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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

Then something incomprehensible happened. 

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Malki

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

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

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

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

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

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

12-Nov-19: On Jordan, the US and the children killed in a pizzeria

Image Source

Nine days ago, the US State Department made an announcement that has a significant impact on our ongoing efforts to have our child's killer brought to justice in the United States.

We wrote about it here: "03-Nov-19: In Washington, a step towards bringing the Sbarro bomber to justice".

Shortly afterwards, the Washington editor at Haaretz, Amir Tibon, did what we think is a fine job of giving the State Department statement some context. It appeared online (text below) on November 3, and in the paper edition. (Click for the PDF)

U.S. Rejects Jordan's Refusal to Extradite Hamas Terrorist Wanted for Trial

Development could lead to further American pressure on Amman to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who played a major role in organizing the Sbarro attack in Jerusalem in 2001

Haaretz - Amir Tibon, Washington, DC | November 7, 2019

WASHINGTON — The White House is rejecting claims by its Middle Eastern ally Jordan that a Palestinian-Jordanian terrorist who was involved in the murder of U.S. citizens cannot be extradited to face trial in the United States.

A new report published this week by the State Department says explicitly that the U.S. considers its extradition treaty with Jordan to be valid, despite a Jordanian court ruling from 2017 that said the opposite.

This development could lead to further American pressure on Jordan to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who played a major role in organizing the “Sbarro attack” in Jerusalem in August 2001, a suicide bombing which led to the deaths of 15 people, including two American citizens.

Tamimi currently lives in Jordan with her family. She was arrested by Israel in September 2001, convicted for her role in the attack in 2003, and sentenced to 16 life terms in prison; however, in 2011 she was released from prison as part of the “Shalit deal,” in which Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in return for the release of one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from captivity in Gaza.

After her release Tamimi moved to Jordan, where she was born and where most of her family currently resides. Ever since 2012, she has been living and working in Amman. Over the years, she has given many interviews, made public speeches, and has also hosted her own television show on a network affiliated with Hamas.

Ever since Tamimi’s release from prison, families who lost their loved ones in the Sbarro attack have been fighting to bring her to justice in the United States, where the justice system is obliged by law to pursue terrorists who killed American citizens abroad. Tamimi also appears on FBI’s most wanted terrorists list.

In 2017, progress was made toward bringing her to stand trial in the U.S., when the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled terror charges against her. Just days after that happened, however, Jordan’s highest court ruled that Jordanian law prohibited her extradition to the United States.

Jordan has since claimed that Tamimi cannot be extradited and that the extradition agreement that the Kingdom had signed with the U.S. in 1995 was invalid. No progress on her extradition has been made since.

Two months ago, Haaretz reported that two senior members of Congress were pressing the Trump administration to act on the subject. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the committee’s ranking member, sent a joint letter to the Department of Justice, seeking answers on the subject.

The two lawmakers noted in their letter that despite previous indications that legal action against Tamimi would move forward in the United States, no progress has been made for the past two years. The main obstacle, they wrote, has been the Jordanian government’s refusal to cooperate with U.S. authorities in bringing her to trial, based on a false claim that Jordan was unable to do anything to comply with U.S. authorities on this subject.

Nadler and Collins asked the department to provide “information regarding the current status” of the efforts to “overcome these objections.”

This week, for the first time since the Jordanian court ruling two years ago, the U.S. government officially stated that it rejects Jordan’s position on the subject.

This new development appeared in the department’s annual report on terrorism around the world. While it praised Jordan and its security forces for their actions against terror organizations, it also mentioned the country's harboring of Tamimi.

“A U.S. criminal complaint was unsealed in 2017 charging Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, a Jordanian national in her mid-30s, with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against U.S. nationals outside the United States resulting in death,” the report states.

The report further notes that “in 2018, Jordan continued to cite a court ruling that its constitution forbids the extradition of Jordanian nationals. The United States regards the extradition treaty as valid.”

Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki, 15, was one of the U.S. citizens murdered in the Sbarro attack, told Haaretz that “what has just happened at the State Department is a welcome step in the direction of overdue justice. It will reverberate, though we realize many steps still lie ahead before we see Malki's killer in chains and handcuffs.”

Roth added, however, that he and his wife, who is also a U.S. citizen, have “knocked on a long list of U.S. government doors since Jordan's highest court blocked American efforts to bring Ahlam Tamimi to trial in Washington.

He said that "Being ignored by senior public figures, members of Congress, their staffers, officials, diplomats - that's been startling for us. We've learned it's easier for them to pretend we're not there, to just not take our calls, to leave our emails unanswered. Who wants to bump heads with the bereaved parents of a murdered child?”

Roth explained that since the Department of Justice has pursued the criminal complaint against Tamimi, the biggest question was how the U.S. could get Jordan to extradite her, despite the Hashemite Kingdom’s refusal to do so thus far.

“My impression is that the Justice Department made an important step in 2017 by deciding to prosecute Tamimi and committing to bring her to trial in the U.S., but they have reached the limit of their jurisdiction,” Roth said in a phone call from Jerusalem, adding that the State Department’s handling of the case has been disappointing and frustrating for the most part.

“In the past few weeks and for the first time, a senior U.S. government figure has entered the picture and indicated to my wife and me that there are quiet moves to press Jordan to comply with the extradition treaty,” Roth said. “Though the years of inaction have been hugely frustrating, it has been good to hear they do indeed want to see Tamimi brought to trial in Washington. They say it’s a matter of how and when.”

Roth noted that Jordan’s King Abdullah regularly visits Washington and meets with senior U.S. officials, and that the Tamimi case has never been publicly raised in the context of those meetings. Just in recent months, the King had met with senior Trump administration officials while visiting the U.S. in September, and then hosted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when she visited Amman two weeks ago.

“Our family is completely not political,. We are not asking for anything except to see this person, who participated in the murder of our daughter, stand trial,” Roth said. “For us this is not about politics, it’s about justice.”

Image Source

No mainstream newspaper anywhere has taken up the Haaretz article or the development that it reports. Not even the Hebrew edition of Haaretz.

But starting this past weekend, there has been a wave of responses in the Arabic media. We have seen dozens of them already, all taking an essentially identical line.

That's reflected in the article we reproduce below, from an Arab source but in English.

MP calls for Jordan not to extradite freed Palestinian prisoner to US

Middle East  Monitor - November 11, 2019

Yahya Al-Saud, Jordanian MP and chairman of Palestine Committee in Jordanian Parliament, has called for Amman not to accept a US request to extradite freed female Palestinian prisoner Ahlam Al-Tamimi, Al-Resalah newspaper reported yesterday .

This call came in the wake of reports about tension between the US administration and Amman over the latter’s rejection of requests to extradite Al-Tamimi, who holds a Jordanian passport.

“The Jordanian government must protect its citizens and America cannot take on the role of international police officer,” Al-Saud said. “[America] has to take the side of the peace camp, not oppression camp,” he added.

“I think that I am representing the view of the Jordanian public in saying that the US is a partner in the occupation [of Palestine] through several measures it has taken in this regard.”

Al-Saud added: “Ahlam was sentenced and released. It is not acceptable to be sentenced twice. However, she did not commit a crime, but defended her country.”

In March 2017, the Jordanian Court of Cassation upheld a ruling of a lower court that Amman must not extradite Ahlam to the US as she is a Jordanian citizen.

Al-Tamimi was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces in 2001, sentenced and spent ten years in jail before she was released to Jordan in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap reached between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.

In 2017 she was included in the FBI’s most wanted list.

(For the record, Middle East Monitor routinely comes in for bitter criticism from well-informed observers (quoted in Wikipedia) who see it as "strongly pro-Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Hamas', a "conspiracy theory-peddling anti-Israel organisation" and "antisemitic".)

Image Source

We have not yet seen a single published comment or report in the Arabic language - not from a Jordanian source, not from any other part of the Arab world - responding to these developments by calling for Jordan to comply with its treaty obligations to its extremely generous foreign aid provider and critically important strategic partner, the US.

We find no Arab call demanding that this moral stain besmirching Jordan's place in the international community be removed. No expression of embarrassment by Jordanian thought leaders distancing themselves from the disgraceful enthusiasm for a self-avowed killer of Jewish children who has lived the live of a celebrity in the Hashemite Kingdom since returning to live there and raise her family, starting in 2011.

The massacre at central Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria took the lives of fifteen people, eight of them children including our Malki. A sixteenth victim, a young mother who was there with her two year old child, has remained in a vegetative state in all the years since then.

The government of Jordan in its customary fashion has stayed stoney silent about what the US has now said publicly about the treaty that Jordan disavows (i.e. that the US regards it as perfectly valid and enforceable). Jordan remains utterly silent as well about the appalling views expressed in its parliament about Tamimi and the US request to extradite her.

Jordan's years'-long public silence on every aspect of its illicit sheltering of confessed bomber and FBI Most Wanted Terrorist Ahlam Tamimi stands in shabby contrast to its many bold, principled and public declarations about its determination to fight terrorism. 

For instance, this news report below from a September 2019 oration by King Abdullah II. Notice its odd but characteristic use of the word "holistic" (see "03-Dec-17: Understanding Jordan's king and his "holistic" approach to terror"). 

"...Jordan launched the Aqaba Process in 2015. Our initiatives have aimed at building a strong global platform, enabling multiple stakeholders to share expertise and focus resources in the fight against terror," the King said. The holistic approach is a major feature of the Aqaba Process and the partnerships that it led to, His Majesty added. "It goes beyond security cooperation, to recognise the wide range of relevant efforts: law enforcement; education; inclusive, sustainable development, that gives people especially young people opportunity and hope; and conflict resolution, to achieve peaceful political solutions to the crises that terrorists exploit," the King said. His Majesty called for countering the extremist narrative, on-line and off-line. "This means fighting the ideological battle on behalf of core values humanity depends on: mutual respect, understanding, and coexistence," the King added. His Majesty urged more leaders to engage in this process. Speakers at the high-level meeting commended Jordan’s efforts in launching the Aqaba Process to bring stakeholders together with the goal of countering terrorism within a holistic approach. [From a Jordanian Foreign Ministry report on Leaders Dialogue: Strategic Responses to Terrorist and Violent Extremist Narratives (Source).]

Coming from the autocrat who keeps our child's killer, who confesses for the record to the bombing, safe and out of the clutches of the US Justice Department, the FBI and the Federal courts of the United States, the hypocrisy and sheer dishonesty on display here is disturbing.

05-Sep-19: On thwarted justice and bearded women

We have devoted several years and considerable effort to generating awareness of the almost unfathomable evil of a Jordanian woman, Ahlam Tamimi (speaking on this video).

Tamimi is a high-profile fugitive from the FBI with a $5 million reward on her head from the US State Department. She freely admits for the record and in public that she played a key role in the August 9, 2001 bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. She has boasted of how she deliberately targeted and succeeded in massacring the Jewish children inside and on the street. One of them was our fifteen year old daughter Malki.

Recently, in her (since-shut-down) Instagram account, Tamimi called this Hamas attack "my operation":

Instagram shut down this account, which was Tamimi's over a period of years, a few days
after this posting appeared in August 2019

She is protected by the Kingdom of Jordan which, in cynical breach of its 1995 extradition treaty with the United States, has refused since 2013 to hand her over to the US authorities for prosecution on terrorism charges. It continues to give her safe haven.

But her hitherto-frequent travel in and around the Arab world, a key part of her evolution as a pan-Arab celebrity, has come to a halt as a result of an Interpol Red Notice.

What's more, for the nearly five years starting early 2012 and ending in mid-2016, it provided her with the freedom and means to have a TV program of her own called "Breezes of the Free", which she recorded in Amman, Jordan every week [see "27-Apr-17: Satellite TV and other basic rights of terrorist life behind Israeli bars"] for a global TV and Internet audience.

The purpose of the show was to encourage support for Arab-on-Israeli terrorism, to celebrate and honor the terrorists and to provide a two-way channel for communication between terrorists imprisoned in Israel and their families.

It's important to keep in mind that the privilege of engaging in years of incitement to extreme violence given to a confessed mass murderer comes against a background where Jordan has one of the most tightly controlled and un-free media regimes in the world [see "20-Jan-18: Shutting down media critics in Jordan isn't quite the challenge it might seem to be"]. Had Jordan wanted, Tamimi - along with her Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood sponsors - could never have gotten these hideous "Breezes" off the ground.

Our personal efforts to get Tamimi in front of a US federal court to face charges in Washington DC involve a good deal of political awareness-raising and lobbying in the US. Our daughter Malki was a US citizen.

Exactly a week ago, Haaretz - in a story filed from Washington by Amir Tibon who is its correspondent in the US capital - reported online on efforts to bring the thwarted Tamimi extradition issue to a larger audience. (Though we're not mentioned, we are the instigators of those efforts.)

Ahlam al-Tamimi took part in the organization of a 2001 bombing at a pizza place in Jerusalem that killed 15. These American lawmakers want Jordan to extradite her to the U.S. https://t.co/wCuXak29Jq

— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) August 29, 2019

The following day, the paper edition of Haaretz arrived at our front door as it has, in both Hebrew and English editions, every Friday for years. We rubbed our eyes at what we saw:

The almost-comical use of the photo of a bearded man to depict a 39 year old female media celebrity with a long history of public appearances and blowing children to pieces obviously had nothing to do with the Haaretz reporter. He was simply conveying the facts.

So we reacted by addressing the newspaper's well-known publisher via Twitter:

Mr @AmosSchocken:

As #MalkiRoth's father, it's troubling that our battle to get her killer, #AhlamTamimi, extradited from Jordan to face terror charges in the US gets zero coverage in @Haaretz and other mainstream media.

Do your editors know who she is?https://t.co/cejqdloCcz

— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) August 31, 2019

Obviously the editors had the wrong person. But do they even know at Haaretz who Ahlam Tamimi is? It's hard to tell.

And if you're wondering - yes, we're troubled by how no one from the paper-publishing side of Haaretz has bothered to respond to us. Of course being ignored, as anyone following this blog knows, is hardly a new experience for us.

And there's this: over at the Hebrew version of Haaretz, they have given no coverage at all, zero, nada, to the Nadler initiative: not online, not in their highly influential daily newspaper. It seems, as friends have told us, that the Israeli election campaigns now underway dwarf everything else.

But then nor has Haaretz ever published a word about our years of efforts to see Tamimi tried on terrorism charges.

And a lot more importantly, given its unexamined implications, Haaretz in all its various Hebrew, English, online, on-paper editions entirely ignores, just as do many other mainstream news outlets do, the much larger and weightier matter of Jordan's mendaciousness in purporting to fight terror while keeping one of its highest profile practitioners safe, well and protected in the bosom of the Hashemite Kingdom and its law courts.

18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?

Barghouti, convicted on multiple counts of murder by shooting,

is a candidate for the next Nobel Peace Prize [Image Source: Arab media]

There are serious efforts underway this week to re-engineer the public image of the convicted Palestinian Arab felon, Marwan Barghouti.

Based on disinformation, partial information and lots of spin, they are directed at concealing the facts of his crimes and imprisonment and putting some wind into the sails of this ambitious man's on/off political career.

Outrageously, the key thing to know about Barghouti, according to one of the world's most influential newspapers which yesterday provided him yesterday with an invaluable op ed platform ["Why We Are on Hunger Strike in Israel’s Prisons", New York Times, April 17, 2017] to megaphone his extreme views, is that

Source: New York Times

In the following 24 hours, the Times found itself in the midst of a storm of protest. We have little sympathy for how the NYT's public editor summed things up today.

A side issue: Barghouti's English is poor. Yet "his" op ed, datelined Hadarim Prison, is a slickly-written piece of eloquent self-promotion. We think there's a teensie-tiny possibility it was written by professional pubic relations people in his name. But then who pays attention to such trivia when the cause is just so compelling?

Barghouti has an interesting group of admirers who help his self-promotion process move forward. Here are just a few.

Desmond Mpilo Tutu, the South African church leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, regularly sings Barghouti's praises. On one view, this is exceedingly odd, given how the Nobel committee specifically noted Tutu's own "nonviolent path to liberation" in its citation. So then is Tutu unware of Barghouti's lethal criminality, as widely outlined in the media for anyone who cares to look (for instance Dr Emmanuel Navon's cogently argued "Desmond Tutu is Wrong about Marwan Barghouti")? No, it does not seem that he is unaware. Instead, like many at that extreme end of the political spectrum, he seems to feel criminality of Barghouti's kind just doesn't count. And to show he means it, he has lately been touting the deeply offensive notion that Barghouti ought to get the same rich prize that Tutu himself did ["Bishop Tutu Nominates Jailed Palestinian Leader Barghouti for Nobel Peace Prize", Michael Friedson, June 8, 2016].

Al Jazeera, referring to the noble hero of the South African struggle to defeat apartheaid, calls Barghouti "the Palestinian Mandela". So do the Ma'an News Agency and a commentator at The Guardian. On the other hand, Le Monde, in the course of an interview with Barghouti, calls the comparison "debatable".

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, an Argentine human rights activist who received the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize and is a leader of the non-violent Latin American Christian group Servicio Paz y Justicia, is another supporter of a Barghouti Nobel [May 2016 source]. So is the parliament of Tunisia [source]. And so are sixteen mayors of towns in France [source] including Valenton and Bergerac (unfortunately we don't know the names of the other metropolises).

A cluster of Belgians, all of them involved in their country's national politics, followed suit and wrote to the Nobel committee in May 2016, improbably calling Barghouti "a peace activist":

“Peace requires the freedom of Marwan Barghouti and of the political prisoners, and more generally the freedom of the Palestinian people living for decades under occupation.”

Thinking logically, we might have surmised that the Belgians meant to exclude homicidal thugs from the list of those to be freed because what possible basis can there be to label such felons "political prisoners"? But then they do seem serious about wanting Barghouti to go to Oslo. So evidently they - like Tutu - don't see a conflict between being (a) a convicted murderer and (b) a peace activist. Sort of like being both a cheese-burger addict and an activist for veganism.

But for those to whom facts and realities still mean something, here's a brief excursion through the contemporary reports that accompanied his journey into the Israeli penal system. To emphasize the point, we refer to news reports carried by Haaretz which is much closer to Tutu's views than to ours.

The capture:

Wiretapping revealed that Barghouti was hiding in a safe house. The commander of the army’s Ramallah Brigade... told Haaretz: “When the intelligence arrived that he was in a building in the heart of a Ramallah neighborhood... an armored brigade surrounded the site and the baton was passed to me. The Duvdevan unit was under my command. We understood that he was in the building. One of the soldiers saw him through the window, taking cover close to what looked to us, at least, like an old woman who was lying on a bed. We removed everyone from the building... ["Will Marwan Barghouti be the Palestinian Nelson Mandela?", Haaretz, July 5, 2016]

The conviction

The Tel Aviv District Court convicted former West Bank Tanzim commander Marwan Barghouti in the deaths of five people on Thursday. Barghouti was convicted of three terror attacks in which the five were murdered, as well as in another charge of attempted murder, membership in a terror organization and conspiring to commit a crime. However, the court acquitted him of 33 other murders with which he was charged, noting that there was no evidence that he was a full partner to those incidents...  The court ruled that Barghouti was directly responsible for a January 2002 terror attack on a gas station in Givat Zeev in which Israeli Yoela Chen was murdered. The attack, the judges said, was carried out at his direct order in revenge for the assassination of Raed Carmi. Barghouti had admitted his responsibility for this attack. The attack in which a Greek monk was murdered in Ma'aleh Adumim on June of 2001 was also carried out at the instruction of Barghouti, the judges said. The former Tanzim leader, the court ruled, also approved the March 2002 attack at Tel Aviv's Seafood Market restaurant in which three people were murdered, as well as a car bomb attack in Jerusalem... [He] was charged with leading dozens of terror operations against Israeli targets since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, including suicide and shooting attacks that led to the death and injury of hundreds of Israeli citizens and Israel Defense Force soldiers. According to the charge sheet, Barghouti headed the Fatah, Tanzim and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade terror groups in the West Bank and was subordinate to Arafat... The state prosecutor said Barghouti funded and planned terror attacks and is not the political activist he claimed to be... Barghouti's supporters in the European parliament were expected to show up for the ruling... ["Barghouti Convicted in Deaths of Five People", Haaretz, May 20, 2004]

Barghouti was sentenced by judges Sarah Sirota, Amiram Benyamini and Avraham Tal to five consecutive life terms plus an additional 40 years. The judges observed that

Barghouti used to receive reports of the attacks carried out by his associates only after they were completed. This was an effort to preserve his image as a political leader not involved in armed attacks against Israelis... [Haaretz, June 6, 2004] 

And some occasionally overlooked points, via JTA:

When Israeli authorities chose to put Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti on trial in a criminal court rather than a military court, prosecutors may have set the stage for an even bigger prize: Yasser Arafat. That possibility was given a boost last week with Barghouti’s conviction on five counts of murder, for Israelis killed in three separate shooting ambushes... The judges said Barghouti could be convicted only in cases where it was proven that he had prior knowledge of imminent terrorist attacks and that he approved the attacks... [He] was acquitted on 21 other counts of murder for lack of evidence. Both outcomes bolstered the argument for putting Palestinian terrorists on trial in regular Israeli courts rather than in military courts, where the standards of evidence are not as strict. Barghouti’s conviction shows that there is sufficient evidence to put terrorists behind bars using standard criminal procedures, and his acquittal on the other counts lends legitimacy to the argument that even Palestinian terrorists will get fair trials in Israel... ["Barghouti conviction could foretell Arafat trial", JTA, May 24, 2004]

Some additional overlooked dimensions:

• Marwan Barghouti publicly boasted of his role in igniting what many call the Second Intifada in 2000. We published his direct quotes (translated to English at the archived Wayback Machine]. This may come as a surprise to those who think of Ariel Sharon visiting the Temple Mount in September 2000 as being the real story. 
• He personally laid out $500 [source: the archived Wayback Machine quoting a November 30, 2004 Margot Dudkevitch report in the Jerusalem Post] for the making of the explosive-filled guitar case that was brought to, and exploded inside, Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria destroying it on August 9, 2001 and killing fifteen innocent people including our daughter Malki. The bombmaker was Abdullah Barghouti, Marwan's clansman.
• We sat through Marwan Barghouti's trial in a Tel Aviv court.
• When another clansman Bilal Barghouti, a senior Hamas operative, was on the run from the Israeli security forces because of his involvement in the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria (he was later convicted for his part), Marwan Barghouti sheltered him for a time in his home. Bilal Barghouti said for the record that, during his stay there, "he saw a number of weapons, and when he left the house Barghouti armed him with a gun for his use." [Source: CAMERA] Marwan Barghouti is an unindicted accessory after the fact to the Sbarro murders.
• And since we're mentioning the Barghouti clan, let the record show that Ahlam Tamimi, the Jordanian Hamas agent who boasts of taking the central role in the 2001 Sbarro massacre and who faces terrorism charges in Washington that were made public on March 14, 2017, is the daughter of a woman named Hasna al-Barghouti [Arabic source]

Leader and parliamentarian, battler for non-violence and peace, candidate for the world's most important reward for bringing peace to the world. And also a cold-blooded thug closely directing other thugs. A man happy to appear in public gripping a sub-machine gun as he claims credit for the blood-drenched Intifadeh years from 2000 onwards.

We don't think it's all that difficult to distinguish between Barghouti the plastic-coated fantasy and invention of parts of the media, and Barghouti the loathsome killer of innocents. 

In the end, it seems to come down - tragically - to whom and what you want to believe.

17-Feb-16: On the search for terror at Haaretz

Route 443 [Image Source]

Over at Haaretz, they have another example of Amira Hass agit-prop disguised as a "news report" today ["Army terror against the Palestinians that journalists only yawn at", Haaretz, February 17, 2016]

It runs through a list of non-lethal actions taken by the IDF and security forces and ends with these words:

[I]n the dictionary of the residents (and mine), destruction of cisterns, theft of land and livelihood, and invasions of homes are acts of terror.

That Hass "dictionary of terror" is a strange and malevolent thing. 

Military actions designed to defensively safeguard the second-busiest artery serving the nation's capital qualify for a prominent appearance in it. 

But it fails to even hint at the numerous attacks, including murders, done in recent weeks by Arabs living nearby. [Google Search]. The very recent killing for instance [about which we wrote: "26-Jan-16: Two attackers stab women at neighborhood grocery store; instantly become figures of emulation"] of a lovely young woman, Shlomit Krigman, 24, stabbed to death on January 26 [her editors at Haaretz reported it, even as she ignores it] on a street in Beit Horon. 

That's a community located an easy stroll away from Beit Ur Al Tahta (the subject of the Amira Hass story) and the adjoining Beit Ur Al Fuqah. Translated to English, the names of those villages are Lower House of Straw, and Upper House of Straw. 

Note also that, as Wikipedia points out, they are built on the ruins of the Biblical... Beit Horon. (Who are settlers here, and who is native? It's rarely as black-and-white in this conflicted part of the world as people like Hass like to portray.)

Hass manages to tell her story without mentioning the rash of murderous stabbings at the Arab-owned Dor Alon gas station on Route 443, an easy hike away from the Beit Ur villages. And other recent Arab-on-Israeli assaults launched on or close to the busy route. And the long history of stabbings, shootings and rammings that have characterized the relationship of our neighbours with this key road. On November 23, 2015, as her editors at Haaretz reported, an Israeli, Ziv Mizrahi, just 18, was stabbed to death there. Numerous other Israelis have escaped with their lives but injured and maimed. [Click here for some of our posts about attacks on Israelis on and near Route 443.] 

There's something depressingly fitting in Hass, recipient of the World Press Freedom Hero award 16 years ago by her peers in the news industry, delivering a bogus slapdown of Israeli "terror" that focuses on a hamlet populated by straw men.

27-Jan-15: Blessed be the True Judge: David Landau

The late David Landau: Click here (not on the picture) to see his
interview on the ABC Lateline program, arguing robustly
why the Shalit Transaction was so seriously wrong

A former editor of Haaretz and of the Jerusalem Post, David Landau passed away today. His funeral will be tomorrow (Wednesday) here in Jerusalem. An obituary has just gone up [here] on the Haaretz site. It describes an impressive career and a life of impact.

The few conversations we had with him were short and conducted - mostly - when we were both speakers at the same conference in England a few years ago. To say that a broad swathe of his political viewpoints were unpalatable to us is understating things.

But when he spoke out on the subject of Israel doing deals with the terrorists, and in particular the Shalit Transaction which remains one of the most bitter moments in our lives, he demonstrated real courage (given what most people from the camp that he says he belonged to were saying about that tragically misconceived submission to Islamist extortion) and integrity for speaking up when he could have let the wave of overwhelming (and to us, incomprehensible) public support for it in Israel speak for itself.

He was interviewed by Ali Moore on Australia's ABC on October 18, 2011, the day that Israel released the first of two tranches of 1,027 convicted killers and assorted other terrorists. The entire interview (video above, text at this link) from the Lateline program runs 16 minutes.

The deep concerns he expressed 3+ years ago have proven to be well-founded. May the memory of David Landau be for a blessing.

26-Apr-13: When it's the news reporters that demand a ban on news reporting...

This photo accompanied a September 2011 article headlined "MADA campaigns amidst precarious media freedom in Palestine". MADA is the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms

Khaled Abu Toameh, an Arab Israeli professional journalist whose integrity places him in a class of his own discloses some of what the mainstream media ignore or fail to see in a piece published today: "Palestinian Journalists Declare War On Israeli Colleagues". A brief excerpt:

It is one thing when governments and dictators go after journalists, but a completely different thing when journalists start targeting their counterparts. An Israeli journalist [recently] had his microphone damaged during an assault, while another was thrown out of a press conference. Behind the two incidents were Palestinian journalists, angered by the presence of Israelis in Ramallah and other Palestinian cities. The threats and harassment came as more than 200 Palestinian journalists signed a petition, for the first time ever, calling on the Palestinian Authority to ban Israeli correspondents from operating in its territories "without permission."
The Palestinian Authority, for its part, has complied, issuing instructions requiring Israeli journalists to obtain permission from its Ministry of Information before entering Palestinian cities. Palestinian Authority officials and journalists later explained that the ban does not apply to some journalists working for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz and who report on "Palestinian suffering"... [more]

Abu Toameh first reported on this regressive move three weeks ago in a Jerusalem Post report ["Israeli reporters covering Palestinians face threats"]. He quoted Jihad Qawassmeh, a senior member of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, who confirmed the ban and said it had been issued as a result of pressure from Palestinian journalists.

One of the justifications offered by the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate for demanding a ban on Israeli reporting is that they seek to prevent Israelis from

"contributing to misleading and relaying a false and harmful image of the Palestinian reality" [source]

The "moderate" PA had some weeks earlier already imposed a new regulation that forbids foreign journalists from working in the area under its control

unless the journalists get advance permission from the Palestinian Ministry of Information. Foreign members of the press who ignore this order can be arrested, as can any Palestinian journalists who assist foreign journalists to operate without this permission. “The Palestinian security forces are entitled to arrest any person who enters the State of Palestine without permission,” said Jihad Qawassmeh, member of the Palestinian Journalist’s Syndicate... [The] new ruling affects all foreign journalists who want to work in Palestinian Authority territories [source]

Perhaps they feel the need to suppress reports like these?

• Quote: Following two weeks of quiet, the Western-backed Palestinian Authority has resumed its brutal crackdown on journalists and bloggers critical of PA officials. The crackdown, which intensified in January, has specifically targeted journalists and bloggers who expose rampant corruption within PA institutions [source: 2013]
• Quote: Cairo January 26, 2013 - The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), denounces the harassments campaign launched by the internal security affiliated to HAMAS movement against the journalists in Gaza strip in order to ban them from participating in any events conducted by their syndicate... [source: 2013]
• Quote: Murad Soudani, chairman of the Palestinian Writers’ Union, called on the journalists’ syndicate to “shame and remove” Palestinian journalists who met with their Israeli counterparts in Oslo, Norway, on World Free Press Day, May 3. “There is no room for flattery or debate surrounding normalization,” Soudani told Maan News Agency. “Intellectuals and journalists are no substitute for politicians.” Soudani added that such meetings “insert defeat into our Palestinian culture”... [source: 2012]
• Quote: In an unprecedented move, the Palestinian Authority prosecutor-general on Monday issued an arrest warrant against the chairman of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Naim Toubassi, on charges of financial corruption and slander. The decision to arrest Toubassi, a veteran pro-Fatah journalist and editor, triggered protests from dozens of Palestinian journalists who staged a demonstration outside the PA government offices in Ramallah [source: 2011]
• Quote: Hamas has been systematically terrorizing Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip - most of whom are members of Fatah - for years. They have been subjected to harassment of many varieties, including beatings and arbitrary arrests. On Tuesday, Hamas took the bull by the horns and forcibly shut down the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate offices in the Strip... [source: 2011]
• Quote: The Palestinian Journalist Syndicate in Gaza reported Tuesday that members of the Hamas-led security forces in Gaza arrested two Palestinian reporters; one in central Gaza, and the other in the southern part of the Gaza Strip... Hamas security forces broke into the home of Awad in Al Maghazi refugee camp, in central Gaza, and kidnapped him after confiscating his personal computer, documents and a camera from the house... The Syndicate demanded Hamas and its security forces end the violations committed against the reporters, and to prosecute those responsible...  [source: 2011]

And so on and so on. But at the end of the day, so what if the Palestinian Arab reporters put up a wall of silence? It's their territory, their community, their freedoms? Right?

Leave it to Khaled Abu Toameh to explain what's at stake:

"If Palestinian journalists have been so radicalized that some are even willing to resort to threats and violence against colleagues, what must one say about the rest of the Palestinians who, for the past two decades, have also been exposed to messages of hate by their leaders? How can anyone talk about resuming the peace process when Palestinians are being told by their leaders, on a daily basis, how bad and evil Israel is? ...How can any leader go to his people and say that he is negotiating with them?"

Honest Reporting offers a useful survey of some of the other press non-freedoms that increasingly characterize life under the PA/Abbas regime.

19-Oct-11: The Shalit Deal: A victims' viewpoint

From Haaretz online edition

From today's Haaretz, an article by Yair Ettinger

Shalit prisoner swap marks 'colossal failure' for mother of Israeli bombing victim | Malki Roth was killed just over 10 years ago in the suicide bombing at Sbarro restaurant in the center of Jerusalem, along with 14 others.

Frimet and Arnold Roth kept their distance from the radio and television on Tuesday. They were afraid that the flood of broadcasts would reveal the voice and face, flush with victory, of Ahlam Tamimi in their own home. To see or hear Tamimi, who took part in the murder of their daughter Malki, would be unbearable. So the news slowly filtered into their home in Jerusalem's Ramot neighborhood via frequent phone calls from friends and relatives and a careful use of the Internet, mostly in English.

"He's in Israeli hands, there are pictures," the father's matter-of-fact voice could be heard from the other room, referring to Gilad Shalit. The mother was explaining to us why the deal to free the abducted soldier was a "colossal failure," the abrogation of the state's role to protect its citizens.

"I'm happy to hear that Gilad Shalit is alive and well," said Frimet Roth. "That's a great relief and happy news. But it's accompanied by other feelings, the difficult ones. There is sorrow, anger; we're having a hard time understanding and digesting it. There is also fear. I'm very scared."

She said she was happy that Noam and Aviva Shalit got their son back; she knew what it was to love a child who wasn't there. Despite her tone, Roth said her objection to the exchange, including the release of many terrorists, was based on reason and not emotion.

Malki was the fourth of the Roths' seven children. She was killed just over 10 years ago in the suicide bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in the center of Jerusalem, along with 14 others. If she had lived, Malki Roth would be exactly the same age as Gilad Shalit, 25.

On the dining room table is a framed photo - Malki is seen with her good friend Michal Raziel. The two died together in the restaurant and were buried next to each other.

The Shalit deal forced hundreds of families who lost loved ones into an emotional whirlpool that is hard to comprehend. Pictures were pulled out of photo albums, siblings and parents remembered the victims and together watched the news, holding on to each other as if going through another Memorial Day.

Arnold and Frimet Roth decided not to gather their children together at home and did not renew their old connections with the other families of the Sbarro victims. They just made sure to keep away from the television.

"During the week, the television was on. That's how we discovered that Tamimi was being released," Frimet said. "This morning I couldn't watch the prisoners smiling. It was a nightmare that I dreamed of so many times for so long. I don't want to see her making a victory sign with her fingers."

Since the bombing a decade ago, Roth swims every morning in the local pool, something that strengthens her greatly, she said. Yesterday morning she needed strength just to leave the house. But at the pool's locker room she couldn't avoid the topic of the day.

Some women said the deal was the "least worst" option, but it was clear they thought the exchange was justified, Roth said. She said she needed to control herself and keep quiet to avoid starting an argument. If she hadn't kept silent, she would have told the women that they, like many others in Israel, were hiding behind a smokescreen.

"Only now there are military leaders who are telling the truth that there were military options that were not taken," she said. "Why was it not done? There was a colossal failure here."

Roth has written a number of opinion articles in the past few days, including one in Haaretz. The pieces drew many responses but did not halt the prisoner exchange. Roth and her family did not join the petitions to the High Court of Justice against the swap, whose ruling she said was clear in advance.

From Haaretz/English (International Herald Tribune) edition. The Hebrew version is here.

1-May-09: The murder of your child gets you thinking like this

The murder of our daughter has made us more sensitive than most to the way the media, and those who explain things to the media, think about the death of children. The op-ed below appears in both the print and online editions of today's Haaretz.

The power of numbersFrimet Roth

"Malki will never become just another number," we vowed, days after our daughter was murdered in the August 2001 terror attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. We never imagined that she could ever fade into less than "just a number."

Yet that is what has happened to her in the mindset of Israel's spokesmen...

Like Malki, the scores of Israeli children murdered since October 2000 have been forgotten. Their precise number has never been tallied by our government, let alone publicized in the international media.

Deflated statistics of Israeli children murdered by Palestinians in this millennium have been widely disseminated on Palestinian Web sites. There they are cited in comparison with the far greater numbers of Palestinian children killed in this conflict.

The refrain "numbers speak louder than words" is now being brandished obsessively in columns and reports about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the number of Gazan civilians killed in Operation Cast Lead, the number of Gazan houses destroyed, the number of Gazan women and children injured. Their impact on world opinion is immeasurable.

Here is what Prof. Rashid Khalidi wrote about numbers in an op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times this past January, while the Gaza campaign was underway:

"But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers."

There is no doubt that Palestinian numbers have won many hearts and minds. The recent resurgence of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism - January and February saw a sharp rise worldwide - is, in many instances, testimony to that.

The numbers cited by the Palestinians dodge issues and trump logic. They obviate the need to explain how Israel is supposed to react to attacks on its civilians without incurring the ire of "human rights" defenders. Those numbers ignore the dilemma Israel faces when its enemy hides in hospitals and in apartment buildings filled with women and children and other noncombatants.

But the numbers "game" is not played for fun and we can no longer afford to ignore it. Israel's security depends to a large extent on how it scores in this unsavory game. Unfortunately, our spokesmen have been derelict in their duty by failing to arm themselves with fighting numbers.

The murders of 144 innocent Israeli children, targeted while they played, ate, studied, hiked or rode buses to and from school over the past eight years, are a potent verbal weapon. Not one of those children was armed, not one was caught in soldiers' crossfire, not one was used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers.

These 144 children provide a context for much of the IDF's activities since terrorism became a major threat in October 2000. This number explains the checkpoints, the security fence, the arrests, and even Operation Cast Lead - all of which have ignited venomous vilification of Israel. Against the backdrop of our murdered children, Israel's conduct can fairly be viewed as not only justified, but unavoidable.

Our phone calls and written inquiries to the appropriate government bodies failed to yield publication of the forgotten number. The tally was reached, rather, by reading the complete list of terror victims posted on the Web site of Israel's Foreign Ministry and counting the children one by one.

Why our diplomats have chosen to conceal the children bombed, shot and stabbed to death by Palestinians remains a conundrum. But it is not too late to rectify the error.

In numbers, at times, there can be strength.

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer in Jerusalem. Her daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in the Sbarro restaurant bombing (2001). She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation, which provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

Please help us honour Malki's memory, and re-affirm the humanity of the victims. Keren Malki, a respected not-for-profit which we created in 2001 provides practical support for thousands of Israeli Jews, Christian, Moslems, Druze and others. They all have in common their desire to care at home for a special-needs child. Without Keren Malki's help, many of these children might otherwise be placed in institutions. Keren Malki is uncommonly efficient, and dedicated to a cause for which there is almost no other source of support in Israeli society - the need to empower parents who make the decision to care at home, and not via an institution, for a child with serious disabilities. You can learn more, and give your support, at www.kerenmalki.org