09-Feb-23: Do America's Jewish communities have the leaders they deserve?

On February 3, 2023, Jordan's Royal Hashemite Court published
and disseminated this photo to illustrate its report under the headline
"King meets representatives of international,
US Jewish organisations"

A version of the post below originally appeared on Frimet Roth's blog "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly" under the title "Don't we deserve better than this lamentable leadership?"

Here's the full text of a February 2, 2023 Jewish Insider report about a Washington gathering of high-profile individuals day.

King Abdullah II of Jordan met with Jewish leaders in Washington, D.C., yesterday. Those in attendance included Rabbi Marc Schneier, Ted Deutch, Jeremy Ben-Ami, Jonathan Greenblatt, Susie Gelman, Hadar Susskind, Dana Gershon, Betty Ehrenberg, Jason Isaacson, John Hannah and Harriet Schleifer.

A prominent article in a Hashemite-Kingdom-controlled Jordanian newspaper covers the same event. As often happens in the Jordanian media, no Jews are named or quoted. Here's its full text:

AMMAN — His Majesty King Abdullah on Thursday met with representatives of international and US Jewish organisations in Washington, DC, and stressed the importance of these organisations supporting efforts to achieve just and comprehensive peace.

King Abdullah stressed the need to step up efforts to push towards restoring calm and de-escalation in the Palestinian Territories, while ceasing all unilateral measures that would lead to instability and undermine peace prospects, according to a Royal Court statement.

His Majesty said Jordan will continue efforts to safeguard Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, under the Hashemite Custodianship.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Director of the Office of His Majesty Jafar Hassan, and Jordan’s Ambassador in Washington, DC, Dina Kawar attended the meeting.

It's become an annual tradition. Executives of major Jewish organizations in the US solemnly file into a meeting room in some fancy hotel or embassy hall and pay their utmost respects to the visiting ruler of Jordan. He speaks, and his words are faithfully reported in Jordan's media. 

I don't personally know most of the people in the list. And since this hasn't been reported anywhere, I don't know what they said. Or whether they spoke at all.

I do however know something about what previous groups of Jewish leaders said and didn't say when they met the Jordanian. And what they have and have not said publicly to America's top political leaders. 

My husband and I [see This Ongoing War] have been outspoken for years about the abject failures of America's Jewish leadership in the Tamimi/Jordan/justice affair.

From a quick check on the web, I see all the distinguished Jewish people meeting King Abdullah this past Thursday hold leading positions in significant organizations (listed alphabetically) that include:

• Americans for Peace Now (educating Americans about "policies that will lead to comprehensive, durable, Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab peace")
• The American Jewish Committee ("the leading global Jewish advocacy organization")
• The Anti Defamation League
• The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
• The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding ("to build Muslim-Jewish relations globally")
• Israel Policy Forum ("mobilize support among American Jewish leaders and U.S. policymakers for the realization of a viable two-state solution")
• J Street ("we advocate for diplomacy-first American leadership and policies that advance justice")
• The Jewish Institute for National Security of America
• National Council of Jewish Women ("social justice by improving the quality of life for women, children, and families and by safeguarding individual rights and freedoms")
• World Jewish Congress ("to foster the unity and represent the interests of the Jewish people")

I know I should have grown used to it. But the pain these encounters inflict only intensifies with time.

My Malki's photos speak to me every day when I am in their presence in our living room. Her gentle eyes, sweet smile, modesty and love radiate from them. Since she was murdered in the Sbarro terror bombing in the summer of 2001, it's the only way she communicates with me.

As I peruse them tonight, I am reminded afresh that Jewish leaders promoting themselves in the Jewish media and mailed solicitations as staunch advocates of rights of the Jews evidently care not one bit about her or us.

US Department of Justice "Most Wanted Terrorist" poster seeking the arrest of our child's killer

Malki's murderer, Ahlam Tamimi, indicted in Washington in 2013 (though this was kept secret until; 2017) is protected and shielded from justice by King Abdullah II of Jordan. And, whatever the leaders say, this clearly doesn't matter one iota to them.

The facts are so clear to me and, as far as I can tell, so irrelevant to them.

The fact that Jordan and the United States have had a valid and active extradition treaty since the days of the Clinton administration and the late King Hussein - the father of today's monarch. 

The fact that the U.S. Department of Justice has demanded that Jordan extradite her under it, and hand her over to the FBI's waiting arms so she can be brought to criminal trial in Washington.

The fact that King Abdullah has authorized the rejection of that demand since Tamimi's indictment. 

The fact that whenever he calls, they come running, as they did last week.

It is an incomprehensible exhibition of sycophancy toward a man who is brazenly using them to buttress his position as a close ally of the U.S. 

And, most important, as the world's largest recipient of U.S. financial aid - now running at some $1.5 billion a year.

Jordan's disdain for Israel is apparently not a factor for Jewish leaders when deciding whether to accept the vaunted invitation of His Majesty (as they usually refer to him).

In meetings, letters and phone calls with many of those leaders we have pleaded since 2017 for their assistance in pressuring the United States to get Jordan to comply with its treaty obligation. All produced nothing more than demeaning, dismissive responses.

What a pathetic show of spinelessness.

Remember this when these organizations next solicit your donation.

22-Jul-22: The loneliest battle of my life

An edited version of the article that follows, written in English by Frimet Roth, was published in Hebrew in the pages of Haaretz and on its Hebrew website last week [here]. The title, translated into English: "The woman responsible for my daughter's murder remains free."

My husband Arnold and I never expected to be involved in political activities of any kind, and certainly not at this stage of our lives. 

We have raised children who are now raising their own children. By our own standards we have lived constructive lives. And we have kept away from politics and politicians the whole time.

Now, more than thirty years after we settled in Jerusalem as olim from Australia and the United States, we find ourselves in one of the loneliest battles it’s possible to imagine.

There is a woman who lives about an hour from here, a woman we have never met. We have spent years trying to get her imprisoned for the rest of her life.

On March 14, 2017, the Department of Justice in Washington charged Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi with “conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against US nationals outside the US, resulting in death.”

Her weapon of mass destruction was a human: a man with an explosives-and-shrapnel-filled guitar-case on his back. He detonated while standing at the counter of the crowded Sbarro pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem on August 9. 2001. The powerful blast decapitated him and destroyed the bustling premises and everything inside. Tamimi later called the massacre “my operation” in one of her many triumphant social posts.

Intending to kill as many children as possible, she came to Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, age 21 and dressed in clothes that made her look Israeli instead of the Islamist zealot that she really was. She had already chosen the pizzeria as her target and brought the bomb right up to its door. Instructing her young male companion on when and how to explode, she ran from the scene. By the time he did what she told him, she had already escaped to safety.

A few hours later, she was the reader of the evening news at a Palestinian TV station in Ramallah called Al-Istiqlal. We weren’t watching.

* * *

We buried our smiley, talented, much-loved Malki, 15, the next afternoon.

Tamimi descended into Israel’s military courts system and then prison in the weeks and years that followed. No one from the government ever contacted us; we knew only what the Israeli public knew. Our sources were the same as everyone else’s.

Then something incomprehensible happened. 

In October 2011, Netanyahu announced that he had done a deal to get back Gilad Shalit, a soldier held for ransom by Hamas. The price: freedom for 1,027 convicted terrorists, most of them killers. We turned to the media to express the incomprehensibility of what was being done and our rejection of the idea that the Sbarro bomber should ever be released under any conditions.

No one from the government of Israel informed us or asked us what we think – and Tamimi’s sixteen terms of life imprisonment ended just like that. Eight years after she was sentenced, the monster walked free.

* * *

Frimet was interviewed by Haaretz on the day
the Shalit Deal was consummated

The awful reality turned unbearable just a couple of months after Tamimi settled back in Jordan where she was born and educated: she was given her own shiny new weekly television show, beamed by satellite every Friday night into all parts of the Arabic speaking world via the Al-Quds TV channel operated by Hamas.

"Naseem Al Ahrar" (translation: “Breezes of the Free”), encouraged its audience to admire and support terror and those who do it. It became a hit that ran for five years.

The week it started to appear on television, my husband went to Washington. I couldn’t travel but I went with him in the form of a video clip we recorded at our home the night he traveled. Together the two of us tried to persuade a room full of senior Department of Justice and FBI officials that criminal charges should be brought against the Sbarro mastermind. No case of Palestinian Arab terror leading to the murder of Americans in Israel had ever been prosecuted by the US government before, though a law enabling this had been on the books for years. The key factor was that Malki had dual American and Israeli citizenship.

***

That Washington DC chapter happened in February 2012. We felt it went well, but no one told us that a federal judge signed the criminal complaint on July 15, 2013. We didn’t know US diplomats were negotiating with Jordan to extradite her. We were given no sign that the charges even existed.

We learned about them in a March 14, 2017 private meeting with DOJ representatives in Jerusalem. They came here to tell us. Tamimi became an FBI Most Wanted terrorist a few hours later, only the second woman ever to be put on that list. An arrest order and extradition request were delivered to the Hashemite Kingdom at about the same hour that we met with the Americans.

We imagined a road ahead leading to trial and imprisonment. In less than a week, we learned how naïve we were.

***

The five years that followed have been hard. The DOJ people making the Tamimi announcement in Washington seemed righteous and determined. But they very soon became unreachable, at least to us.

Jordan’s highest court ruled later that same week that the 1995 Clinton/King Hussein Extradition Treaty was invalid. The reasons were absurdly technical and as we have since learned, don’t hold water. We learned this by suing the US State Department two years ago. If we had any doubt before, we now knew that the Jordanian government was concealing the truth in order to keep this immensely popular figure safe from the Americans.

In the years since March 2017, the US has stated formally — but very quietly — that the treaty actually is valid. But they have never made a single public call telling Jordan to hand her over to US law enforcement. Meanwhile Jordan has become one of the three largest recipients of massive US foreign aid. Tamimi lives free in Amman, never in hiding for even a day.

It’s not only Washington that’s lost its voice. America’s major Jewish organizations have almost entirely failed to urge the US to enforce its own criminal code or its own treaty to bring Tamimi to justice.

Through writing, blogging, speaking via video conference wherever we are invited, we keep the campaign alive. We wrote to President Biden last Sunday asking him in a private letter to meet with us, to talk with us about how it can be that America’s most wanted female fugitive remains free to keep inciting other people, especially children and teenagers, to do more terror. The White House has not responded but told Associated Press on Monday that they have no intention of responding to the Roths’ letter.

In Israel’s power circles, our voices get close to zero attention, and not for lack of trying. Israel has done nothing to help bring Tamimi to American justice.

We understand the political calculus: terror bad, King Abdullah good, mustn’t undermine him. But if you see justice as a supreme value, it’s hard not to feel betrayed.

***

Four weeks from now, we will mark our precious Malki’s 21st yahrzeit, the anniversary of her murder. With time, it strangely becomes ever more painful to think about her. Perhaps this is because the list of milestones she has missed grows with each day for me.

I imagine her as a mother and wife. A musician perhaps - she played the classical flute exceptionally well already at the age of fifteen. As an occupational therapist – the field she told me she hoped to study.

Malki

I imagine conversations where I share personal experiences with her. She was not only my oldest daughter but a friend as well.

Kindness, empathy and generosity were second nature to her - towards her parents, her six siblings, her many friends. She even extended those traits to her youngest sibling, Haya, who was and remains profoundly disabled: blind, unable to speak, to stand, to sit, to respond in any way.

But Malki lavished love and attention on her and reached out as well to other children with disabilities in our neighborhood, at her school, in summer camps.

At school, she didn't excel but did passably well. Studying for exams only stole time from her other activities - artwork, heart-to-heart conversations at the youth group where she was an enthusiastic madricha.

I long to do more for her. But all that is left for me is to honor her by bringing her murderer to justice. With every letter my husband and I write to powerful and influential people, with every phone call we make, with every interview we give to the media, I feel that I am giving a gift to our Malki.

POSTSCRIPT: More than 20,000 justice-minded people from all parts of the world have already answered our request to sign our petition. It urges the Secretary of State in Washington to do what should have been in 2013 when a federal judge signed a criminal indictment against Tamimi: tell Jordan to hand her over to the still-waiting US law enforcement officials so she can be tried in a court of justice under US law as the Jordan/US extradition treaty explicitly requires. To sign the petition, go to change.org/ExtraditeTamimi. Thank you. 

16-Mar-21: I remember shedding tears that day: Four years later

The article below is cross-posted from Frimet Roth's The Good, The Bad, The Ugly blog and was authored by Frimet. 

It was published there on March 15, 2021 under the heading A call to President Biden. Please check out the video clip at the bottom; we produced this - with the help of talented friends - to mark the anniversary about which Frimet writes.

---

Exactly four years ago, during the evening hours of March 14, 2017, Department of Justice and FBI officials invited my husband and me to a meeting in a Jerusalem hotel.

There they shared with us news that we believed would herald the arrest and trial of our child's murderer. Ahlam Tamimi had by then been enjoying freedom and security in Amman for five and a half years. In October 2011, she had been released in the lop-sided Shalit Deal with the terror organization Hamas.

The moment she landed in her native country Jordan, she began boasting of the terror bombing attack she had masterminded on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in August 2001. The eatery had been packed with families that hot summer afternoon. The number of victims reached 15, including 8 children, among them our Malki.

Tamimi repeatedly urged her admirers to follow in her footsteps from the platform of a weekly talk show she hosted on the global Arabic-language Al Quds TV station. She also addressed live audiences both in Jordan and in several neighboring Arab countries to which she travelled during those years with ease.

On that March 2017 evening - it happens to have been my birthday - those US officials told us charges against Tamimi, the existence of which we knew nothing about until that moment, had just been unsealed. And her extradition to the US for trial had been demanded of Jordan pursuant to the 1995 Extradition Treaty between the two countries.

I remember shedding tears that day as I sat at the table across from those officials. I had little doubt that this monster would soon be where she belongs - behind bars in a US Federal penitentiary, this time until her last day on earth.

But here we are in 2021 and we are no closer to justice now than we were then. 

King Abdullah's regime steadfastly refuses to honor the extradition treaty that Jordan signed and ratified with the US in 1995. 

Jordan receives generous financial aid from the US as well as praise and adulation from the White House and from numerous individual members of Congress.

My husband and I are incredibly disturbed by the apparent passivity on the part of the US in the face of Jordan's brazen contempt for the rule of law.

It often seems to us that Jordan is the tail wagging the dog in this much lauded "partnership".

We truly hope that you, President Biden, will impress on Jordan that the existential support lavished on the Hashemite Kingdom is contingent on this evil woman being brought to justice.

We produced the video below with friends to mark the fourth anniversary this past weekend. It's also accessible via YouTube.

20-Nov-20: I wish Malki were here to encourage me

Malki was three years old when we celebrated
Israel's Independence Day for the first time in our
Jerusalem home after making aliya a year before

Frimet Roth's op ed below originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post edition of August 12, 2020, the week that marked nineteen years since the massacre at the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria. That's where the life of our daughter Malki, just 15, ended. And so did fifteen additional lives did too - 14 of them absolutely and immediately. And one more, the life of a young mother who was in the fast food place with her toddler daughter and has been in a a vegetative state ever since.

We're reposting it here now for a number of reasons, among them for the benefit of the members of Secretary of State Pompeo's entourage who have been here in Jerusalem since Wednesday and are flying out today. 

We would have very much wanted to discuss the Tamimi case with them - their strange and inexplicable silence in the face of Jordanian recalcitrance in particular. And their office's passivity. Perhaps next time.

Why is Ahlam Tamimi still free, 19 years after the Sbarro bombing?

The US has demanded her extradition from Jordan, Yet Jordan’s King Abdullah II refuses to accede to that demand.

By Frimet Roth | August 12, 2020 | The Jerusalem Post  

Nineteen years ago, our angel Malki was snatched from us in the Sbarro terror bombing.

Some may wonder how a pain can linger, oppress, ache and resist comfort for so long. Well, let me assure you, it can. And it does.

Sometimes, it feels more heart-wrenching to remember her life than it did when she was first murdered. There are so many family experiences and events from which she missed out.

The bombing that took her life and those of 14 other innocent Jews was uniquely horrific. It has spawned numerous “miracle” legends about lucky people who came eerily close to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has even inspired a minor writer to fabricate an entire interview with me which he included in his published memoir as well as in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

It is often the only one of many bloody attacks mentioned when the Second Intifada is revisited. Photographs of the site minutes after the explosion - it is the busiest intersection in Jerusalem’s city center – are often reprinted. The sight of baby carriages and strewn body parts is emphasized.

But for some reason what doesn’t attract press coverage is the travesty of justice that ensued.

To the bafflement of my husband and me, despite our years of effort to achieve justice for our Malki and the other victims, there’s remarkably little concern about how the mastermind, the main perpetrator of the Sbarro terror attack, is today a free woman.

Jordanian Ahlam Tamimi scouted Jerusalem’s streets during the summer of 2001 for a target that would offer the greatest possible number of Orthodox Jewish children. Having traveled with him by public transport from Ramallah, she escorted her “weapon,” a suicide bomber called al-Masri, on foot from East Jerusalem to the Sbarro location.

She boasts of how she spoke English to him during their walk in order to pass as tourists. Police were at that very hour combing the city’s streets for a terrorist about whom they had been alerted.

After instructing him to wait ten minutes before detonating so that she could escape unharmed, she fled back to Ramallah. There she calmly reported the attack on the nightly Arab language news program where she worked as the on-camera presenter.

In front of cameras, Tamimi has smiled to learn how many children she murdered and expressed dismay that the number wasn’t higher. She has urged audiences on Hamas TV and on social media to emulate her deeds. The depths of her evil are apparent to all.

My husband and I are astounded. Why is it that she is still free? Why does this not disturb people more than it appears?

The US has demanded her extradition from Jordan. It has an extradition treaty with Jordan that was signed and ratified by both countries and has been valid since 1995. Yet Jordan’s King Abdullah II – the totalitarian ruler of his kingdom – refuses to accede to that demand.
Nonetheless, the US State Department, the White House and US Congressmen from both sides of the aisle persist in praising “His Majesty” as they are wont to call him. The reverential tone they adopt when addressing him or referring to him is utterly cringe-worthy.

It is impossible to relate this outrage and omit our own leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While he is now a footnote in the sequence of events, it cannot be overlooked that Tamimi is free in Jordan because he chose to send her there. The several pleas that my husband and I published, circulated and delivered to Netanyahu to remove Tamimi from the list of freed murderers included in the infamous Shalit Deal, were all in vain. He never responded to us at any stage or in any form.

What he did do was tell the press that he sent letters of apology to all victims after the Schalit Deal. His staff personally told me when I called his bureau in the weeks after the Schalit Deal that hundreds of such letters were mailed out.

That is a lie. None were mailed out.

And so the travesty endures. I would note that a faint glimmer of light at the tunnel’s end now uplifts us. Several US politicians, global celebrities and major Jewish organizations have joined us in demanding that the US pressure Jordan to extradite Tamimi by withholding the generous annual financial aid it receives from the US A new law empowering such a sanction was passed in December 2019.

Prior legislation entitles the US Department of Justice to arrest and try suspects for offenses committed against US citizens overseas. Malki was, as I am, a US citizen. That US law specifies that a suspect can and must be pursued by US law enforcement and brought to trial in the United States. Jordan has raised a single objection, which American authorities have told us is spurious. But the fact is she is still in Amman with her family and not in a Washington courtroom.

Malki left behind a detailed diary recording the events of the last year of her life. It makes for a painful read, not to mention an eye-straining one since she wrote it in microscopic script. She clearly wanted to pack in the maximum.

Each year as her yahrzeit approaches, I read a few more entries and publicize one of them:

“February 4, 2001: There was a mortar firing in Netzarim [Gaza Strip] and truly miraculously nobody was hurt. There was a one year old baby lying at the site where it fell! A miracle! A person from Karmei Tzur was killed on his way home, a father of small children... We had a talk about Kever Rachel [Rachel’s Tomb]... then communal singing. I cried a bit and it was hard for me to start singing so Shira and I just hugged and that really helped me. At the end we had a talk by Rav Elisha Aviner. He was simply amazing! He encouraged us so much about the situation in Israel.”

I wish Malki were here to encourage me.

10-Aug-20: Malki Roth's parents are interviewed on i24NEWS

Calev Ben David live-interviewed the parents of Malka Chana Roth, one of the many victims of the Hamas bombing attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, nineteen years ago today (August 9).

Frimet and Arnold Roth who live in Jerusalem with their family are spearheading efforts to have the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan extradite the Sbarro massacre mastermind, a Jordanian woman called Ahlam Tamimi. The United States unsealed a criminal complaint (in effect, an indiictment) against Tamimi on March 14, 2017. Jordan almost immediately engineered a legal decision by its highest court to the effect that the 1995 Extradition Treaty between Jordan and the United States was of no legal effect and consequently Jordan was under no obligation to  arrest her and hand her to the US authorities. Tamimi is a celebrity in Jordan today. [YouTube]

Calev Ben David is currently co-anchor of i24NEWS' daily news program "The Rundown" and a political-diplomatic analyst for the channel.

i24NEWS is an Israeli international 24-hour news and current affairs television channel located in Jaffa Port, Tel Aviv, Israel. It broadcasts in French, English and Arabic. The channel's owner is Patrick Drahi and the CEO is Frank Melloul... The channel went live on 17 July 2013 [and] began broadcasting in the US on 13 February 2017. The English channel is broadcast from New York between 6 and 10 p.m. Eastern Time and at other times broadcasts from Israel. [Wikipedia]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weeks? Make that lives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The terror attack on Sbarro was unique in several ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The victims of terrorist Tamimi are still waiting for that.

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

29-Jan-18: Freeing unrepentant terrorists and the horrors it has brought

New York Times, October 18, 2011

We haven't been shy about expressing the deeply negative feelings we have for the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Deal and for the decision-making and consultation with members of the community of victims of terror (of which there was none) that led Israel's government to enter into it.

Before the October 2011 mass release, we said this:

“This deal is a disaster,” he [Arnold Roth] said of the exchange for the Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, as he sat with his wife, Frimet, on the balcony of their Jerusalem apartment. “Some of these people will go back to murdering. They pose an existential threat to all of us” ... “This is not a political issue for us,” he said. “I am not some raving right-winger. We too share the joy of the Shalit family. But the victims are being marginalized. We object on principle. We see ourselves as agents of the children who will be killed by the graduates of this release.” ["In Israel, Swap Touches Old Wounds", Ethan Broner in the New York Times, October 14, 2011]

and

"...She's got a life [referring to Ahlam Tamimi, mastermind of the Sbarro massacre] that's being handed back to her as a result of this transaction... Many hundreds of convicted murderers are going to be released for no other reason that the Government of Israel saw no alternative. Obviously, everyone in this country is delighted if this is going to produce a healthy and well Gilad Shalit, but that's not the whole deal - and the parts of the deal that involve allowing terrorists back on the streets are a recipe for a terrible outcome." [Arnold Roth interviewed on Lateline/Australia's ABC, October 13, 2011]

and

"With today’s decision to free the terrorists, prime minister Netanyahu, a savvy politician to the core, conveys to us his disdain for the lives of ordinary citizens like my Malki; his disrespect for Israel's justice system; and his lack of regard for the soldiers who faced death in order to apprehend the terrorists about to be freed. Which rational soldier or police officer is going risk his life in the future to defend us from the monsters like Tamimi, sworn to murder still more Jews? The prime minister is quoted this morning saying that his "heart goes out" to Israel’s many terror victims. His actions and those of his cabinet suggest otherwise. How can they sleep at night, knowing the peril they have brought onto their people?" [Frimet Roth - "A mother's statement", October 14, 2011]

and

[The] murderer of our daughter and of 14 other people, the majority of them women and children, is on the release list as we feared for years she would be... Has our government taken into account what the release means to families like us, and we are in the thousands, who have suffered the worst possible loss and now see the perpetrators dancing and prancing in the arms of their supporters? Everyone wants Gilad Shalit home, safe and well. If we were his parents, we might have done what the Shalits did. But this is not the same as deciding, as prime minister or as the cabinet, what is good for the country, for the people of Israel. The jubilation emanating from the two Palestinian Arab governments tonight, the Hamas and the Abu Mazen regimes, should make clear to Israel's friends everywhere that something dreadful has happened tonight. We may come to bitterly regret this transaction for years to come... [From Frimet and Arnold Roth's statement to an Australian newspaper, October 12, 2011]

and many dozens of similar public statements, interviews and op eds.

Nadav Shragai, a respected veteran of Israel's brand-name media, and for years a correspondent at Haaretz, has a lengthy analytical article in the English edition (which is published online only) of the high-circulation Yisrael Hayom daily. (Amos Schocken, the publisher of Haaretz, is quoted on Wikpedia saying that Shragai was a journalist with clear opinions with which he largely disagreed, but "his opinions never influenced his news reporting, which was always professional".) Datelined January 26, 2018, it's entitled "Warning – abductions planned". Not surprisingly to anyone paying attention to terrorist attacks on Israelis these past six years and in light of what he writes, our statements were painfully accurate.

In our words, some of Shragai's revelations (direct quotes from his article are in italics):

• No fewer than 420 of the 1,027 let loose in the Shalit Deal are again engaged in the satanic work of doing more terror. 210 of the 1,027 have already been re-arrested by the IDF. Some 100 are currently back in the Israeli prison system.
• "Terrorists freed in the Schalit deal have directly or indirectly been involved in the murder of seven Israelis, including the three teens abducted in Gush Etzion in June 2014, as well as Rabbi Michael Mark and Baruch Mizrahi."
• Shragai, referring to reports from the Palestinian Authority, says Shalit Deal releasees are currently "working to carry out attacks in various parts of the West Bank and their main goal is another abduction of an Israeli". 
• The Gaza operations of Hamas are now led by graduates of the Shalit Deal who are keeping Gaza relatively quiet while they "rebuild themselves [and] hatching plans for terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria, all while continuing to shake up the regime of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas." 
• One of those is Yahya Sinwar of whom we wrote recently ["13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"]. He is aided by Tawfiq Abu Naim [we mentioned him in 2012] and Zuhair Jabarin, another Shalit Deal graduate. Sinwar, while serving a term of four life sentences for planning terrorist attacks and before being freed by Israel, was involved in planning the lethal kidnapping of a young IDF service man, Nahshon Waxman.
• In the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Shalit Deal beneficiaries play a major terrorist role as well. A Jordanian with close ties to Iran, Maher Obeid was put in charge of Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks in the West Bank in late-2017 [see this Ynet backgrounder] after Saleh al-Arouri, who was freed prior to the Shalit Deal, was promoted in October 2017 to become the deputy head of Hamas. 
• al-Arouri has been the focus of several of our posts. One of the founders of Hamas, he is a veteran of Israel's prison system where he spent 15 (some say 18) years. On release in 2007, he was expelled to Syria. Hamas' offices in Syria were shut down in 2012, at which point he and several terrorist colleagues were welcomed to Turkey. He appears in several of ours posts: "22-Dec-15: Has a Hamas terror insider just been thrown out of Turkey?"; "11-Dec-15: The price of the Shalit Deal and the countries that help it keep rising"; "27-Nov-14: Hamas terrorist ring is busted; Israel says the handlers operate from Turkey; Qatar is involved"; "30-Sep-14: Martyrs and monsters"; "11-Sep-14: Freeing terrorists: The price in human lives lost and in justice perverted keeps getting clearer".
• Three Shalit Deal graduates now report directly to Obeid: Abdel Rahman Ranimat (also written as Abed a-Rahman Ghaminat) [a central figure in this post of ours: "11-Sep-14: Freeing terrorists: The price in human lives lost and in justice perverted keeps getting clearer"] is in charge of the Bethlehem, Hebron and Jericho regions. Abdullah Arar [profiled in "01-Jan-18: Another reason we call it the catastrophic Shalit Deal"] controls Jerusalem and Ramallah. Forsan Khalifa runs what we call Samaria, the northern part of the West Bank.
• Dozens of terrorist attacks, including many that were thwarted, over the past year were initiated by this leadership and by other Shalit Deal releasees.
• They have also been instrumental in so-called smaller Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks in which firebombs (otherwise known as Molotov Cocktails) were the weapons of choice rather than guns, rifles, knives and vehicle rammings. These have risen greatly in number over the past few weeks: 84 in November 2017, but then 249 in December 2017. Shragai notes that another Shalit Deal releasee was the driver of the wave of such attacks in the area of Dura until he was sent back to prison.

Other prominent Shalit Deal releasees mentioned in the Yisrael Hayom article because of their revived active terrorism roles:

• Hussam Badaran who "oversaw an attempt by Hamas operatives from Hebron to commit terrorist kidnappings of Israeli civilians or soldiers". We have much more to say about this terrorist: see "13-Jun-13: Little-known sides to the post-Shalit careers of unjustly released killers"
• Hashem Abdel Kader Ibrahim Hijaz "tried to launch terrorist abductions near Ramallah, using a local Hamas operative." 
• Mazen Fuqaha, another leader of Hamas' West Bank command who was killed in Gaza in March 2017, also devoted his energy to preparing a massive abduction. Fuqha was responsible for the suicide bus bombing at the Meron junction in 2002 that killed nine people. Sentenced to nine terms of life imprisonment, he served only nine years before being freed in the Shalit Deal.
• "The Hamas cell that planned a series of terrorist attacks to be launched at the train station in Binyamina, the central synagogue in Zikhron Yaakov and the bus station in Wadi Ara, was also planning a kidnapping. The cell, which consisted of two residents of the village of Bani Naim near Hebron and an Israeli Arab from Wadi Ara, was funded by a group of terrorists freed in the Schalit deal. They kept in touch via Facebook."
• Ruhi Mushtaha "another senior figure in Hamas who is close to Sinwar, had been assigned seven life sentences for his involvement in the Waxman abduction, was also released in the Schalit deal. Mushtaha was involved in assembling the list of prisoners Hamas wanted to be released. Since Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, he has also been in charge of the Hamas prisoners portfolio."
• Mohammad al-Sharatha, "a member of the terrorist cell that kidnapped and murdered IDF soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Saadon in two separate abductions in 1989."

All of them, back in the same lethal business that long prison sentences ought by rights, and by reason of justice, to have terminated.

Image Source: FBI

Shragai doesn't mention her but Ahlam Tamimi deserves a place in the gallery of monsters. 

We have written frequently about her; she's our child's unrepentant murderer. The Shalit Deal enabled her to walk free, return to Jordan where she was born and where most of her family lives, to marry in a widely-watched celebration - to another Shalit Deal murderer/releasee, to start a family, to host her own TV show and present it to a global audience for nearly five years, to become a celebrity guest at guilds, colleges, schools and universities in several Arab countries and especially in Jordan, and to be a media-smart spokesperson for the deeply bigoted jihadist mission personified by Hamas.

The strikingly undeserved peace and quiet she has found in Jordan despite (full credit to the Hashemite regime and its ruler - "26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions") being on the run from the FBI is one of the many reasons we hold, and will continue to express, strongly critical opinions about the process that handed her freedom back to her and to many hundreds of additional loathsome murderers.

11-Sep-16: Fixing a plaque to a Jerusalem wall

Frimet Roth delivers a speech at the unveiling of the plaque 

outside the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria, September 23, 2003
[Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

It's September 11, the fifteenth anniversary of what the world calls 9/11, an event so evocative of hatred, bigotry and senseless carnage that it has become a by-word for the increasingly terror-infested era in which we live.

Fifteen years ago to the day, on September 11, 2001, a thousand or so residents of the Jerusalem neighbourhood where we live gathered in a public park at nightfall to remember two girls - one sixteen, one fifteen - who were among the victims of another massacre, brazenly carried out in the very center of Jerusalem, the nation's capital, a month earlier. 

The site of that attack was the local Sbarro pizzeria. Those two victims, among the 15 murdered and 130 maimed and injured on August 9, 2001, were our next-door neighbour's daughter Michal and our own daughter, Malki. The lovely girls had been the closest of friends.

In the year that followed, we fought an unpleasant and mean-spirited battle with the leadership of the Jerusalem municipality. The mayor at the time was Ehud Olmert. His career later brought him to the highest political position in the country and then after that to prison. He's there now.

What we sought to achieve was something simple: a plaque on the outside wall of the pizzeria, memorializing what had happened there at 2 o'clock on a hot summer's afternoon, with the names of the innocents killed in that Hamas massacre.

As with most of the battles we have felt obliged to conduct in Israel over the years, we saw this as a moral issue with deep resonance in Jewish tradition. We also saw it in personal terms; we sought no one's help in taking the fight to the authorities, and we got none. This battle, like most of the others, ended up providing us with mostly-unwanted insights into how power can be used and abused by the people who have their hands on the steering wheel of the city or the country.

At the end of this particular fight, we achieved a sort of pale victory.

Frimet Roth speaks [Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

On one hand, the mayor's office decided that a plaque would be placed on the outside wall of Sbarro, and a ceremony was scheduled.  

But on a closely related matter - we had also requested that Jerusalem, which had already announced it was going to erect a monument to the memory of the 9/11 victims, should put up a memorial to Jerusalem's own, many victims of Arab-on-Israeli terror - we were given a run-around. 

That run-around actually never came to an end.

In the course of the following year, several bogus announcements were made by the municipality about plans to designate a specific site for a Jerusalem terror victims memorial. 

A public committee for making decisions about a Jerusalem memorial was announced. But if it ever met, we never heard about it. 

Another announcement said a site in the Camp Allenby plot (named for what it used to be decades earlier) near the corner of Hevron Road and Yanovsky Street on Jerusalem's south side had been designated for a memorial to Jerusalem's terror victims and work was underway. 

Of course, nothing ever came of that either.

Frimet Roth eventually published an angry complaint in the Jerusalem Post on July 30, 2003 ["No memorial, not even a plaque"] in which she mentioned some of the evasions we had heard from city officials. 

Here's the main argument: that Jerusalem was faced with having to put up some 30 terror memorial plaques, and that doing so would "interfere with the city's character and appeal" and chase away the tourists. There's no reason for us to comment on the stupidity of what we heard. 

Also this argument - that the building owner objected. That sounded strange and unlikely to us.

The simple plaque bears the names of

the 15 people murdered inside the Sbarro pizzeria and the

Hebrew word for "To remember" [Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

A few weeks after Frimet's article was published in the Jerusalem Post, and without any other reaction having come to us from the municipality's many officials and leaders, a notice out of the blue: we were notified that a Sbarro plaque had finally been allowed. And that a mid-afternoon ceremony was going to be scheduled at the site. 

Frimet was invited to be one of the speakers and she accepted.

The text below is a translation of what Frimet, Malki Roth's mother, said in Hebrew. 

The date was September 23, 2003. The plaque is still there today though the Sbarro pizzeria is long gone and replaced with another business.

And the need to remember and not forget continues to be axiomatic - and disputed.

Why We Need This Plaque 

By Frimet Roth 

(First published in an article we posted on the Malki Foundation website thirteen years ago)

The path leading to the erection of this memorial plaque was neither short nor smooth. When we faced the obstacles, we asked ourselves whether it was really necessary at all.
There were times when the municipality made clear their feeling that a plaque would actually be detrimental - that it was bound to alter the character of the city of Jerusalem, even chase away tourists.

But we persevered - we, the bereaved families, along with the staff of the Municipality's Protocol Department - and we overcame those obstacles, even managing to have the plaque erected in time for the second "yahrzeit".

But the question, a legitimate one, remains What is the purpose of this memorial? It's safe to presume that we, the relatives of the victims, will not visit it and undoubtedly our pain will not abate, now that it is there. Our intense longing will continue - every day, every hour.

As I see it, the plaque's real significance is for others for those who never knew the victims personally, who never heard of their deaths, who heard but may have already forgotten. When these people pass by and chance upon the names of these martyrs, the collective memory of this horrendous war will be deepened.

And I believe this nation badly needs to work on its capacity to remember. To contend with constant fear, this nation has found it necessary to forget each terror attack and its victims as quickly as it can. Demolished business premises are speedily rebuilt; they're filled with customers looking for a fun time out.

I heard a television correspondent not long ago reporting from the site of a suicide bombing that had claimed six lives. He was speaking early on the following morning. He pointed to the heavy traffic and commented "Apparently the urge for routine is more powerful that everything else."

If he was correct, then the Jewish nation is paying too high a price for its normalcy. Remembering our victims a little more would not indicate weakness. Nor would it empower the enemy, or hinder our ability to cope. Remembering the outrages done to us is simply a normal, sensitive and positive reaction.

Jewish tradition encourages this approach. With the holiday of Rosh Hashana, also known as "Remembrance Day", drawing close, this is a most appropriate moment to emphasize the need to remember these victims. The men, the women and the many children who perished here were righteous, every one of them. Both in life, as we their loved ones can affirm, and in death, having died as martyrs - in sanctifying G-d's name.

Our Sages teach us that the righteous are considered alive even in death. For us, their parents, children, brothers and sisters, they truly live on in our hearts and memories. My hope is that they will now also live on in the thoughts of others, thanks to this plaque. Even if only briefly.

And the promise of our Sages be fulfilled, as it says "Just as Yom Kippur atones, so too do the deaths of the righteous."

After the ceremony [Photo credit: Arnold Roth]

Earlier today, the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, we saw a featured op ed in the Financial Times which included this striking claim:

The real tragedy of terror is what it makes us do to each other. We start fearing people just because of how they look: the colour of their skin, the way they dress. 

We Tweeted this response:

If terror's "real tragedy" is fear of the other, do the dead, injured and survivors count?

Astoundingly, depressingly, that question still needs to be asked, and for many the answer is likely to be: "Well, it sort of depends."

It's not only in Jerusalem, but also in Jerusalem, that people need constantly to be reminded of the sanctity of human life, of the imperative of remembering and never forgetting the innocent victims, and of fighting the terrorists with total determination in order to defeat them.

09-Aug-16: Fifteen years after the Sbarro massacre

Malki 1985-2001

Frimet Roth shares some personal thoughts at her blog on the anniversary of the day our daughter was murdered: Fifteen years on, there's no relief from the grief

Please read and share.

28-Apr-16: Terror-by-knifing attack foiled at Qalandiya; assailant, again, is a child

The attackers came equipped with these stabbing
implements - two identical kitchen knives
and a switchblade found on the body of the young male
[Image Source: Israel Police]

A violent attack at the Qalandiya security checkpoint yesterday (Wednesday) on Jerusalem's north side has cost a pair of Palestinian Arabs, a young married woman and her teenage brother, their lives.

Times of Israel reports that, while no Israelis from among the security personnel attacked suffered any injuries, the two assailants, armed with knives, were killed after attempting to attack the heavily-armed Israelis.

The attackers are identified as Maram Salih Hassan Abu Ismail, a woman of 23, and her brother Ibrahim Saleh Taha, 16. Both are said to be from Surif, an Arab community located south of Jerusalem and north of Hebron. Ma'an News Agency says the woman is the mother of two children and pregnant with a third.

Surif is familiar to Israelis with a sense of history. It is home to most of the Arab mob who carried out a total massacre of the convoy of Jews (among them Frimet Roth's cousin Eliyahu Herskowitz ז"ל) known as the Lamed Heh. Its 35 members had set out on foot in January 1948 with the goal of relieving the Arab siege on the Gush Etzion communities. Those beleagured communities, numerically overwhelmed by the surrounding enemies, eventually fell to the invading the Arab Legion, the military arm of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on Friday May 14, 1948, some hours before Israel’s independence was declared in Tel Aviv. They remained, judenrein, under Jordanian military occupation for the next 19 years. The massacre and then capture of the Gush was "one of the major episodes of the State of Israel-in-the-making", playing a significant role in Israeli collective memory. Wikipedia reminds us that the post-1967 revival and massive flourishing of the Gush Etzion communities is regarded as deeply symbolic, linked in the Israeli psyche to the massive loss of life in Israel's War of Independence.

Ynet's report of yesterday's terrorist attack says the Arab couple

attempted to walk through a passage intended for vehicle entry and began speeding up in the direction of Border policemen stationed at the scene. The female assailant had her hand in her bag in which there was a knife. The male assailant's hand was held behind his back which aroused the security forces suspicion. The police called upon them to stop several times. However they continued to quickly approach in their direction. The police continued to call upon them to stop and throw down the bag the woman was holding. The woman stopped close to the Border policemen, both of them took several steps backwards and then suddenly they turned towards the forces, the woman took out a knife and threw it straight at the policeman closest to her. The policeman was not injured. The security forces acted quickly and shot them dead. A search of the area revealed that in addition to the woman's knife, the male had a similar knife in his belt, as well as a pocket knife.

As always, there's an air of Rashomon ("alternative, self-serving and contradictory versions of the same incident" embodying "multiple eye-witness testimonies of an event contain conflicting information") already evident in parts of the media.

Arabic-language audiences are getting a sadly-familiar-sounding narrative at considerable odds with the Israel Police and media accounts. An Iranian news source calls yesterday's thwarted terror attack a "massacre". A Gazan source refers to a "child martyr", and martyr-posters are, not surprisingly, online [here] already. Al Safir, a Palestinian Arab news outlet, calls what happened an "execution". So does this Gulf news source. For Aljazeera, it's about the woman's orphaned children, and the death of a younger brother. As far as we can tell, none of those Arabic reports shows the knives that were removed from the clutches of the attackers.

As usual, the events we see as terrorism are described by the Arab and Muslim media to Arab news consumers context-free form, devoid of connection to the ongoing wave of knifings, rammings, shootings, bombings. Forgotten for the moment are the multiple public acts of glorification of women, sub-teen and teenage children enjoying the acclaim of Arabs and Moslems from across the spectrum - and at the highest levels of Palestinian Arab power - for the violence of their usually-pointless murderous assaults on Jews. It's an ongoing tragedy for all concerned.

Haaretz says

Hassan Tahah, another sibling, told Haaretz that he doesn't believe his sister was planning to carry out an attack. "We have no details about what transpired and no one briefed us, but I don't believe this whole terrorist attack story," he said. According to him, his sister was on her way to a doctor's appointment, accompanied by his brother. "She was probably lost, or didn't understand what was going on at the roadblock, and the soldiers shot her and my brother," he said.

We wrote about another terror-minded sixteen year-old from Surif with a knife in the wake of an earlier attack ["23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror"] some months ago. And for a sense of some of the numerous recent Arab-on-Israeli attacks at Qalandiya, click here.

23-Mar-16: Frimet's new blog

Frimet's new blog

This Ongoing War is where Frimet and Arnold Roth write about terrorism and its victims. We have posted more 3,000 times since starting in June 2006.

In January 2016, Frimet began writing at her own blog as well. It's called "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly | Frimet Roth writes from Jerusalem". Here's how she describes its scope:

The Good is outnumbered two-to-one in the title of my blog. So too it is outweighed on this planet by The Evil, The Corrupt and The Seamy. For the most part, I focus here on those negatives - along with a light sprinkling of The Good. When I address The Bad and The Ugly here, it’s mainly in relation to two topics: (a) Terrorism and the current Israeli government’s pathetic handling of it; and (b) Children with disabilities and Israel's pathetic handling of them. (I have blogged about this for some years, but under an assumed name.) Also expect occasional digressions to other Bad and Ugly topics that plague Israel. I hope readers will share their thoughts here too.
The murder of my precious daughter Malki, aged fifteen and a half, in the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, colors this blog intensely. The life and challenges of my youngest daughter Chaya, profoundly disabled physically and cognitively, colors my discussion of disabilities.
In 1988, I moved to Jerusalem from Queens, NY, following a 12-year-stopover in my husband's hometown, Melbourne, Australia. The law degree I earned decades ago has lain mostly unused ever since and portrait sketching is one of my passions, so those sketches are likely to appear in my posts now and then.

We would be glad if you would take a look at today's post. It's called "On Brussels, Sbarro and moral clarity".