of Ahlam Tamimi – the Sbarro massacre mastermind – as simply wonderful people? 

We're wondering the same. But the evidence in front of our eyes is - people who think like Ehrenreich are hardly in short supply. Their upward mobility reflects a catastrophic malaise going well beyond moral narcissism that we think is not well understood. This video will help.

We endorse Elder's words:

For a glimpse of the intense Jew-hatred and the ardent support for terror that animates Ben Ehrenreich’s protagonists, watch the video below [link] that will introduce you to the four people Ehrenreich lists first in the Acknowledgements for his book: Bassem and Nariman Tamimi, and Bilal and Manal Tamimi.

(We are busy with preparing a feature-length post to share some of what the past fifteen years since the Sbarro disaster have taught us.)

UPDATE August 10, 2016: Another fine expose of Ben Ehrenreich by Petra Marquardt-Bigman appears on the Harry's Place site: "Ben Ehrenreich Celebrates the Tamimis (who celebrate terror)", today.

24-Jul-16: Sociopaths, savagery and the seductiveness of Palestinian Arab victimhood

Ben Ehrenreich [Source]

Over at the LA Review of Books, under the title "The Humiliation Machine'", they have a new review by Amy Wilentz of

The Way to the Spring, Ben Ehrenreich’s new book about the Palestinian struggle against the ongoing and seemingly endless Israeli occupation [that] is bound to be a highly controversial work. 

Ehrenreich has been promoting the violent and hateful Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh, a village of about 550 people located a few kilometers north of Israel's capital, for years. It was the vehicle that enabled him to snag his biggest hit so far - a 2013 New York Times Magazine cover story about the place and its people. Long on romance and bravado and carefully phrased progressive-sounding rhetoric, that piece barely skims the deeply embedded bigotry and long record of acts of murder against Jews that are only too easy to see in the life of Nabi Saleh... if you look. 

Ehrenreich plainly prefers not to look. He's a key player in sanitizing the Tamimi clan's blood-lust and race-based hatred of Jews.

We wrote an angry response when that heavily-marketed New York Times piece appeared ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]. Here's how it started:

Friends have pointed us to this week’s NYT Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. 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 a person not be captivated? 
But there is much wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know this because for years we have been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are furious with anger about what the article says, and what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.

We wanted to be heard by the readers of the New York Times in a more direct manner at the time and tried. If you want to know how that went, we documented that too: "9-Aug-13: Protesting journalism of the amoral sort". 

And for a little more about actual life and real attitudes in the temporal Nabi Saleh, as distinct from the Pallywood fantasies of the talented Mr Ehrenreich, here's another of our past posts on that theme: "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

Ehrenreich's previous major push for the
"struggling" Tamimi clan's campaign
for bigger and more deadly murderous
attacks [New York Times]

It has to be said that Amy Wilentz's LARB review of Ehrenreich's paen to those village monsters includes some sharp insights. And if you're interested in answers to some of the questions she refreshingly poses but doesn't entirely untangle, help can be found in the fine work of the historian Petra Marquardt-Bigman, in particular her November 2015 essay in The Tower focusing on the Tamimi clan: "How a Family Became a Propaganda Machine".

We were struck, though, by how little Ms Wilentz has to say about the vicious, murder-oriented polemic that the Tamimi pack specialize in propagating. Most of their work-product is (naturally) in Arabic and intended for an Arabic-speaking audience, but some of it is easily accessible to English-speaking readers. 

So we sent the following to the LARB editors last night as a comment on the book review. They have just posted it below the Wilentz piece:

Here's some more "poetry of the desert" that Ehrenreich might have included but chose not to. It's some frank opinion-sharing by Nariman Tamimi, whose under-appreciated, explosive bigotry rarely makes it into English publications. 

We translated it from the Hebrew source in our blog last year. The context is important: it appeared at the same time as Amnesty International was spending a small fortune putting Tamimi's husband Bassem into the center of a US roadshow designed to further burnish his entirely bogus "heroism", a process Amnesty had begun a couple of years earlier and continues today, and which was accompanied by a round-the-clock effort to shield him and themselves from the fury of people who understand Tamimi's key role in murderous anti-Jew violence over the past decade.The voice quoted in this extract is that of his wife, Nariman Tamimi: Source: 11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really? 

"Women and children have always been a part of the struggle in Nabi Saleh, as opposed to what has happened in Qadoum, Bil'in and Ni'lin. Here, it’s a cultural thing, something traditional and educational, and also the fact that everyone in our village belongs to the one family numbering about 500 people and in reality there’s no alternative..." One of the major Palestinian murderers who emerged from the village is Ahlam Tamimi who transported the perpetrator of the terror at Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria. [Nariman again] "What she [Ahlam Tamimi] did was an integral part of the struggle. Everyone fights in the manner in which he believes. There is armed uprising, and there is popular uprising. I support every form of uprising... 

Ahlam Tamimi, described in inappropriately benign terms here and in Ehrenreich's celebration of the murderous culture of the denizens of Nabi Saleh, is the engineer of the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. She planned it, chose the site, delivered the bomb to the location, and repeatedly - since being set free in the Shalit deal of 2011 - celebrates (in the Arabic-language media) what she says it stands for. Ehrenreich ought to say why this still-young woman is a figure of adulation among the members of the Tamimi clan in Nabi Saleh: not despite the murders she executed but explicitly because of them.  

Nabi Saleh, setting aside the poetry and the pretentious, cultural allusions, has a rich tradition of anti-Jew murder. Failing to put this in the center of the review of Ehrenreich's agitprop is to be complicit in the incitement emanating from that wretched village daily.

Wilentz is thankfully less entranced by the romanticism of both Ehrenreich and his sociopathic subjects than the editors at the New York Times seem to be. She writes:

Because he stands with the Palestinians, Ehrenreich has been called brave and courageous, but as someone who has also tried to do this kind of work in the Middle East, I can say that for a certain type of reporter, it doesn’t take bravery — there is something very seductive about victims, and to follow the Palestinians is simply to follow a reporter’s instinct for a good story... ["The Humiliation Machine", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 22, 2016]

She's being way too generous. And we ought to mention, for those who don't already know, that there's a terribly painful reason we pay attention to what's said about Nabi Saleh and its Tamimis. (Incidentally almost everyone in the dusty town is called Tamimi, with Tamimis routinely marrying other Tamimis in a cultural practice common among Palestinian Arabs and with consequences well-known in Israel's paediatric hospital wards). 

Baby carriages outside the devastated Sbarro pizzeria, minutes
after the Tamimi woman had fled the scene [Getty Images]

We do that because the engineer of the 2001 massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem is a woman called Tamimi. Her husband, who also happens to be her cousin, is another Tamimi. They are a pair of convicted and exultant murderers of Jews. 

He was raised in Nabi Saleh, and she says she has blood ties to almost everyone there, and reputedly lived there very briefly after she made aliyah from her homeland of Jordan in the late 1990's. 

Today the woman is the town's pin-up girl in the literal sense - they adore her there and all the barbaric hatred, bigotry and blood-shed she stands for.  If Nabi Saleh had a municipal symbol, it would probably be the grotesque smile on her face.

This Tamimi couple, both of them convicted murderers of Jews who were serving multiple life sentences in Israeli prisons after being convicted, live perfectly freely today in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, having both been released in the catastrophic Shalit Deal in 2011. 

Life has been awfully good. She has no money problems, having been a recipient of the notorious (and ongoing) Palestinian Authority Rewards for Terror payments scheme [background: "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look"]. Today. she's a full-time propagandist for the Islamists of Hamas. She burnishes her fame on that platform with an active social media presence that includes Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In addition, she travels and does well-publicized personal appearances throughout the Arab world. Indeed she is one of the most widely-recognized, very public faces of the savage Islamist bigotry of Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood. 

And not only in the Middle East: she has her own heavily-promoted Hamas-branded weekly television program (in English, "Breezes of the Free") that's beamed each weekend via satellite and streaming internet video to television screens of Arabic-speaking households on every continent. 

This Tamimi woman also the murderer of our fifteen year old daughter Malki and of 14 other innocent patrons of that pizzeria. She can barely stop boasting about the role she played. She frequently returns to the disappointment she felt that she had not managed to murder yet more Jews and especially Jewish children. [You're doubting us?: "04-Feb-15: The stunningly different fates of two terrorists in Jordan and what they reveal about how the war against terror is going"] 

Her life's work, on constant public display, is devoted to encouraging additional acts of blood-curdling savagery. 

Analyzing Amnesty's culpability at The Tablet

The role of Amnesty International in the marketing of a Tamimi-centric view of terrorism-as-liberation has gotten much less attention in the media than it deserves. 

How any progressive-minded can be aware of that role and still send the occasional support check to Amnesty is totally baffling to us. Withholding support is one sure-fire way of getting its management to stop ignoring the criticism they have drawn from people like us - and ignoring is most assuredly what the Amnesty clique have been doing. 

Click here for a couple of dozen articles we have written in the past two years about Amnesty's odious promotion of Bassem Tamimi, a propagandist to whom Goebbels would surely have raised his hat. 

And if your time is short, please read just one of our posts that captures the essence of the others - this one for instance: 

• "07-Sep-15: Peace, human rights, the sheer joy of killing people". 

Or this: 

• "06-Nov-15: What Amnesty hath wrought: The elevation of the terror-minded Tamimis".

This has all worked out just peachy for Ben Ehrenreich who can be expected to return soon to the well for more public attention as the impresario of the little village in the hills. 

Did anyone ever say terrorism doesn't pay?

30-Mar-13: "To see the NY Times gloss over this travesty of justice is journalism of the most amoral sort"

Our daughter, Malki z"l. Murdered  at age 15

by the most prominent, celebrated and honored 

of Nabi Saleh's offspring.

The editors of the New York Times Magazine chose two weeks ago to publish a partisan, tendentious and extraordinarily selective piece of advocacy journalism about the village of Nabi Saleh. Located a few kilometers north of our home in Jerusalem, it's a place that holds significance for us since almost all its residents share the same surname: Tamimi.

One of those Tamimis is the person who engineered the massacre of women and children in which our much-loved child Malki was murdered at the age of fifteen in August 2001 at Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant.

We published a response to that article ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]. It evoked a response beyond anything else we have written before: many thousands of views here on our blog; thousands more on several other magazines and blogs that cross-posted it on their sites.

The editors of the New York Times did not respond to it.  Nor did they react to a letter that Frimet submitted to them ten days ago. Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine is now online, and with it the letters (3 of them) that the editors have chosen to publish. We assume they received many more. We're confident none would have spoken in the voice of a mother whose child was brutally killed by a woman from the village whose promoters revel in the use of the bogus descriptor "non-violent". It's the alleged non-violence of the village and its people that underpins the article's premise.

Here below is the letter Frimet submitted - and that was rejected at the New York Times. Please consider passing it along to your friends, particularly those friends who read the Times and fall victim to its highly selective presentation - over many years - of the realities of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel.

Jerusalem
March 20, 2013 

The Editors,
NY Times 

Ben Ehrenreich's article ["Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?"] is a brazen quest for confirmation of his preconceptions about the Palestinian Israeli conflict: politics blended with fantasy and embellished with every tear-jerking cliche in the book. Smiling, frolicking children; poetic "activists"; generous hostesses plying their delicacies at every turn. It is a bucolic scene that is frequently painted in anti-Israel publications. But how does the NY Times publish a piece that plays so fast and loose with fact and history?

Sadly, I am well-equipped to offer some corrections and details omitted by Ehrenreich.

Ahlam Tamimi, the villager whom Ehrenreich described as a woman who "escorted a suicide bomber", is in fact the self-confessed engineer and planner of a bloody terrorist attack. By her own account and after several scouting forays, Tamimi selected a target: the Sbarro restaurant in the heart of Jerusalem, on a hot August afternoon in 2001.

Tamimi has said she chose it because she knew it would be teeming at the appointed hour with women and children. She transported the bomb, enhanced with nails and bolts to maximize the carnage, from Ramallah across the Qalandia security checkpoint and into Israel’s capital. Israeli soldiers still waived females through without inspection in those days.

Tamimi and her weapon, the bomber, both dressed in Western garb and chatting in English to appear as tourists, strolled through the city center. At the entrance to Sbarro, she briefed him on where and when to detonate, instructing that he wait 15 minutes to allow her a safe getaway.  Fifteen men, women and children were murdered that afternoon. My teenage daughter Malki was among them. Ehrenreich, who writes warmly about Nabi Saleh’s children, displays a cold detachment when relating to the bombing’s victims, the youngest of whom was two years old: “Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors.”

Tamimi, on the other hand, has focused hard on the children. Filmed in an Israeli prison, she smiled broadly when an interviewer informed her that 8 children were murdered, and not merely the 3 she had known about. Since her release in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, Tamimi has repeatedly and publicly boasted of her deed, adding: "I have no regrets. I would do it again."

Tamimi has always lived in Amman, other than two years in Nabi Saleh while attending university. Israel ‘exiled’ (to adopt Ehrenreich’s term) her to Jordan where her father and brothers reside. Since her release she married another Tamimi, also a convicted murderer freed in the Shalit deal. He too is a home-town hero in Nabi Saleh. The host of her own weekly show on Hamas TV, she travels freely throughout the Arab world to address her many fans, accepting accolades and trophies while urging others to follow in her footsteps.

For a mother to bury her loving, gentle child is torture. To watch the murderer walk triumphantly free and enjoy life rubs salt into that wound every day. But to see the NY Times gloss over this travesty of justice with a cover story that showcases this woman’s many admirers in Nabi Saleh – that is journalism of the most amoral sort. You ought to be ashamed of it.

Frimet Roth - Jerusalem

We would be grateful if you would also consider referring those friends to the op-ed ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"] we posted here two weeks ago in the immediate wake of the NYT Magazine cover story.

POSTSCRIPT: Regular readers of the New York Times may recall that its editors provided an unsurpassed platform, and sickening prominence, to our daughter's murderer six years ago when she was still a prisoner serving multiple life terms (these days, she is out, free as a bird and newly married). We wrote about it here: "28-Jun-07: About sweet-faced young women", "5-Jul-07: A Balance of Views?" and "7-Jul-07: A Palestinian Terrorist". We were as outraged then as today by the ease with which they slid past the grotesque acts for which this woman and her fellow child-killers were responsible, and in which the citizens of bucolic Nabi Saleh take such unconcealed pride.

17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

Today's New York Times Magazine [Image Source]

If you want to affect how people think about an issue, putting your case onto the cover of the New York Times Magazine must be one of the most effective ways to go. 

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.

Friends have pointed us to this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. 

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.

His own photogenic daughter Ahed Tamimi has achieved fame and influence and even been awarded a prize by one of the Middle East’s more Israel-phobic political figures for playing her part. Photos of her sticking a fist in the face of IDF servicemen in Nabi Saleh, the personification of an innocent sort of juvenile courage, are everywhere. (The NYT article mentions that she has been dubbed "Shirley Temper" in some quarters; you can see why in this video clip.) 

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:

• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists

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:

• 28-Dec-17: So how old is the Tamimi girl?
• 24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey
• 19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets