30-Nov-20: A long-obstructed step towards justice: Norway is extraditing a Jordanian fugitive to Paris

Undated photo of the Goldenberg restaurant in Paris' Marais Quarter

This is about a murderous attack nearly four decades ago on people seated in a Parisian restaurant. Why are we writing about it now?

The answer comes in a report that Norway's government said Friday it is going to extradite to France a man suspected of taking part in the carnage. 

For people like us who are fighting to see the confessed bomber of a pizzeria filled with children - who happily boasts that this was her personal doing - and who has astoundingly lived the life of a princess in total freedom for the past nine years, this is an important development. 

It's also inspirational. And it ought to be a big deal for everyone concerned with justice.  

First the background: Around noon on August 9, 1982, a gang of Islamist terrorists threw a grenade into the dining room of Chez Jo Goldenberg, a Paris restaurant packed with about fifty lunch-hour patrons. They then directed their machine gun fire point blank at the innocent patrons guilty of being seated at the tables of an eatery known for its Jewish cuisine. They murdered six people - four French nationals and two American tourists - and injured 22 others. 

The atrocity was completed in some three minutes. At the time, it was called "the heaviest toll suffered by Jews in France since World War II". The killers were not found, according to the police. In fact years went by before there was a break in the case.

Because there are both parallels to and lessons for our efforts to see Jordan arrest and extradite our child's killer - the unspeakable Sbarro Massacre Monster, it's a case in which we are vitally interested We have written about the hunt for the perpetrators before. See

• 20-Jun-14: Does Europe face the most serious terror threat ever? At CNN, they say yes and explain (poorly) why
• 13-Feb-16: Three decades after a terror attack on a Paris restaurant, some things remain just as they were
• 30-May-19: Paris, Amman, Washington: Extradition and what it can reveal about governments and terror

Here's what Reuters reported on Friday ["Norway to extradite suspect in 1982 attack on Paris Jewish restaurant"] in a news story datelined Oslo:

Norway will extradite a man to France who is suspected of taking part in an attack that killed six people in a Jewish restaurant in Paris 38 years ago, the government said on Friday. At least 20 others were wounded in the bombing and shooting assault on the Jo Goldenberg restaurant in the Marais quarter in August 1982. In 2015, arrest warrants were issued against three former members of the Abu Nidal Organization, a splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a source told Reuters at the time. The suspects were identified long after the attacks because of statements from other former members of the Abu Nidal group under a French judicial process that maintained their anonymity, the source said. One of the men, named as Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed, lives in Norway, where he moved in the 1990s. Norwegian authorities rejected an original 2015 extradition request for him on grounds that, in most cases, it would not extradite its own citizens. Norway recently adopted new pan-European regulations on arrests, leading French prosecutors to seek extradition of the suspect for a second time, and he was arrested in September. The Ministry of Justice cleared Abu Zayed for extradition to France on Nov. 12 but the decision was later appealed to the full Norwegian cabinet. “The appeal was unsuccessful and today the decision was final,” a spokeswoman for the justice ministry said in an email to Reuters. Now in his early 60s, Abu Zayed has denied any involvement in the case. In 2015, he told the Norwegian daily VG he had never been to Paris. The Jo Goldenberg bloodshed, at the time, marked the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in France since World War Two and came amid a wave of violence involving Palestinian militants.

So with this development, people now know this Abu Zayed has lived a quiet and comfortable post-massacre life in Scandinavia for two decades. But what became of the other terrorists? 

We know what's happened to at least one of them. He's sheltered by a friendly Arab government that brazenly refuses to hand him over and, of course, has zero interest in bringing him to any kind of local justice in its own courts. Given our focus here on how our child's murderer has lived a charmed life for the past nine years, this sounds like Jordan, right? 

Right.

Goldenberg's right after the 1982 atrocity

In 2015, a year after those anonymous Abu Nidal terror group informants tipped off the police in France (and we're guessing that one or more of them were members of the same gang), Marc Trévidic, an examining magistrate at the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris, specializing in fighting terrorism. issued arrest warrants for several suspects. 

One was Nizar Tawfiq Mussa Hamada, a Jordanian. 

The other, reputedly the mastermind behind the attack and also a Jordanian, was Souhair Mouhamed Hassan Khalid al-Abassi, known in crime circles as Amjad Atta.

Ben Cohen writing for Algemeiner last year ["Jordanian Refusal to Extradite Paris Kosher Restaurant Killer to France Renews Concern Over Amman’s Terrorism Policy"] takes up the narrative, explaining that France turned to the Jordanian authorities asking for them to honor the France/Jordan extradition treaty that, by no coincidence, had been signed in the middle of 2015. 

The Jordanians rebuffed them. Ben goes on to refer to how 

France is not the only country to have been turned down by Jordan after submitting an extradition request in connection with terrorism. In March 2017, the US Department of Justice issued a criminal complaint against Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, who ferried a Palestinian suicide bomber to the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, in her car. In the subsequent bombing attack, 15 people lost their lives, including two US nationals. US Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary B. McCord described al-Tamimi as “an unrepentant terrorist who admitted to her role in a deadly terrorist bombing that injured and killed numerous innocent victims.” A $5 million reward has been offered by the Justice Department for information leading to the arrest of Al-Tamimi, whose name can also be found on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. So far, however, Jordan has refused to extradite al-Tamimi, who has lived openly in Amman since she was released in a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas on October 28, 2011, to the US.

Jordanian Walid Abdulrahman Abu Zayed at his court hearing in Oslo 

[Image Source]

The article goes on to quote some comments that put Jordan's shameful evasions into context:

“The thwarted Jo Goldenberg extradition shows that you can either have healthy bilateral relations based on justice, openness, and honesty,  or you can pander to the pro-terror forces inside Jordan,” [Arnold] Roth said in an email. “You cannot hope to have both.”

Roth, who has been advocating with his wife Frimet for al-Tamimi’s extradition to the US, said that the Jordanians were being given a pass by Western allies eager not to jolt the kingdom’s political stability.

“There seems to be a sense that Jordan’s dear friends in the West need to cut the country some slack, not press too hard and do what needs to be done, so that its widely admired anti-terrorist monarch, King Abdullah II, can get on with the job of building a stable, prosperous Western-facing state,” Roth remarked.

At the same time, Roth said, al-Tamimi had been turned “into a pan-Arab hero from her safe perch in Amman, Jordan’s capital.”

Through her TV and internet appearances, Roth said, al-Tamimi had “become an inspiration to the powerful and very large forces inside the kingdom (and far beyond it) who want more bloodshed and conflict, more killing of Israelis and Jews.”

We stand firmly by what we said. If anything, what we have learned in the past year reinforces our views even more strongly.

Jordan continues to be given an absurdly generous pass by its Western allies. This is self-defeating and encourages the very strong forces at work in the kingdom that want more bloodshed, more conflict, more killing of Israelis and Jews. The groundswell of support for Ahlam Tamimi ("Ahlam we hear your voice") since October 1, 2020 when her husband was expelled by Jordan's authorities ["04-Oct-20: The Sbarro bomber's husband has been forced to leave Jordan: A snapshot of developments"] is one clear and public expression of how that works.

As for the fugitive mastermind, al-Abassi/Amjad Atta, an Agence France Pess report some years ago said an Interpol Red Notice had been issued against him directed at Jordan's police. Said to be 62 years old at the time and an "elderly man who works as a construction worker", he was born in Zarqa, a Jordanian city located 30 km east of Amman and home to "one of the largest camps for Palestinian refugees in Jordan". AFP notes it's also "known to be the hometown of Jordanian Abu Musab Al-Zarqaoui, the late leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq".

They fail to mention that Zarqa is also where Ahlam Tamimi, the Sbarro bombing monster who murdered a larger number of innocent Jews than Amjad Atta did, was born in 1980. 

A year after his arrest, according to an AFP report at the time, Jordan's judicial system ruled that Amjad Atta could not be handed over to the French for trial because 

"at the time of his arrest an extradition deal between Jordan and France had not entered into force, the source says. The deal was signed in 2011 but became effective only in July last year, after Abassi, also known as Amjad Atta, was released on bail. Jordan has also refused to hand over a second suspect, Nizar Tawfiq Hamada, 54, because the statute of limitations concerning the criminal allegations against him expired, the source says."

Jordan's contemptuous disdain for the war against terror and terrorists, for its relations with allies and for the law of extradition all get far too little international attention. People ought to know.

30-May-19: Paris, Amman, Washington: Extradition and what it can reveal about governments and terror

The landmark Jewish restaurant in Paris whose patrons were targeted in 1982

by Palestinian Arab jihadists and their machine guns and hand grenades.

In this post, we explain why an important court decision handed down in Jordan this week by its highest court throws a sharply negative light on Jordan's controversial 2017 claim that the kingdom's 1995 Extradition Treaty with the US in invalid and non-binding.

That earlier ruling, concerning Ahlam Tamimi, now looks contrived and unconvincing. And though the United States isn't saying much about it, we think people ought to know.

Terror and the Hashemite Kingdom

Jordan's creativity with the definition of terror is not new and hardly a secret.

But in polite circles, especially circles which view King Abdullah II as a valuable friend of the West and a strategic ally in the battle against "the terrorists", discussion of the matter is largely confined to whispers.

That's an insight we keep re-acquiring as we pursue Ahlam Tamimi, the confessed Jordanian killer of our daughter [24-Mar-17: Our daughter's smiling killer: "Shocked" that US "decided to go after her for no obvious reason"]. The Hashemite Kingdom's role in that process, and few know this as well as we do, has been obstructive, deceptive and dangerous.

Ahlam Tamimi, now a fugitive from US justice with her own "Most Wanted" poster (in English and Arabic versions), is a Jordanian woman of 39 who faces serious US Federal terrorism-related charges that were announced in Washington on March 14, 2017.

Ahlam Tamimi the fugitive

The brief version: At the age of 21 and as Hamas' first female terrorist, Tamimi masterminded the bombing of the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria massacre and the many Jewish children inside. (She has proudly admitted for the record that it was Jewish children she sought to kill. And why.) She carefully chose the site, scouted out the access path, brought the bomb (a human bomb - a young religious fanatic also in the service of Hamas) and then fled back to Ramallah moments before the explosion where she read the evening TV news bulletin for Istiqlal TV.

One of her many innocent victims, as regular visitors to this blog know, was our daughter Malki, 15. She was an American citizen.

In October 2011, Tamimi was released prematurely to our horror from a prison sentence of 16-life-terms in Israel in the Shalit Deal. Israel sent her off to Jordan where she came from ["19-Oct-11: Haaretz: Shalit prisoner swap marks 'colossal failure' for mother of Israeli bombing victim"]. She quickly set about developing an enhanced career in terror and terror-incitement under Jordanian protection.

Some weeks later, in early 2012, we went to Washington and asked the US Department of Justice to prosecute Tamimi. Under a Federal law, the US can go after terrorists who kill US citizens on foreign soil. Its jurisdiction is world-wide.

And indeed, this eventually happened. The background is here: "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?"

The details of how terrorism charges were finally announced against Tamimi are not well known. For instance, the fact that the judge who signed off on the charges actually did so in 2014, three years earlier. There's a reason for those lost three years; not such a good reason.

And this:

All three of the DOJ officials quoted in the 2017 announcement have moved on to other positions during these past two years. We wrote a letter last week [i.e. in March 2019], addressed to them and to the three officials who filled their places in the DOJ. Among other things, we asked them whether the DOJ is going to address certain serious problems that we described for them. At this stage, we do not plan to publish the letter; we continue to hope that we will get a meaningful DOJ response that deals with the important issues we raised. However we do want people to know (which is why we are posting this now to our blog) that we sent that letter and that it respectfully requests the DOJ to take specific steps... [Our March 14, 2019 post]

It's distressing to report that the Justice Department has still not responded to our letter. But our concern here and now is with other aspects of the Tamimi case.

The 1982 Paris killings

Let's turn now to a murderous Palestinian Arab terror attack on one of France's best-known Jewish landmarks, a Paris restaurant called Chez Jo Goldenberg. It happened on the same date as the Sbarro atrocity, but 19 years earlier - on August 9, 1982.

In a 2016 post (13-Feb-16: Three decades after a terror attack on a Paris restaurant, some things remain just as they were"), we made some pungent observations about Jordan and the poorly understood, even surprising, way it approaches terrorism in general and ultra-violent antisemitic attacks in particular.

In November 2018, Mr and Mrs Tamimi, unrepentant murderers both,

were paid generous tribute on Jordan's most-watched TV channel.

Not one word about the Israelis they killed.

We wrote this:

We wish there was much wider awareness of how Jordan has provided a friendly environment since 2011 for the woman who masterminded the murder of our daughter, allowing her to operate freely from within Jordan's borders; to speak as an honored guest at its universities, professional guilds, law courts and other venues; to record her television program "Naseem Al Ahrar" (translation: “Breezes of the Free”) week after week for beaming out to the Arabic-speaking world throughout the past 4 years; and to emerge as a genuine pan-Arab celebrity.

In a Jordanian courthouse

So now to the events of this week. Ben Cohen's fine report today ["Jordanian Refusal to Extradite Paris Kosher Restaurant Killer to France Renews Concern Over Amman’s Terrorism Policy"] on The Algemeiner website sets the stage:

The Kingdom of Jordan’s highest court has rejected a French appeal for the extradition of a suspect in a deadly attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris more than 30 years ago — raising further concerns that the stalwart ally of the West continues to offer safe haven to terrorists wanted by the courts of other countries, including the United States.
On Tuesday, Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruled against the extradition of 57-year-old Nizar Tawfiq Mussa Hamada, one of the alleged participants in the Aug. 9, 1982 attack at Chez Jo Goldenberg, a kosher restaurant in the traditionally Jewish Marais district of Paris.
After exploding a grenade inside the packed restaurant during its lunchtime service, two terrorists then opened fire on the diners with machine guns. Six people died and 22 more were wounded in the assault.
The atrocity was carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization — a radical Palestinian terrorist group that was active during the 1970s and 1980s, when it carried out attacks in over 20 countries. Named after the nom de guerre of its founder, Sabri al-Banna, the Abu Nidal group was backed at different times by the Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan regimes.
Speaking after Tuesday’s decision in favor of his client, Hamada’s lawyer, Mazan al-Tawil, praised the Jordanian judges for “categorically refusing” the French extradition request. Al-Tawil referred to the court’s decision to reject an earlier extradition request for Hamada in Feb. 2016 for the same reason — that a period of more than 30 years had elapsed since the atrocity, exceeding Jordan’s “limitation period” for extradition.
Al-Tawil’s co-conspirators in the attack on the restaurant have similarly escaped French justice because of the intervention of Jordanian courts.
The suspects in the Chez Jo Goldenberg attack were not formally identified until 2014, when two anonymous informants associated with Abu Nidal’s group supplied the French authorities with the missing information.
The following year, France’s top magistrate tasked with combating terrorism, Marc Trévidic, issued arrest warrants for several suspects, including Hamada and fellow Jordanian citizen Souhair Mouhamed Hassan Khalid al-Abassi — aka Amjad Atta — reputedly the mastermind behind the attack.
A French request to the Jordanian courts for al-Abassi’s extradition was similarly rejected in Oct. 2015 — just three months after the Hashemite Kingdom signed an extradition treaty with the French government.
But France is not the only country to have been turned down by Jordan after submitting an extradition request in connection with terrorism... [The Algemeiner today]

The Tamimi extradition

Ben Cohen is of course right.

That very same Jordanian tribunal, the Court of Cassation in Amman (the equivalent of a Supreme Court), handed down a highly problematic ruling in an unrelated extradition case two years ago. That 2017 case is about Mrs Tamimi. Its larger importance is that it considers the legality of an extradition treaty between Jordan and the United States that the US considers - without any doubt - in effect and binding.

The US had made a formal request years earlier (we think in 2013 but can't be sure) for Jordan to hand Tamimi over to them for bringing her to the US as required in their treaty. Jordan had persisted for the following three-plus years in its refusal.

The Jordanian court was asked, in effect, to rule on whether Jordan could, should or had to extradite Tamimi to face US terror charges.

It decided within the same week as the announcement of Federal charges against Tamimi, in fact just days later. In a somewhat bizarre ruling it first confirmed what everyone already knew, that there is indeed an extradition treaty with the US and has been since 1995. The Clinton Administration had signed it with King Hussein's government when it wanted to get its hands - and did get its hands - on Eyad Ismoil, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plotters.

But, said the court, embarking on a Save Tamimi strategy, a constitutional flaw in the process meant that the treaty with the US could not be used to send the confessed killer to a Washington courthouse. Moreover, the treaty was not only invalid now. It had been invalid since the day it was signed.

This is an astounding thing for a US ally to claim. But it gets worse. 

Jordan has in reality happily extradited other Jordanian terrorists after 1995, The most recent was sentenced in the US just last year. None of them, as it happens, targeted Jews. (Could that be the missing key? And in case any reporters are reading this, feel free to ask us for the details - which are a matter of public record but remain ignored in the Tamimi scandal nonetheless.)

The flaw, said the court, was in the fact that the treaty needed to get the approval of Jordan's rubber-stamp parliament. But it somehow never did. And it continues not to get it. Never getting it meant, the court implies, that Jordan's constitution prohibits the treaty from going into effect. And so Ahlam Tamimi could not be handed over to the US for prosecution. Case closed.

The US government reward

In its March 14, 2017 announcement, the DOJ did more than just unveil charges against Tamimi. It also added her to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list where she still is today. A $5 Million reward for "information that leads to [her] arrest or conviction" was announced nine months later by the Rewards for Justice Unit (RFJ) of the Department of State.

Never in hiding: The Tamimis in their Amman apartment

in March 2017 where Associated Press reporters and

video people visited them [link including video]

That reward, which we pressed for is a curious thing. Why?

Because Tamimi has never been in hiding. She lives free-as-a-bird in Jordan today in a pleasant, well-equipped apartment with her family in Amman. Her husband, who is her cousin and also a convicted murderer was also released in the Shalit Deal. News crews, among them Associated Press visit regularly and interview her there.

The DOJ and the State Department's RFJ clearly know this.

Jordan's legal stance

Consider now what Jordan's Court of Cassation did in the Jo Goldenberg Massacre decision on Tuesday. It said (our words, not theirs):

We would simply love to do the right thing and extradite these evil shooters back to Paris. But - such rotten luck - the 2015 France/Jordan extradition treaty doesn't help since the statute of limitations has expired. Yes, it's too late. Our judicial hands are tied.

To which a pair of grieving parents in far-away Jerusalem say: So which one is it, Your Honors?

In your French decision, you treated that 2015 extradition treaty as legal and binding but you discovered an unrelated problem that meant the alleged perpetrator of the Paris massacre didn't have to be handed over to the French prosecutors. But in your American decision, you found the US treaty was invalid; some additional signature was needed, you said, and 22 years later Jordan's rulers still hadn't found the pen (except when it was needed for that French treaty). So Tamimi is saved the trouble of being prosecuted in Washington.

What a farce.

Did the 2015 France/Jordan extradition treaty get approved by the Jordanian rubber stamps that, according to the 2017 Tamimi decision, had to approve it? Apparently yes. Jordan's most senior judges aren't claiming the agreement with France is tainted constitutionally (as the 1995 US/Jordan one is, they say). If the French treaty was flawed, they would have said it. And they didn't.

We say: So then let that same Jordanian rubber stamp come now, this afternoon, right this hour, and at the king's command fix Jordan's allegedly invalid US Extradition Treaty. Isn't that how rubber stamps are supposed to work?

Or take the opposite view. Let's say the French treaty was never rubber stamped by Jordan's parliament. Yet the judges, who are silent on this point, treat it as being perfectly effective. No constitutional flaw. No need for it to be rubber stamped because, well, you know. But, oops, sadly there's this statute of limitations.

Taken together, the two Jordanian Court of Cassation decisions, one from 2017, one from this month, underscore the very high likelihood that the Jordan/US Treaty is in reality perfectly valid. That is precisely what the US says though it has not yet said it in public for reasons that bother us a great deal. (We have it in writing from multiple US government sources).

Without being excessively blunt on this, let's just say there's much room to be deeply cynical about Jordan's claims and its highest court's decision to refuse the US extradition request in the specific case of Tamimi. (Jordan's government itself, as distinct from its Court of Cassation, has never said a word in public about their refusal to extradite Tamimi.)

"Stop bothering Jordan"

Respected observers have noted that the kingdom of Jordan is going through a rocky period. There seems to be a sense that its dear friends in the West need to cut it some slack, not press too hard and do what needs to be done so its widely admired anti-terrorism monarch, King Abdullah II, can get on with the job of fixing the economy and building a stable, prosperous Western-facing state.

The man speaking is the Palestinian Arab father of the human bomb who

was brought to the Sbarro site by Ahlam Tamimi.
(Tim Palmer, the Middle East bureau chief of Australia's national

broadcaster, ABC, at the time of the Sbarro 

massacre tried to persuade usto be interviewed with because
he's so opposed to violence and so pro-peace.) She fled to the
safety of Ramallah after instructing him to explode a
few minutes later. Which he did.

We don't agree.

Jordan, entirely unreported by the news industry, has turned the Sbarro savage, Tamimi, into a pan-Arab hero from her safe, government-guaranteed perch in Amman, Jordan's capital.

Since 2011 via TV, social media and Internet-streamed video all over the Arabic speaking world and even into Israel's security prisons, she has become an inspiration to the powerful and very large forces inside the kingdom (and far beyond it) who want more bloodshed and conflict, more killing of Israelis and Jews, more "dignity" for the 80+ percent of Jordanians who call themselves Palestinians.

Tamimi no longer takes part in the weekly terror-promoting TV program we mentioned earlier. (Leaving it was not her choice - another story.) But she continues to play a key role in Jordan's fascination with Arab-on-Israeli terror. For a good example, see "24-Nov-18: How Jordan's mainstream media showcase a couple of role-model jihadist murderers".

Justice

The thwarted Jo Goldenberg extradition underscores what we already learned as we have tried (and continue to try) to bring our child's killer to justice since 2012:

You can have healthy bilateral relations based on justice, openness and honesty. Or you can pander to the powerful pro-terror forces operating inside Jordan. No one and certainly not a government that aligns itself strategically with the US can expect to have both.

It's a message we still hope (and fully expect) to hear articulated by officials of the US government.

13-Feb-16: Three decades after a terror attack on a Paris restaurant, some things remain just as they were

Chez Jo Goldenberg, Paris [Wikipedia]

One of the tragic milestones of modern Jewish life in France is back in the news today. And as we note below, this says something about the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan that most people - and especially the foreign policy experts of the United States - prefer not to know.

Chez Jo Goldenberg, a restaurant that no longer exists, was mentioned in an earlier post of ours ["20-Jun-14: Does Europe face the most serious terror threat ever? At CNN, they say yes and explain (poorly) why"] that looked at the decades-long history of lethal Islamist bigotry and terror directed at European targets. 

That June 2014 blog post was our reaction to some sadly superficial mainstream journalism suggesting that certain acts of terror that year - in particular the shooting murders at the Jewish museum in the Belgian capital - amounted to an "early indicator" that Islamism-in-Europe was becoming a serious problem and that it needed attention because, well, things might get worse.

An early indicator? That's absurd. Our point was that it is highly misleading - at least - to depict very recent European violence done in the name of Islam by Islamist terrorists as something new and freshly threatening. In reality, decades of acts of murderous violence have been directed at European targets by Islamists - Jews and Israelis naturally prominent among them. We quoted a handful of examples there. Then we said:

These instances are literally selected at random. The list of Islamism-driven attacks and attempted attacks of a terrorist nature on European targets is lengthy. It's not possible that the people at CNN are seriously suggesting this is a new process with its origins in the last eight weeks. We think a big part of Europe's problem - apart from a serious case of historical amnesia - is a self-imposed stupidity on this subject. Will Europe recover in time to address the very real existential challenges it faces? 

Events of the past few months show that addressing those challenges has not gone so well. Consider, in France alone, the bloodbath of the Friday 13th attacks in Paris this past November with 130 killed via multiple attacks on bars, a sports stadium and a concert hall. ["Paris attacks: What happened on the night", BBC]; the cold-blooded killings of Jewish hostages in a Paris kosher food store ["Paris killer asked victims if they were Jewish before firing", Times of Israel] in February 2015; the savage January 2015 murders at a French satirical magazine ["As it happened: Charlie Hebdo attack", BBC] also in Paris.

If being ready for "worse" means lower death tolls, then let's agree something is not working.

Goldenberg's was one of those now-mostly-forgotten "acts of murderous violence directed at European targets... from Islamist sources" that we mentioned in that June 2014 post:

The August 9, 1982 Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant attack in Paris: Islamist terrorists threw a grenade into the dining room and fired machine guns on a Jewish restaurant in Paris's Marais district, on 9 August 1982. They killed six people, including two American tourists, and injured 22 others - "the heaviest toll suffered by Jews in France since World War II".

Until it closed its doors for the last time in 2006, Goldenberg's (inaccurately described in many accounts - including the New York Times, AFP,  and others - as a kosher restaurant; it was not kosher, and did business on Sabbaths, but was proudly Jewish) served as a reminder of a different France, one barely recognizable in the country of the same name today.

Until the late 1990s its homely red banquettes attracted government ministers, film stars and celebrities dining on caviar, herrings, goulash or its famous chopped liver. On the Pletzl - Yiddish for square - Goldenberg's was symbolic of a neighbourhood where thousands of eastern European Jews arrived from the late 19th century, and which was the focus of Nazi round-ups during the occupation of Paris in the second world war. More than half of the local Jewish community would die in concentration camps. The restaurant founded by Jo Goldenberg, who lost his parents and all his sisters in Auschwitz, became a symbol of resistance and revival, a meeting place for Holocaust survivors and former resistance fighters. ["For Paris's Jewish quarter, a fight to save its soul", The Guardian, March 6, 2008]

France had some 700,000 Jews in 1982 (530,000 according to a different 1982 source) when heavily-armed terrorists of the Abu Nidal Group attacked Goldenberg's. Today's French Jewish population is estimated at about 478,000 [a 2013 source] and declining according to all observers.

Terror attacks directed at Jews and Israelis have a long French history. In their Arab/Islamist chapter an El Al passenger jet came under terrorist attack at Paris' Orly Airport more than forty years ago: hostages were taken, amid machine gun, bazooka and grenade fire (with the French government quickly providing the terrorists with safe passage via a plane that flew them safely to Baghdad). Yasser Arafat's PLO terrorists attacked Iraq's Paris embassy in July 1978 and seized hostages - evidently in an effort to persuade the same Abu Nidal Group to stop besmirching the good name of the Palestinians. And the Islamists of Hezbollah had launched multiple terror attacks on the streets of Paris, and especially in its large department stores, by the mid-eighties (Wikipedia listing of terror attacks in France). That's more than three decades ago.

Fast forward to this past week's news, and its background.

Nearly a year ago, the French police announced that they had

at last identified three suspects and are seeking their arrest. Grenade-throwing Palestinians burst into the Jo Goldenberg deli on August 9, 1982, and sprayed machine-gun fire. Six people, including two Americans, were killed, and 21 injured. The restaurant, which has since closed, was a centerpiece tourist attraction in the famed Marais neighborhood. Paris prosecutor’s office spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre said Wednesday that international arrest warrants have been issued for the three suspects — now aged in their late 50s and early 60s — who were believed to be members of the Abu Nidal group. She says they are believed to be in the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Norway but declined to identify them by name, citing protocol. ["Suspects identified in deadly 1982 Paris Jewish deli attack", Times of Israel, March 4, 2015]

Then a day or two later it was revealed that

Jordan has rejected an extradition request from France for two suspects accused of carrying out [the] 1982 deadly attack... The alleged mastermind of the attack... Zuhair Mohamad al-Abassi, 62, was arrested in Jordan last year. The request was rejected because at the time of his arrest an extradition deal between Jordan and France had not entered into force, the source said... Jordan has also refused to hand over a second suspect, Nizar Tawfiq Hamada, 54, because the statute of limitations concerning the criminal allegations against him expired, the source said. The decision was taken in October, four months after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius urged Jordan to "respect international procedure" by extraditing Abbasi and Hamada. David Pere, a lawyer for the AFVT association that represents French victims of terrorism, said he was "astounded" by the Jordanian decision. "We were expecting the Jordanian authorities to send a strong message in the fight against terrorism," Pere said. He said Amman's decision not to extradite the pair was a "political" one aimed at "keeping social peace in Jordan"... ["Jordan rejects 1982 Paris attack suspects extradition", AFP, February 10, 2016]

Clearly some things just don't change.

And as for that comment above about the Jordanians needing to keep "social peace", that reflects some serious observations about the Hashemite Kingdom that we have addressed ourselves in the past. [Click here for our previous posts tagged with "Jordan"].

People who watch these things, and we are among them, know Jordan enjoys a special place in the affections of the US State Department. State's most recent "Country Reports on Terrorism" annual survey, published in June 2015, says of the Hashemite Kingdom:

Jordan remained a key ally and a model partner in combating terrorism and extremist ideology... Jordan demonstrated regional leadership in the fight against ISIL... and participated fully on the diplomatic, political, financial, and military fronts... Jordanian prisons have a religiously based de-radicalization program that seeks to re-engage violent extremist inmates into the non-violent mainstream of their faith.

There's much we want to say about that key ally but for now we will be brief.

Jordan legislated its first anti-terrorism law in 2006, a year after a series of terrorist bomb blasts at three Amman hotels that killed dozens of people.

Under the new law, penalties for terrorist acts range from 10 years in prison to the death penalty, and the definition of terrorism has been expanded to include any act meant to create sedition, harm property or jeopardise international relations, or to use the Internet or media outlets to promote "terrorist" thinking. [Aljazeera, April 25, 2014]

That law has since undergone changes (summarized in this April 2014 AFP syndicated report) to take account of current, very real threats facing the Kingdom and its ruler, and made concrete by the hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Jordanians who have joined the ranks of the various Islamist forces engaging in the ongoing Syrian bloodbath. King Abdullah II signed those changes into law at the end of May 2014 ["Jordan amends, widens its anti-terrorism laws", Associated Press, June 1, 2014].

Massive political demonstration by members of Jordan's Muslim

Brotherhood, July 31, 2015 [Image Source: Getty]

But what the State Department report - and Aljazeera as well - fails to mention is how Jordan has carefully defined terror over the years so that acts of violence directed at Israelis are specifically, by definition, never to be considered terror. For instance:

Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism of 1999 (Ratified 28 Aug. 2003): "Jordan does not consider national armed struggle and fighting foreign occupation in the exercise of people’s right to self-determination as terrorist acts under art. 2(1)(b)" [Source]

Jordan's creativity with the definition of terror is not new and hardly a secret, but largely ignored nonetheless. Jordan's failure to hand over the alleged perpetrators of the 1982 Paris savagery is more of the same, and not so surprising.

At a very personal level, we wish there was much wider awareness of how Jordan has provided a friendly environment since 2011 for the woman who masterminded the murder of our daughter, allowing her to operate freely from within Jordan's borders; to speak as an honored guest at its universities, professional guilds, law courts and other venues; to record her television program "Naseem Al Ahrar" (translation: “Breezes of the Free”) week after week for beaming out to the Arabic-speaking world throughout the past 4 years; and to emerge as a genuine pan-Arab celebrity.

The convicted mastermind of the massacre in Jerusalem in which 

our daughter was murdered, along with 14 other innocents. 

The confessed killer hosts a weekly TV show that is recorded 

every week in Jordan [Screen shot from Oct 13, 2015 edition of
"Nasseem al-Ahrar"]

Touted as the first female terrorist to join the ranks of Hamas, this Jordanian woman advocates unhindered from Jordan today for more violence, more murder and more jihad - all of it directed at Jewish and Israeli targets. Inciting energetically via television, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and well-publicized personal appearances, she is a widely-recognized, very public face of the violent, Islamist bigotry of Hamas.

Hamas was formally banned in Jordan in 1999, and continues to have the status of an outlawed entity. However the Muslim Brotherhood - to which Hamas owes allegiance, as the Hamas Charter says explicitly - operates freely within Jordan. Reuters described the Brotherhood in August 2014 as "the ideological counterpart to Hamas and Jordan's largest political group". It is today a "major player" in the Jordanian political scene.

Perhaps the French will have some views to share with the US now on this "model partner".

20-Jun-14: Does Europe face the most serious terror threat ever? At CNN, they say yes and explain (poorly) why

Moslem protestors outside the Danish Embassy in London,
February 3, 2006 [Image Source: Getty Images]

A lengthy article on the CNN website yesterday looks CNN-style at the threats posed to European countries by returning jihadists who have cut their terror teeth in the carnage of Syria and Iraq. [See "Europe faces 'greatest terror threat ever' from jihadists in Iraq and Syria" | CNN | June 19, 2014]

It starts out focusing on a recent police raid in Cannes on the French Riviera. Their target was the apartment of Ibrahim B., a man of 23, who had returned to France from 18 months of fighting in Syria on behalf of Jabhat al Nusra, an Al Qaeda offshoot, prohibited as a terrorist organization by the United Nations,, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. He had been spotted sending online messages that called for "punishing France" which evidently triggered some concern. The police raid on his home turned up a stash of soda cans converted to bombs containing nearly a kilogram of TATP. That's a high-explosive substance used to make detonators in multiple post-9/11 Al Qaeda bomb plots.

The case of Ibrahim B is one of dozens in recent months involving European jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq... gaining combat experience, training and an extremist mindset... A European counter-terrorism official told CNN up to 300 veterans of the Syrian Jihad have already come back to Europe. "The threat of attacks has never been greater -- not at the time of 9/11, not after the war in Iraq -- never," the European counter-terrorism official told CNN. He envisaged a flood of small-scale but effective and chilling attacks.

Being CNN, the article is long on superficial, short on substance. It races through some quasi-research data, without any indication of where it comes from or how accurate it is. For instance:

• About 2,000 citizens of EU states have traveled to Arab states to join the jihad. 
• "France, Germany and the UK account for the largest numbers, all with hundreds of citizens fighting in Syria. But in per capita terms more have travelled from Belgium... (which) has sizeable North African and Turkish Muslim populations and active radical groups)... than any other EU country." 
• An anonymous source says there are 150 Belgian fighters in Syria. "Up to 15 more" go each month.
• "About 35 are thought to have been killed..." and "60-70 had returned home". 

So much for the data candy. (Some of the numbers seem similar to an earlier article dealing with essentially the same theme, published in the Wall Street Journal on June 2.) Then a faltering attempt at trying to sound more weighty and serious:

• Quoting an anonymous European official connected to counter-terrorism, the way intelligence-sharing is done in Europe is "woefully inadequate". A central database to serve all of Europe is needed to track the "extremists" (i.e. the jihadists and Islamists) who fly out of Europe take part in the carnage directed at fellow Moslems and Arabs.
• But some good news: "European governments were beginning to understand the need for better collaboration" - no source for that fatuous line.
• Much of what is known about eager jihadists comes from looking at Facebook, Twitter and darker corners of the social media. "But scouring social media and jihadist forums is labor-intensive and demands language skills. And the most dangerous militants won't be so transparent about their intentions." That's important to know, right?
• And then a key observation: "There's huge excitement on online jihadist forums," said the official. "It's a further catalyst for radicalization and could lead to a surge in travel flows."
• And as for what this might mean in life-and-death terms, "An early indicator of the potential threat came last month when a gunman opened fire at a Jewish museum in the Belgian capital, Brussels, killing four people." Those murders happened in May.

The problem is that, sensationalism aside, there is indeed a great deal about which to be concerned in Europe. 

But focusing on the relative handful of committed European Islamists who actually take up arms (principally, let it be noted, against other Moslems) is to miss a much larger and more meaningful point. And for journalists to portray the callous murders carried out in the Belgian Jewish museum as "an early indicator" of the Islamism-in-Europe problem is absurd. 

• Could the cold-blooded murders in March 2012 of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France by French-born Islamist Mohamed Merah have been an indicator of the problem?
• Perhaps the 2007 "Sauerland-Gruppe" bomb plot  in which three men (two of them German converts from Christianity to Islam) were arrested on September 4, 2007 while leaving a rented cottage in Medebach, Germany where they were building car bombs using 700 kg of a hydrogen peroxide-based mixture?
• Is it warning of things to come when Islamists plan in 2006 to kidnap and kill Jews in Prague, hold them captive in a synagogue, make demands which cannot be met and then blow up the building, killing everybody inside?
• Would not the 7/7 massacres (52 killed, hundreds injured) carried out by British-born Moslems in London in 2005 qualify as a sign? 
• How about the Islamist 11-M bombing of the trains in Madrid (death toll: 191, with some 1,800 injured) in March 2004?
• Or the machine-gun and grenade attack that killed two people and wounded thirty attending a Bar mitzvah service at the Stadttemple in Vienna on August 29, 1981? Was that a warning sign?
• The August 9, 1982 Chez Jo Goldenberg restaurant attack in Paris: Islamist terrorists threw a grenade into the dining room and fired machine guns on a Jewish restaurant in Paris's Marais district, on 9 August 1982. They killed six people, including two American tourists, and injured 22 others - "the heaviest toll suffered by Jews in France since World War II".

These instances are literally selected at random. The list of Islamism-driven attacks and attempted attacks of a terrorist nature on European targets is lengthy. It's not possible that the people at CNN are seriously suggesting this is a new process with its origins in the last eight weeks.

We think a big part of Europe's problem - apart from a serious case of historical amnesia - is a self-imposed stupidity on this subject. You can see how it works by examining the practices of the BBC, where the very use of the word "terrorism" is made impossible as a result of political-correctness gone mad. [See "16-Aug-11: When the powers at the BBC put this much effort into something, they must really care"; and "10-Jan-13: When terror is ignored by news reporting agencies, the BBC for instance, what can we learn?"]

Will Europe recover in time to address the very real existential challenges it faces? Stay tuned.