05-Mar-23: Intertwined lives: A Purim reflection

From a 1997 family snapshot:

Malki dressed up for Purim as a farmer

In a few days from now, we will be marking the sixth anniversary of the day in 2017 when senior US Department of Justice officials announced the unsealing of terror charges against our child's killer, the Jordanian fugitive terrorist Ahlam Tamimi ["14-Mar-17: Sbarro massacre mastermind is now formally charged and her extradition is requested"].

But before then, the Jewish world will mark one of its happiest annual events: the festival of Purim. An emotional roller-coaster? Certainly. Jewish life is replete with such moments.

About once every five years (and most recently in 2018), we repost here on our blog a reflection written by Arnold Roth touching on the festival through the lens of three intersecting lives. In posting it below, we have adjusted the dates of Purim so that they are correct for 2023. 

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Purim, for those not so familiar with the intricacies of the age-old Jewish calendar, works in a slightly unexpected way.

Throughout the world, Jewish communities will begin marking it this coming Monday night, March 6, 2023. That evening and then again the following morning, Tuesday, observant Jews will gather in whichever part of the world they are to hear the reading of the Book of Esther.

In Jerusalem where we live, we do the same - but exactly 24 hours later. The day is called Shushan Purim. (Shushan in the Purim narrative is where the Persian royal palace was located.) The first of the two readings of Esther in Israel's capital takes place Tuesday night (March 7, 2023). The second will be the following morning, Wednesday (March 8, 2023) as part of the Shacharit daily morning prayers.

Later in the day on Wednesday, March 8, 2023, Jerusalem's Jews - but not the Jews of almost every other community around the world - will celebrate what Purim stands for by means of a festive meal and appropriate beverages. 

(Note that along the way there is a traditional fast day, the Fast of Esther, actually a dawn-to-sunset fast and not a full 25 hour fast, which this year starts before dawn on Monday morning, March 6, 2023.) 

At exactly this time of year, but eighteen years ago in 2005, Arnold Roth was given an opportunity to publish a reflection about how Purim, with its family-focused joy and celebration of good triumphing over evil, feels to a family like ours that has lost a loved child to an act of hatred-based terrorist murder.

The result was a short essay published on the aish.com website. The themes which the article touches remain on our minds, so here is a replay.

Fifteen
The number that conceals G-d's name also represents the mysterious turning point for three generations of my family | Arnold Roth 

Most Jewish teenagers growing up in Australia during the 1960s were, like me, children of concentration camp survivors. Our parents were involved in owning small businesses or were employed. There was hardly a professional among them. At birth, most of us lacked even a single grandparent; almost all of us were named after family members who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

It was clear that we were everything to our parents, and no one needed to tell us why. Top of their priorities list was ensuring that we gained the best possible education. Little wonder that several of the largest and most successful Jewish schools in the world were started in Melbourne in the years right after World War II. And the community's interest in things Israeli was unlimited; the occasional Israeli film and Israeli visitor to Australia's distant shores were memorable events.

The Six Day War happened when I was 15. The weeks of rising tension leading up to it left an indelible mark on me: the grainy television images of Egyptian and Syrian troops on the march; Nasser's strident speeches and unilateral blockade of the sea lanes to Eilat; the massing of Egyptian forces on Israel's Sinai border and of the Syrians on the Golan frontier; U Thant's disgraceful capitulation in removing UN peace-keeping forces from Sinai precisely when they were most needed.

Our daughter Malki Z"L with her
beloved grandmother Genia Roth Z"L

who visited us in Jerusalem, April 2000

And the blood-curdling threats of one after another of the Arab dictators and monarchs: "The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified... This is our opportunity to erase the ignominy which has been with us since 1948... Our goal is clear - to wipe Israel off the map."

Holocaust Horrors

Fifteen marked a turning point in my life. 

A few months after Israel's stunning defeat of the forces bent (once again) on the liquidation of the Jews, I enrolled for the first time in a Jewish day-school. My ideas about being a Jew in the world, about history and how it affects our lives, about the Holocaust and the chain of Jewish life, began taking grown-up shape.

My mother grew up near Łódź in a town located close enough to the Polish/German frontier to have been overrun by Nazi forces on the first day of the war. 

Among the men rounded up by the invaders on that September day was her father, the grandfather whose name I was given. As a father myself, I have to breathe deeply in calling to mind the image of my mother throwing herself at the feet of a German soldier, begging, screaming for her father's life to be spared.

On the day the Nazis marched into Poland and began the process of destroying a world, trampling a unique culture into the mud, murdering Jews by the millions, my mother had just turned 15.

My awareness of my parents' lives begins, in a certain sense, with the end of the war: their four or five years as displaced persons in post-war Germany, their long journey to Australia as a young couple with no English, no marketable skills and no roots beyond their few personal ties and their very Jewish sense of community.

An unexpected photograph changed this for me a few years ago.

I have a cousin, Chana, a kibbutznikit, the daughter of my father's oldest brother. She was brought to Tel Aviv in the 1930s as a baby by her parents who fled pre-war Galicia, and has lived her life in Israel. Returning as a tourist to her roots, she traveled to Krakow in 2000, and via a chain of circumstances ended up in possession of four photocopied pages which she shared with me. These were Nazi documents - census forms which the Germans required the Jews in the Krakow ghetto to complete prior to dispatching them to the death camps.

The first page had been completed in the distinctive handwriting of my father, of blessed memory. A small snapshot attached to the form showed him as I had never seen before: virile, handsome, young. Two other pages were the census forms of two of my father's sisters. Their names were known to me from a family tree I had put together years earlier with my father's help. But until that moment, they were nothing more than names. Now I gazed at the portraits of two vibrant young women.

My oldest daughter, Malki, had just completed a family-roots project at school and I knew she would be interested. A glance at the pages and she said exactly what I had been thinking: Malki bore a striking resemblance to my father's beautiful sister Feige.

Feige, at left, who did not survive the Holocaust. 

And the great-niece she never knew, Malki, at right.

For us, and for Malki, the resemblance between them was striking.

Unlike my parents, Feige did not survive the Nazi murder machine. Whatever promise her life contained, whatever talents she was developing, whatever gifts she was planning to give the world - all these were overturned by a massive act of violent, barbaric hatred.

Some months after we gazed on those extraordinary pictures for the first time, Malki sat down and quietly (without telling us) composed the words and music of an infectiously upbeat song: "You live, breathe and move - that's a great start!... You'd better start dancing now!"

Living in the land promised to the Jewish people was a source of deep contentment to this granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. The discovery of Feige's picture enabled Malki, I think, to gain a strengthened sense of her personal role as a link in an ancient chain.

Unbearable Questions

Arafat's intifada war against Israel's civilian population broke out around the time we received those precious pages. 

From the diary she kept, it's evident that the near-daily toll of injuries and deaths weighed heavily on Malki's mind. She writes of having to leave her classroom to weep in privacy upon learning of another terror attack… and another and another. 

We, her parents and siblings, were unaware of the depth of her empathy for the victims of the war raging in her precious land. The turmoil and pain, to Malki, were deeply personal. Though born in Australia, she had lived in Jerusalem since age two. She felt deeply connected to Jewish history.

In August 2001, my daughter and her friend Michal interrupted the activities of a busy summer vacation day to grab lunch in a crowded Jerusalem restaurant, Sbarro. 

If she had noticed the man with a guitar case on his back striding through the unguarded door and positioning himself next to the counter where she was engrossed in tapping out a text message on her cell phone, would Malki have recognized the hatred, the barbaric ecstasy, on his face before he exploded?

Malki and Michal were buried the next day. The closest of friends since early childhood, they lie side by side, forever, on a hill near the entrance to Jerusalem. Malki was 15.

Her diary is full of questions: How can such terrible things happen to our people? Why is our love for the Land of Israel not better understood by outsiders? What kind of Divine plan calls for teenagers to be injured and killed by people for whom we hold no hatred at all? How can such intense hatred even exist?

The unbearable question marks left behind by my daughter scream at me every day.

The Hidden Name

Jewish life, viewed from a distance, is an astonishing saga of tragedy, achievement, grandeur, destruction and greatness, played out over millennia. There is a risk we lose this perspective when we are the individuals living it.

Malki and her close friend Michal Raziel.The girls were
standing side by side at the Sbarro pizzeria's
counter when the human bomb walked in and exploded

At Purim, we feast, we drink, we ceremoniously deliver gifts, we celebrate with those we love and like. But the narrative at the heart of this festival is of a close brush with tragedy: the Jewish victory over a genocidal conspiracy by murderous Jew-haters.

Here in Jerusalem, a day later than almost everywhere else in the world, Purim is marked on the 15th day of Adar. Jewish calendar dates are written using a simple alphanumeric code: alef is one, bet is two and so on. But longstanding tradition is to avoid the straightforward way of writing the number 15. 

You would expect it to be yud-heh (lit: ten-five); however these two letters happen to form the first half of G-d's name and are accorded special treatment and respect. Accordingly, 15 is written as tet-vav: nine-six. G-d's Name, as it were, is hidden within the number 15.

Purim is odd in another way: the name of G-d is completely absent from Megillat Esther.

Does this mean the victory of the Jews over their oppressor happened without His involvement? Jewish tradition answers with a firm 'no'. G-d's role was crucial, but our ability to make sense of how and why He acts is limited, inadequate.

Those of us raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, and who have experienced the tragedy of a child's death by hatred, struggle to understand the nature of the Divine role in our lives as individuals and as a people. There are times, according to Jewish wisdom, when you need to know that G-d's hand is at work even when the evidence is difficult to see, even when there are more questions than answers.

Malka Chana Roth's memory is honored by the Malki Foundation. It supports families wanting to provide their severely disabled child with quality home care. More information at the Malki Foundation website

[A Dutch version of the article above is online here.]

30-Apr-20 The Holocaust and our family

Arnold Roth tweeted this yesterday as we marked 72 years of Israel's proudly-restored independence.

Text:

From Jerusalem on #IsraelIndependenceDay, my family gives thanks for the WW2 Alled victory and the liberation by US forces of Dachau-Kaufering, a Nazi German death camp from where my father Abraham Rottenberg, a slave laborer, emerged among the few survivors 75 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/gbB3bHx6Ie— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

And then this:

As with many Holocaust survivors, the joy concealed the background darkness. Dad died in 1982. In 2000, I learned for the first time of his first wife, murdered by the Nazi Germans. And in 2016, I learned about their daughter, murdered at age 3. Of these losses, he never spoke.

— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

Arnold's father of blessed memory, Avraham Zvi-Hersh (Romek to his friends) Rottenberg, was liberated exactly 75 years ago - on April 29, 1945. On the advice of friends in Australia, where by then they had made their home, who said a shorter, more ordinary name would help in the process of settling into a new country, he and his wife changed the family name to Roth in the 1950s.

Back to the war. In the summer of 1944, after five years of already living through horrors that in every sense of the word are unimaginable, he was shipped (we now know on the basis of post-war German documentation) to one of the sub-camp complexes of Dachau called Kaufering [background]. There he became, not for the first time in the war, a slave-labor prisoner. From an online record [here], we think he may have been working for the Messerschmidt aviation company. But we can''t be sure.

Life in Dachau-Kaufering was, in key respects, hellish even by comparison with the rest of the Nazi German genocide industry:

The prisoners were used without consideration for life and limbs. The allocation of food was inadequate. According to the report of the war crimes investigation commission... the 11 concentration camps of Landsberg/Kaufering were the worst in Bavaria in terms of inhumane housing, food and the high death rate. The prisoners called these camps "cold crematorias"... By the end of April 1945, a total of about 30,000 prisoners had passed through the camps, including 4,200 women and 850 children. In just ten months, according to estimates from early post-war times, at least 14,500 prisoners died from hunger, epidemics, executions, transfer to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and on a march death. [Source]

As Arnold wrote to our family yesterday:

What happened there is nightmarish even by comparison with... Dad's own experiences in the Krakow Ghetto (with his wife Anda and daughter Sara - both soon murdered by the Germans), in the Plaszow labor camp, in the Auschwitz extermination camp and in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He was in all of those. US forces took control of what was left of it on April 29, 1945 and Dad then moved to nearby Munich where he soon met Mum.

With the war over and the mad scramble to find family and learn what had happened to them, he became aware (he was one of 17 children) that both his parents and all but two of his siblings along with most of his pre-war fellow-yeshiva-students and friends had been murdered in the Nazi German death machine.

In post-war Germany, starting, as so many European Jews did in those immediate post-liberation months, as a penniless, stateless, lone survivor Displaced Person bereft of family, Romek leveraged his skills as a photographer to quickly get back to making a living. It was a line of work from which he supported his wife and children for the next twenty-five years.

In the family lore, based on snatches of recollections he shared with us, he set himself up in one of Munich's public parks, snapping photographs of people out for a stroll or just enjoying life after a devastating war. He then somehow managed to track down the people he photographed (printing photographs in those days involved chemicals, equipment and considerable time) and sold them, or some of them at least, the photos.

This is how he met and then married Gucia.

Gucia had survived with all three of her sisters by staying tightly together - as they survived the nightmarish experiences of incarceration in the Lodz Ghetto, and then Auschwitz and forced labor camp - from the first day of the war until the day they were liberated. In the course of those years, the four sisters lost (to acts of murder) their parents and all three of their brothers. Also: their health, their education, their youth.

Arnold shared several photos yesterday - among them those below - with our family in Melbourne as well as with our childen and grandchildren. He did it to honour, as he wrote, how they rebuilt their lives, soon married (there was a rush of Jewish weddings in post-war Germany), started a family (they unfortunately lost a first child), sailed off to distant Australia, and over the following years raised their two sons in what he describes as comfort and an atmosphere of love and mutual caring.

Romek in Munich - some time between 1946 and 1949. A colorized version of
a black-and-white photo.

Romek and his wife Gucia probably photographed just before they married
in Munich in November 1947

Munich, probably 1948: Gucia and Romek. The monochrome photo
was recently colorized.

Like many other survivors of the Holocaust, Romek spoke little about his experiences with his own children. That's not to say he didn't talk. He did but usually in the relaxed company of other Yiddish-speaking survivors who needed little background and no explanation from one another in order to put things into context. It was, after all, the context of their own lives too.

Arnold reflected on that when writing his mother's obituary for the Australian Jewish News a few years back:

I know terribly little about the details and cannot understand now what stopped me from pushing harder when I could to know the contours of that part of [Gucia's] life, those six years of incomprehensible nightmare. What I do know comes mostly from overhearing both my parents chatting amiably with their dinner-party guests and card-playing friends, recounting stories – sometimes hair-raising – about ghetto, forced labor camps, Auschwitz, transports. Somehow the self-restraint got relaxed when they were in the company of other survivors, and the presence of inquisitive children with big ears didn’t get in the way.

In particular, to us children, Romek never once mentioned that he had had, and had lost (to murder at the hands of the Nazi Germans), a young wife and a daughter. The child cannot have been more than three or four when she too was shot or gassed or starved. About these lives and losses we learned only many years later after Romek himself had passed away.

In the past four years we also discovered a whole hitherto-missing branch of his family, the children of an older brother who himself lived through the Holocaust (a story with much drama) but who died young in the early 1950's. That family not only survived the war in Europe (as Rottenbergs) but remained there, living until today in Belgium. It's quite a narrative, one we're still exploring.

Melbourne's Jewish community was shaped and profoundly influenced by the influx of survivors, mostly with Polish backgrounds like Gucia and Romek, after its immigration policy was belatedly liberalized starting in 1947.

The Roths arrived in Melbourne as refugees in September 1949. Australia granted them a two-year permit but in time they became devoted and happy citizens and remained there for the rest of their lives. Romek passed away in Melbourne in 1982, Gucia in 2016.

May their memories continue, as they have been until now, to be a blessing for their entire growing family.

25-Mar-19: On justice and decency for American victims of terrorism: When US indignation leads to a troubling comparison

Yilmaz [Image Source]

What follows might at first not seem a relevant contribution to our battle for the extradition to Washington DC of our child's killer. But in a surprising and little-noted way, that is just what it is.

In early February, we became aware for the first time of a terrorism case involving a Turk by the name of Adem Yilmaz. (He's actually quite peripheral to our purpose in this post.)

Yilmaz was indicted by the United States in 2015 on a variety of charges tied to terrorism activity. This included his alleged role in a human bomb attack in Afghanistan that took the lives of two American soldiers. Eleven other people were injured.

From the Associated Press report, we learned that the case against Yilmaz had been kept under seal - unpublicized, a secret - for some years right up until early February 2019. During those years, he was serving time in a German prison. He was convicted by a court in Dusseldorf in 2010 which

sentenced Yilmaz to 11 years in prison for trying to mount what the German judge reportedly called a "second September 11." [VOA] 

The American charges related to Yilmaz being part of a foiled 2007 plot to attack American citizens and facilities in Germany including the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein base. In order to bring him to justice, the American authorities needed to wait till he completed that German prison term.

This Yilmaz story caught our eye.

Why? Because of the parallels with Ahlam Tamimi who, though not held in custody, lived free and unencumbered in Jordan for five and a half years before the US Department of Justice unsealed criminal charges against her that had been issued in 2012.

Yilmaz behind bullet proof glass inside the courtroom
of the district court in Duesseldorf,
western Germany [Image Source]

Those Tamimi charges relate to her role in the devastating bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001. We described that process in a post ten days ago ["14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?"]

But what happened after the charges against the Turkish jihadist were unsealed is simply stunning.

Within a few days of being formally asked by the US to extradite Yilmaz who was "still deemed dangerous by German authorities", the Germans - according to another AP report - decided instead to put him on a plane to his native Turkey.

He was briefly held by anti-terrorism authorities at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport. And then he was simply let loose. He's now free [source].

How very not surprising.

The reaction from the United States, however, is the real point. A February 25, 2019 report quotes Robert Palladino, deputy spokesman for the State Department, telling a press briefing that the US has been in talks with Ankara about Yılmaz:

"Yılmaz is a convicted terrorist; he's charged with serious crimes by the United States... The United States will never relent in its efforts to bring Yılmaz to justice.”

Bravo!

AP again:

Deputy U.S. Secretary of State John Sullivan immediately called a meeting with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who was in Washington to take part in meetings of the coalition fighting against the Islamic State group, to express American displeasure. "We are gravely disappointed by Germany's decision to deport a dangerous terrorist — Adem Yilmaz — to Turkey, rather than to extradite him to the United States to face justice for his complicity in the murder of two American servicemen," acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said in a statement later Wednesday after the two diplomats had met.

Gravely disappointed is a fine start.

And then this:

"Adem Yilmaz is responsible for the deaths of U.S. servicemembers," U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell said in a tweet on Thursday. "This failure to extradite him to the United States violates the terms and spirit of our Extradition Treaty."

Yes, it does.

And seeing those words there both uplifts us and depresses us. If only we had heard something even remotely like them in the Tamimi case.

Indeed, several disturbing Tamimi/Jordan-related questions suggested themselves to us as we thought through what had just happened. For instance why has the US evidently accepted Jordan's abrogation of its treaty obligations with vastly more understanding and grace and far less indignation than in the Germany/Turkey case? 

What wouldn't we give to hear a robust declaration from the State Department to its Jordanian counterparts calling them out on Jordan's dereliction of the responsibility to extradite Tamimi to the US; on flouting their treaty obligations; on undermining the rule of law.

Ahlam Tamimi

Then we learned that the Anti-Defamation League in Washington was thinking similar thoughts.

On March 12, 2019, the ADL'S CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote a public letter to the US Attorney General William P. Barr highlighting some of the parallels between the Yilmaz and Tamimi cases.

And, to our rising optimism, he asked for an official public response. (The emphasis in the quotes that follow is ours.)

Greenblatt noted that

Ms. Tamimi’s case is almost identical in many respects to the Yilmaz case on which the Justice Department recently spoke out. As you may know, Tamimi is on the list of America’s Most Wanted Terrorists because of her role in a 2001 suicide bombing at a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem by the U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization Hamas that killed 15 people, including two American civilians.

One of those killed American civilians, as most regular readers of this blog will know, is our daughter Malki whose life ended when she was just 15.

That attack also injured over 100 others, including four Americans, one of whom remains in a permanent vegetative state since that attack over 17 years ago. Tamimi was indicted in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Justice for precisely this reason after Israel reluctantly released her under duress as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap. Like Yilmaz, Tamimi is a dangerous terrorist who has been enjoying legal impunity in a U.S. ally (Jordan) that since March 2017 has refused to honor its treaty to extradite her to the United States, even though the State Department lists that treaty as still in force on its website. Jordan has previously extradited terrorism suspects to the United States under this treaty. In the meantime, Tamimi has bragged (on camera) about her role in killing Jewish children and makes repeated public appearances as a celebrity and role model, including on Jordanian television, seated beside Jordanian politicians, and at the country’s main trade union office.

We were thrilled by how the ADL letter then set about framing the issue:

This is a vital matter of justice and decency for American victims of terrorism, and for ensuring that America does not apply a double-standard in pursuing justice when the victims are American Jews or other American citizens visiting the Jewish State. 

As the criminal charges the U.S. Department of Justice has filed against Tamimi illustrate, American law clearly grants our government the right – and the obligation – to pursue and prosecute terrorists who murder American citizens abroad, and yet not a single terrorist who has killed an American in Israel or the disputed territories has ever been successfully tried by the U.S. government, and almost none have even been indicted by the U.S. government. 

This case is a welcome exception in that the Department of Justice has taken vigorous steps to bring this terrorist to American justice, but the government of Jordan is thwarting the Department of Justice efforts. (To be best of our knowledge, there is no indication that the State Department has acted as vigorously as the Justice Department to ensure that Jordan complies with America’s extradition request.)

The letter goes on to pose some sharp and very welcome questions:

As such, I have several questions for you that go to the heart of whether America is equally committed to ensuring justice for these victims of terrorist acts, including:

First, has the U.S. government sought a review of the Jordanian Court of Cassation’s March 2017 decision to invalidate America’s 1995 extradition treaty with Jordan on narrow, technical grounds, rendering it void from the day it was signed until today, and denying the extradition to the United States of Ahlam al-Tamimi, an admitted mass murderer whose victims include three U.S. citizens?

Second, does the U.S. government agree that this Jordanian decision runs counter to the reality that Jordan has extradited at least three Jordanian citizens to the United States, where they were prosecuted and imprisoned for serious crimes? And that these extraditions related to the deaths of fewer American citizens than the number of killings of U.S. citizens for which Tamimi has been charged?

Third, will the U.S. government clarify to its Jordanian ally its extreme dissatisfaction at the highest levels regarding how this action has resulted in Tamimi evading justice while developing a celebrity persona and a career as a media commentator, as a figure of significant influence in Jordan advocating terrorist attacks and as a person actively encouraging Jordanians and Arabic-speakers outside Jordan (via a television program she broadcast globally from Amman between 2012 and 2016) to provide material support to terrorist organizations?

Fourth, does the U.S. government see the Jordanian court ruling, Jordan’s subsequent refusal to do anything to ratify the extradition treaty to overcome that ruling, and its refusal to extradite Tamimi outside of the framework of that treaty as an unacceptable dereliction of a strategic ally’s responsibility to uphold its legal obligations and the rule of law, as well as a stain on Jordan’s record as a generally staunch partner in the fight against terrorism and extremism?

And fifth, what does the U.S. government intend to do to ensure that Tamimi does not continue to enjoy her legal impunity and public profile in Jordan in the same manner that Adem Yilmaz will likely be able to do as a result of Germany’s refusal to extradite him to the United States, which, as you noted, helped him “deliberately... escape justice”?

As far as we know, the ADL has not yet heard back from the DOJ. We will be watching.

And hoping.

12-Mar-17: ISIS bomb attack on a giant German mall is thwarted

The Limbecker Platz mall on less fraught days [Image Source]

There's so much news about terrorism that most people pay little attention.

Yes, it's a sort of paradox but our own experience bears out its truth. Why people tune out reports about terrorist threats, terrorist arrests, victims of the terrorists - those are weighty and troubling questions to which useful, persuasive answers are in short supply. Perhaps they're part of a work in progress. We can hope.

Likewise the matter of why so many people - especially public figures with political and or law-and-order responsibility - find it hard to even pronounce the word.

Our self-appointed task here is simply to help people have access to some of the information and to aspire towards creating a context that helps them understand how all of this affects us and them.

To Germany.

The Limbecker Platz shopping mall in Essen (population about 600,000) was shut down in its entirety by police yesterday (Saturday). Nearby parking garages as well as an underground rail station were all put into lockdown while sniffer dogs searched the entire area.

"We received very serious indications from security sources that a possible attack was planned here for today and would be carried out," a spokesman for Essen police told the Reuters news agency. "That is why we were forced to take these measures." Police later ordered the shopping center, one of the biggest in Germany, to remain closed for the rest of Saturday... ["Arrests made following terror threat on Essen shopping center", Deutsche Welle, today]

The German tabloid newspaper "Bild" detailed the nature of the threat as human bombs - or in their words, a multiple suicide bombing. They say the attack, which they see as the work of Islamic State (ISIS), has now been foiled and that two males in Oberhausen, a nearby community, were arrested last night in connection with the threat. But we saw a different German report that says there is an ongoing search for people connected to the making of an explosive device. And that one of the two men arrested had already been released as of late Saturday night.

Police closed the entire complex down on Saturday [Image Source]

A German who went to Syria to become an ISIS fighter is believed to be the plot's mastermind. He was - perhaps still is - in contact with people in the Essen area to organize it. He sent them bomb-making instructions via the Internet. The German Press Agency says the two arrested last night were in contact with him but are nonetheless not being treated as intending perpetrators.

The Limbecker Platz mall is a serious enterprise with more than 200 stores and up to 60,000 people flocking to it on a normal Saturday. Germany has many dozens of large-scale malls (here's a listing of the largest).

For reasons related to why we blog, we have written numerous times about Germany in the past couple of years (click to see some of those earlier posts). Sadly for the Germans, there's little chance that we will be lacking terrorism-related material about which to write in the foreseeable future.

It's a country going through some major wrenching changes. An estimated 300,000 migrants arrived in Germany in 2016 [source: "The Islamization of Germany in 2016", Gatestone Institute, January 2, 2017], in addition to the more than one million who arrived in 2015. At least 80% (about 800,000 in 2015; about 240,000 in 2016) of these migrants were Muslim according to the Central Council of Muslims in Germany.

08-Jan-17: Pakistanis, working for Iran, plotted murders of Israelis in France, Germany

From news coverage of the suspect's earlier arrest last summer [Image Source]

A brief report put out by Kuwait's official newsagency caught our eye last week:

BERLIN (January 3, KUNA): The office of the German Prosecutor General has on Tuesday officially accused a Pakistani national of spying for Iran. Sayed Mustafa, 31 years, confessed of receiving money from an Iranian secret service for spying on the former head of German-Israeli Society Reinhold Robbe over at least one year, said a statement by the Prosecutor General's office located in Karlsruhe city. The defendant is also accused by Paris of spying on a professor of economics for the same Iranian secret service, according to the statement. The man. arrested in last July is to stand trial after his interrogation complete in mid-December [Source: Kuwait News Agency KUNA]

The fractured English aside, it sounds like more than spying is involved here, unless the Kuwaitis mean for us to believe that Iran is seeking insights into economic theory or wants to get a deeper understanding of how Germany's parliament works (Robbe has been an elected member of the Bundestag for the past 23 years). Both options are unlikely.

Now there's a different version of this murky story from an official German source:

German federal prosecutors pressed charges against a 31-year-old Pakistani student who they believe targeted Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician Reinhold Robbe on behalf of the Iranian intelligence agency, German media reported on Friday. Robbe, who served as president of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) until 2015, was being eyed as a possible assassination target, according to information reviewed by German public broadcasters NDR and WDR, as well as the daily "Süddeutsche Zeitung." According to the federal prosecutors' indictment, the suspected agent, named as Syed Mustufa H., compiled a thorough "movement profile" on Robbe and staked out the DIG offices in Berlin - signs authorities said were a clear indication of an assassination attempt.
The suspect paid particularly close attention to Robbe's public transportation travel habits and charted alternate routes that he took on the way to the DIG Berlin building. Prosecutors said the suspect's actions were part of a broader operation to identify possible targets with friendly ties to Israel in Germany, France and other European countries, the reports said. The Pakistani man is also accused of spying on a French-Israeli professor at a business school in Paris on behalf of Iranian intelligence. The suspect was previously detained by authorities in July 2016 under suspicion of espionage and was known to Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV). The Pakistani suspect is believed to have been spying for Iran since July 2015. The exact motive for carrying out a possible attack on Robbe is still unclear. However, security agencies speculate that the Iranian government could have been preparing a retaliatory move against people closely linked to Israel should Israel carry out airstrikes against Iranian nuclear power plants. Despite his extensive observation of Robbe, files confiscated from Syed Mustafa H. indicate that some of his methods were those of an amateur... The suspected agent officially studied engineering in Bremen and also worked at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the northern German city, the reports said. It is the first known case of a German politician being the target of an espionage operation by the Iranian intelligence agency, the reports said. [Deutsche Welle, January 7, 2017]

We're left wondering: Does this suspected spy/assassin have a surname and is it H? (Associated Press says this is "in keeping with German privacy rules"). Is there a good reason for not publicly identifying the Iranian spy agency? Is this really just an espionage story? And can we expect the wiley - and ruthless - Iranians to intervene and extract their agent from the German authorities clutches as they recently did in Kenya? ["14-Dec-16: Kenya, one way or another, clarifies its stance in the face of Iranian terror"]

In Pakistan, the alleged agent's July 2016 arrest in Germany on charges of serving the Iranians was a real story: see "Germany arrests Pakistani man accused of spying for Iran" [Express Tribune, Pakistan, July 8, 2016]. The photo at the top of this post is from the news coverage at the time.

Israel's Ynet, like us, is inclined to look past the espionage claims and to view the arrest as more pertaining to a sleeper assassination squad in the service of the Iranian regime:

A 31 year old Pakistani man has been indicted for being involved in an attempt to assassinate Reinhold Robbe - a member of the socialist-democrats and former president of the body responsible for strengthening relations between Israel and Germany. [He] was recruited by Iranian intelligence services, and was tasked with following known, outspoken Israel supporters in Germany... Mustafa and other operatives were to have been given orders to assassinate these targets should Israel have struck the Iranian nuclear reactors... Mustafa was arrested in July on suspicion of spying, and has been known to German intelligence services as a suspected Iranian agent since at least 2015. [Ynet, January 8, 2017]

And an Israel-based video news network pursues a similar line:

While the motive of the possible attack remains unclear, authorities reportedly suspect that the individuals were targeted as part of a planned worldwide retaliation scheme, in case Israel carries out an airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Another suspect, also a Pakistani national, was arrested in connection to the affair but was released due to insufficient evidence, as he was able to erase the hard drive of his computer prior to his arrest, possibly destroying incriminating information. He left Germany immediately after his release. German media noted that it is the first known case in which a German politician was the target of an operation by the Iranian secret service... [i24NewsTV, today]

As for Iranian motivation (and perhaps fingerprints), a reminder of a news snippet we highlighted here just last month: 

Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, while speaking at a conference in Tehran, said that were President-Elect Trump to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear “deal” signed by the Obama administration, Iran would destroy the State of Israel... ["Iran threatens to destroy Israel - again", Washington Times, December 12, 2016]

We suspect this story has some way yet to go.

30-Nov-16: An Islamist mole inside Germany's homeland security office?

A BfV security person [Image Source]

Less than two weeks ago, we wrote here ["21-Nov-16: German experts "discover" that Islamist terrorists are "being trained" to come into Europe as asylum seekers"] about some serious terrorism-related matters that had just been uncovered in Germany.

In addition to being Europe's strongest economy, Germany has the additional distinctions of (a) being home to what has just become Europe's largest community of Muslims and (b) having admitted a seven-digit number of immigrants in the past year under a remarkably flexible and generous asylum-seeker program,

The problems that have followed are life-impacting in a variety of serious ways.

We ran down a list of deeply worrying developments in the context of Germany's embrace of a huge influx of largely undocumented migrants in a single year and expressed our concern that German officialdom seemed to be unsure of what it ought to be doing:

Forgive us, but given the scale of the threat and the indications that serious-minded malevolents with Islamist doctrine as their guide have targeted their towns and public places, these German voices strike us as being sadly indecisive. For their sakes, we hope we're wrong... [That earlier post of ours]

German Salafist Islamists at a spiritual gathering [Image Source]

And for the sake of those who place their faith in the German government's security apparatuses, we hope what has just been uncovered - see the next paragraph - is quickly addressed by decisive and effective action.

This ["Germany Arrests Suspected Islamist Mole in Spy Agency"] comes from today's Wall Street Journal:

A suspected Islamist mole in Germany’s domestic intelligence service has been detained, officials said Wednesday, sparking criticism of an agency that has been on high alert following a string of attacks and foiled plots this year. Prosecutors in Düsseldorf said they had arrested a 51-year-old German national and recent Islam convert on suspicion of preparing an attack on the agency’s headquarters in Cologne and attempting to violate professional secrecy. Officials said the man had offered to help other Islamists launch an attack, but there was no proof he had started work on a plot...
The suspect was intercepted sharing agency secrets in an online chat and offering “fellow believers” access to its headquarters for an attack, the prosecutor’s office said. His chat partner was in fact an undercover agent. The suspect said he was “ready for anything to help his brothers” and that an attack against “infidels” was “in the interest of Allah,” according to the prosecutor’s office. The office said the man had confessed to infiltrating the agency to warn “fellow believers” about investigations into them.

But an AFP report [here] suggests the suspicions are actually more concrete than that: the suspect

is believed to have been planning a bombing at the BfV headquarters in the western city of Cologne, according to the German press [though] there was no immediate suggestion he had any ties to ISIS.

And in Der Spiegel, it's said that the arrested intelligence man had already "made a "partial confession" to the plot".

(BfV stands for Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the domestic intelligence service of the Federal Republic of Germany. In English, the name translates somewhat ambitiously to "Office for the Protection of the Constitution".)

Germans watched in horror during this past summer as ISIS claimed several mass-terror attacks carried out by so-called asylum-seekers:

• One on train passengers in the vicinity of Wurzburg [see "19-Jul-16: Tentacles in Germany: Again, a train, an axe, a religious war-cry, innocent victims and a search for motives"
• A second - an attack on people at a shopping centre in Munich ["24-Jul-16: In Germany, a gunman with Iranian citizenship kills 9"]
• A third on people at a music festival in Ansbach ["25-Jul-16: German tentacles: An explosion in a wine bar and deepening concern about 'asylum seekers'"].

The Wall Street Journal report says these attacks

most of them by recently arrived refugees, showed the country was a prime terror target. The arrival of well over a million refugees, mainly from the Middle East, since the beginning of last year has stretched the agencies’ already limited surveillance capacity. The domestic intelligence agency started a recruiting drive recently to try to keep up. The suspect was hired in April 2016 after a change of career and was part of a team observing followers of the fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam. The number of Salafists in Germany has tripled since 2012.

Putting "tripled" into a concrete perspective, the BfV believes Germany has about 40,000 Islamists today, among them some 9,200 Salafists (ultra-conservative Islamists).

A BfV spokesman says the suspect

hadn’t behaved suspiciously during his recruitment, his training or his work

and even though he

was thought to have pledged allegiance to Mohamed Mahmoud, the Austrian leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist group [Telegraph UK, November 29, 2016]

the man's wife and family

reportedly knew nothing of his conversion to Islam two years ago and subsequent radicalisation. [Telegraph]

That last line might be the most incredible thing about this newest European encounter with lethal jihad. And in certain ways, the most alarming.

21-Nov-16: German experts "discover" that Islamist terrorists are "being trained" to come into Europe as asylum seekers

Asylumn seekers arrived in Germany [Image Source]

Whether or not there are genuinely new disclosures here, the article published  a week ago on the website of Deutsche Welle ("Germany’s international broadcaster [where] 3,000 employees and freelancers from 60 countries work") is sober and plain-spoken even if its conclusions are emerging a little late.

'Islamic State' reportedly training terrorists to enter Europe as asylum seekers | Deutsche Welle, November 14, 2016 | Germany's spy agency has warned that the "Islamic State" (IS) is infiltrating refugee groups to get into Europe. Officials and analysts are now looking into methods by which potential terrorists can be spotted early. | On November 13 last year, three teams of militants from the so-called "Islamic State" (IS), armed with Kalashnikovs, stormed the Stade de France stadium, the Bataclan concert hall and several pubs in Paris. The rampage left 130 people dead, 85 of them in Bataclan, where the band, the Eagles of Death Metal, was playing.
Meanwhile, investigations have revealed that all nine men involved in the attacks had traveled to Europe together with the stream of refugees that entered the continent in 2015. According to German weekly "Welt am Sonntag," the country's spy agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) has warned that IS is specifically training terrorists to merge with asylum seekers looking for safer havens in Europe. The report's authors say that the BND suggests that terrorists train potential attackers on how to answer questions during border interrogations so they can prove their credibility as refugees. The spy agency has refused to comment on this matter. Responding to an email query by DW, an agency press spokesman said: "Basically, the BND communicates its information only to the German government or to responsible bodies of the German parliament in confidential sessions." Many refugees have fled from IS terror in regions like Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq...

A million immigrants arrived in Germany last year, and Muslim organizations assert [here] that "at least" 800,000 of them are Muslim. They keep coming in large numbers that have no precedent even as news stories about the massive influx of 'asylum seekers' disappear from news sites and television screens.

Germany's total population was about 80 million five years ago. It's currently about 82 million. An estimate quoted here suggests that Germany was home, as of the end of 2015, to 5,945,000 Muslims. Pew Research says [here] France has 4.7 million Muslims, and that Germany has slightly more,

The European Commission, aware of how much misinformation and disinformation accompanies this issue, publishes a valuable though laconic document entitled "Asylum quarterly report". Using notably dry language, its most recent issue published [here] in September offers some startling data:

• The number of first-time asylum seekers arriving in the European Union's 28 countries during the month of September 2015 alone was 170,825. (We're selecting September to enable a comparison to be made. Otherwise, September has no special significance.) Of those, 47,185 sought asylum in Germany, representing about 28% of the entire human 'asylum seeking' tidal wave now arriving at Europe's shores.
• The same numbers for the month of September 2016, a year later show a total of 101,765 arrived in all the 28 countries taken together. That's notably down on a year earlier, But of those, no fewer than 76,320 came to Germany. That's 75% of the entire EU number. 
• If that tidal wave of 'asylum seekers' is subsiding, as the greatly diminished amount of news coverage might imply, there's simply no sign of it in Germany. 
• (The numbers for all 28 European countries are on display in this dynamic online table. If these stats interest you, this is an excellent and authoritative source,)

Asylum seekers in Berlin [Image Source: Uriel Heilman/JTA]

When Islamists carried out shocking terrorist attacks in Paris almost exactly a year ago ["14-Nov-15: The Friday 13th terror assault on Paris"], European and German public officials were anxious to downplay - even to deny - any connection between such outrages and the flood of Muslim "asylum seekers".

Thus, for instance, an un-named "source in Germany's federal police" quoted in an Israeli report a few days after the coordinated massacres that took the lives of 130 people and injured an astounding 400 more at the Stade de France, numerous Parisian cafés and restaurants and the Bataclan theatre in the centre of the French capital.

"That is what I fear, people on the right side of political spectrum confusing the refugee problem with the Islamic terrorism problem, even though there is no connection," admitted a source in Germany's federal police... [i24news.tv, November 15, 2015]

No connection, he said? Did he have any actual idea at the time? Does he now? When Germany's government officials say a year later that they are "now looking into methods by which potential terrorists can be spotted early", the realists among us can only offer them the best of luck.

And for a European reaction, consider this brief extract from a news report published in a respected news source in the wake of the Paris savagery:

The European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, has warned Europe against confusing refugees and terrorists, asking the public not to “give in to such basic reactions”. And speaking to the AFP News Agency, a Syrian refugee named Ghaled said he wished the empathy for the scores killed Paris could be translated to empathy for the hundreds of thousands dead in his home country... ["Paris attacks: Syrian refugees put shootings in French capital in perspective", The Independent (UK), November 16, 2015]

A year on and "confusing refugees and terrorists" turns out not to have been such a "basic" reaction.

That DW report we mentioned above goes on to provide a platform for some German voices that don't seem the least bit surprised by what's just been conceded:

Regardless, the fact that IS terrorists have slipped into the continent with hundreds of thousands fleeing from war in the Middle East is nothing new, says Susanne Schröter, expert on Islamic terrorism at Frankfurt University. "This was known since the beginning. I warned about such a possibility even before there were any examples of terrorists slipping in," she told DW. "This is because IS announced that it would send attackers to the continent through the route which refugees were taking. At the time, politicians denied this," she added, referring to over 1 million refugees from Syria and Iraq, who landed in Europe last year. The situation in European countries like Germany, which took in over 840,000 refugees in 2015, was difficult. Border controls had to be given up and many of those coming in could not be registered by authorities properly, compounding the problem, Schröter said... [Deutsche Welle, November 14, 2016]

The DW article goes on to provide plenty of exposure to the more conventional sort of European and German viewpoint. For instance (and these bullet points are all direct quotes):

• "The steady flow of refugees at the time also unleashed a sequence of violent attacks against asylum seekers, especially in the states of former East Germany. "Our leaders thought, if we now admit that there could be terrorists among refugees, then it would serve as fodder for right-wing populists and lead to more anti-migrant feelings. So they played it down, but ultimately that was not the right thing to do," the analyst said.
• "Bataclan was not the last target on the list of attacks in Europe. A major attack on Brussels' main airport and an underground station on March 22 this year killed 32 people and wounded many others. 
• "Smaller knife attacks and a suicide explosion in the southern German town of Ansbach shook the country and Europe. 
• "Most of these attackers were refugees themselves or had contacts with asylum seekers, highlighting the fact that the newcomers were especially vulnerable to terrorist recruiters. "There are different kinds of people who come in as refugees. They have different political backgrounds and there are some who are close to IS, and some who have fled from IS," said Schröter.
• "Most of the asylum seekers who come to Europe are young men, who are disillusioned when they land in Europe, because smugglers have promised them something completely different, like more money, a house and a car, Schröter said. 
• "The long registration and waiting process until they finally know what is going to happen to them, adds to the discontent, she explained. Many people simply leave refugee homes and never return, and terror groups and Islamic fundamentalist organizations, like Salafists, use this to their advantage and recruit young people to stage attacks.
• [Schröter says] "the state will have to monitor people more closely. The possibility of terror attacks and cyber invasions has now prompted the German spy agency BND and the domestic intelligence organization, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, to plan a 73 million euro ($78 million) project for supervising internet and telecom messaging services. The agencies have not revealed exact plans, but according to a combined report by the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" daily, and public broadcasters WDR and NDR, the BND wants to react faster to messages sent on mobile services like "WhatsApp." 
• "The agencies justify the project, called "Panos," by saying that the "security of Germany and its citizens can no longer be taken for granted. [Can anyone's today?]
• "It is likely that the heightened supervision of communication channels will affect normal citizens and refugees not involved in terrorism. But, as Schröter says, "considering the present situation, there could be nothing worse than a big terror strike, not only because of the possible victims, but also because of the effect it will have. And that is why everything needs to be done so that there is no big attack."

Forgive us, but given the scale of the threat and the indications that serious-minded malevolents with Islamist doctrine as their guide have targeted their towns and public places, these German voices strike us as being sadly indecisive.

For their sakes, we hope we're wrong.