23-Feb-22: Weaponizing Turkish teenage girls: What the Sbarro bomber did next

Tamimi's Istanbul audience in October 2021:

Eager young Islamist women and girls, anxious
to know about killing Jews

She has been called the most wanted woman in the world. Here, for instance. 

But in America's news industry, there is little sign of interest in the life and doings of Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi. This is surprising. And also a real shame.

What she does and how it's perceived in the Arab world would surprise, perhaps even shock, many if they knew.

Tamimi, our daughter's killer, is a Jordanian who lives in a modern apartment in her country's capital, Amman. She has a masters degree in journalism and was the presenter of her own successful TV show for some five years. 

Adoring tributes to her appear on Aljazeera and much of Jordan's mainstream media as well as in major social media including Facebook and Instagram. Her op-eds are published on Arabic-language news sites and the BBC featured her in an absurdly sycophantic news report in 2020. 

The innocents she murdered are never mentioned in any of those articles. 

Shrewd maneuvering by the Hashemite Kingdom's leadership has enabled her to stay safely out of the reach of US government law enforcement efforts. That's at the heart of what we write here.

HER OPERATION

Tamimi became a fugitive from US law enforcement when the Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and arrest warrant against her on March 14, 2017. She faces trial in Washington under a US federal law [18 U.S.C. 2332a - Use of weapons of mass destruction] that criminalizes acts of terror involving a weapon of mass destruction outside the United States and - the key provision - whose victims are Americans. 

In a massacre she later called "my operation", Tamimi brought a human bomb - a young Islamist zealot called Al-Masri with an explosives-filled guitar case on his back - from Ramallah to Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria, located at one of the city's busiest pedestrian crossings. 

She later recounted how she left him there after imparting instructions on how to proceed. She herself fled on foot to the Old City's Damascus Gate where she boarded a ride-share taxi van back to Ramallah and her night job as a TV newsreader. 

She heard the thunderous explosion from a safe distance. Initial news reports via the van's radio suggested the death toll was lower than she wanted: 

I admit that I was a bit disappointed, because I had hoped for a larger toll. Yet when they said 'three dead,' I said: 'Allah be praised.'  ...The driver was translating [from Hebrew to Arabic] for the passengers... Two minutes later, they said on the radio that the number had increased to five. I wanted to hide my smile, but I just couldn't. Allah be praised, it was great. As the number of dead kept increasing, the passengers were applauding. They didn't even know that I was among them. On the way back [to Ramallah], we passed a Palestinian police checkpoint, and the policemen were laughing. One of them stuck his head in and said: 'Congratulations to us all.' Everybody was happy... [Source]

The toll kept rising and many dozens more were injured. The majority of the dead and maimed were, as Tamimi intended, Jewish children. 

By the time her ride reached Ramallah, it was clear she had produced the largest news story of that day. The key piece, the crowning achievement in her terms, was the murders of 14 "zionists". 

Malki, our teenage daughter, was in the center of town that afternoon with a friend, heading for a summer-camp counselors' meeting when they stopped on the way for lunch at a place they both loved. They were standing at the pizzeria's counter when Al-Masri entered the unguarded shop and walked up behind them. 

And then exploded.

We spent twelve nightmarish hours desperately searching for her. Eventually, with the help of a social worker, our two oldest sons located their sister's lifeless body in the small hours of the morning in a cold storage drawer at the Abu Kabir pathology center in Jaffa. Malki was the fifteenth victim. 

Of the many killed, two were American nationals: Malki, 15; and Judith Lillian Greenbaum (known to her family and friends as Shoshana), 31, a tourist and pregnant with her first child. A sixteenth victim, also a US citizen like Malki and Shoshana, remains unconscious in a Tel Aviv long-term care center today.

MEDIA CELEBRITY

Tamimi was born in 1980, the daughter of a career soldier in Jordan's military. She was raised and educated in Jordan and then, at 21 and a student at the Palestinian Arab Birzeit University near Ramallah, she became the first female admitted to the ranks of the Hamas terrorist forces. 

Once in, she was assigned to blow up a central Jerusalem supermarket with an exploding beer can. She failed and demanded a second mission. That's how some ten days later she spearheaded the Sbarro savagery that propelled her to fame. 

In 2001, and in the wake of the Sbarro devastation, Tamimi was arrested, tried and convicted by an Israeli military court on the basis of her full confession. A panel of three judges sentenced her in 2003 to sixteen terms of life imprisonment with an unusual recommendation that she never be released - no parole, no political deals, no swaps. 

No one paid attention and she was stunningly freed eight years later in October 2011 as part of an extortionate deal, ill-judged and catastrophic in our view, made by Israel with globally-outlawed terrorists of Hamas, the organization whom Tamimi was serving.

She was 31 when she walked out of her Israeli prison cell and returned triumphantly to Jordan and months of wide jubilation and public appearances. She was young enough to marry a few months later and to dramatically expand her career. 

THE HASHEMITE FACTOR

Early in 2012, from Jordan, she began presenting her own television program called "Breezes of the Free" (in Arabic “نسيم الأحرار”). The hour long celebration of terror and terrorists went to air weekly via the Hamas satellite network to a vast and ardent Arabic-speaking audience spread all over the world. 

Tamimi on the set of her TV show

Anyone aware of how tightly the King Abdullah governments ruling Jordan since 1999 manage the country's media will realize a show like Tamimi's could never happen unless that was what the king and his advisers wanted.

The context is important. Jordan is rated Not Free in Freedom in the World 2021, an annual study of worldwide political rights and civil liberties compiled by Freedom House. And the trend has grown stronger: a year earlier, Jordan was rated Partly Free as it was in 2019, 2018 and 2017. 

Plainly, Jordan is not one of those places where subversive voices can sneak under the regime's radar. If a message is getting transmitted, that reflects the Royal Hashemite Court's will.

THE FUGITIVE

In 2013, a year after Tamimi's horror show began going to air, the US filed terror charges against her in Washington. 

And promptly sealed them without any pubic announcement, keeping them absolutely secret. 

We learned off the record and long after the fact that this was supposed to allow high-level discussions to take place with Jordan about extraditing her into the hands of the FBI as required under the 1995 Jordan/US Extradition Treaty. Jordan had extradited fugitive Jordanians to the US multiple times since the treaty took effect. It similar and active treaties with numerous other states. 

But if indeed there were talks, they were unproductive. And on March 14, 2017, nearly four years after a federal judge had signed the charges, senior officials of the Department of Justice in Washington finally unsealed and publicized them [here]. 

Because of our involvement, the DOJ people did us the courtesy of an in-person briefing some hours ahead of the public announcement. Even so, we were unprepared for the distressing frustration that followed. 

The day those US federal charges were made public in 2017, the FBI added Tamimi to its Most Wanted Terrorists List. It's a small and exclusive list, currently made up of just 25 individuals, only two of them females. Some time later, the State Department's Rewards for Justice program posted a $5M reward for relevant information about Tamimi - whose home address and daily whereabouts were and are known to the media, the Jordanian authorities and the US government.

But just six days after the unsealing of the federal charges, Jordan's Court of Cassation, the kingdom's highest judicial body, ruled, as part of proceedings in which Tamimi was the centerpiece, that the 1995 treaty had a fatal flaw. Incredibly, they decided that in Tamimi's case, the US demand for extradition was unenforceable against Jordan. 

The details of the flaw are technical and irritating. It's beyond dispute that the Jordanian legislature could have easily fixed the problem then, and still can now. 

In a soft, almost inaudible voice, the US rejects the Jordanian position that the flaw and the invalidity let Jordan off the hook and leave Tamimi free to go about her life. The Jordan/US pact continues to be listed in Treaties in Force, an authoritative online State Department publication that underpins the American view. 

Throughout the five years since Jordan repudiated the treaty, no American official has addressed the matter publicly. Our repeated requests to a stream of US politicians and officials to tell the Jordanians publicly and out loud that harboring Tamimi disgraces them, fall on deaf ears. No such statement has been made by any of them. 

Instead, as Fox News reported during another of the many official visits by Abdullah to Washington, this one in July 2021, the State Department issues what can reasonably be called mantras. Vague assertions of fact blended with fond wishes and zero action. Fox showed this slide when it interviewed us live last summer:

In essence it's the same message the Trump administration issued. And it means as little today as it did then. 

For all practical purposes, the Sbarro victims have been swept under the carpet. 

OVER TO TURKEY

Now we jump to October 2021. 

In the intervening years, Tamimi has appeared multiple times on Aljazeera's multiple media, on BBC Arabic, on lesser known Arabic news channels, on Jordan's commercial RoyaTV channel and on numerous additional platforms where she has been interviewed, showcased and glorified as an icon. 

Her op-eds have appeared in the pages of multiple Arabic newspapers and news websites as well as on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and less-known Arabic-only social media sites. Arabic-language criticism of anything she has said, written or done is published nowhere.

Our occasional interactions with US government officials have been frustrating, sporadic, largely unproductive from our point of view and hard to arrange. Our experience with the US Embassy in Israel throughout the Trump years exemplifies the approach: as bereaved parents of a murdered US national expecting to be guided and assisted, we are mostly ignored. Not in a polite way and certainly not because we are rude. Persistent and raising an irksome issue, certainly. But never rude and not hostile.

By video, Tamimi speaks to the young Islamist

women in Istanbul - October 2021

Among the crumbs of information that we have gotten in these sometimes deplorable interactions is that the US government believes Jordan - because Jordan says so - has Tamimi under control. She's not inciting any more, we're assured. Her toxic influence has been neutralized. The problems are behind us.

From what we see, such claims are untrue.

In October 2021, Tamimi spoke in Arabic via video conference to an Islamist event in Istanbul, Turkey, held under the banner of الملتقى العلمي الدولي للشباب [“Gathering4youth”]. We spotted a video clip of the seminar that was uploaded to YouTube and promptly passed it along, with selected Arabic-to-English text translation, to senior US officials. If they are doing something with it, they're not telling us.

We asked a professional translator to review Tamimi's presentation. Here's the part we think captures the essence of her message:

...Allah let me have a membership in the ‘Izz ad-Deen al-Qassam battalions and [allowed me to] participate in two jihad operations that produced, by the Lord’s virtue, the deaths of fifteen zionists with 122 zionists wounded in two Jihad operations. We ask Allah to accept this. 

These two jihad operations are a crown on my head. By Allah’s virtue, I entered history by doing the finest of deeds, the finest operations, in the finest of ways, which are the ways of jihad. 

Praise Allah, He has prescribed me this fate. And when I met the "suicide bomber" [the Arabic expression translates literally into "the martyrdom-seeker"] ‘Izz ad-Deen Al-Masri, this was not a matter of such ease to stand next to a bomber. There are many lessons I learned. Many lessons which ‘Izz ad-Deen Al-Masri taught me without talking, [just by] being a road companion from Ramallah to Jerusalem, to the center of the [Jerusalem commercial] center where the Zionist entity is found, at the Jaffa and King George Avenue [corner]. This drive which lasted about an hour, from Ramallah to Jerusalem, or 90 minutes, [during] much of it I was learning from suicide bombers.

What does it mean to be a suicide bomber? It means that your spirit, your senses, your feelings, all of you, are pending against the Lord. Which is a difficult matter for us in this life to work out. But Hamas’s suicide bomber unit was able to spiritually train these suicide bombers.

What does it mean to sit for years [with] your sole mission to prepare your soul with effort, to train your soul? How do I become a spiritual character, how do I make my soul pending against Allah? And uproot all other attachments to this world. Only then shall I be worthy of the suicide bombers unit, and put my spirit forward in Allah’s path.

This is what ‘Izz ad-Deen Al-Masri taught me.

However until now I have not reached even half a degree of the character of ‘Izz ad-Deen Al-Masri and all suicide bombers who decided to put their souls forward in Allah’s path.”

It's hard to predict how much lethal damage is done when an eager and evidently impressionable audience of Islamist girls and young women, some of them about the age Tamimi was when she had her great moment at Sbarro, or younger, are exposed to a charismatic celebrity-jihad preacher with copious amounts of blood on her hands. 

The potential is horrific. Why has this not made headlines?  

ANTISEMITISM

From watching Ahlam Tamimi preach, we know political issues play almost no part in her messaging: no occupied territories, no green lines, no give-us-a-state. Theology seems to interest her more.

As she has said elsewhere, her brief and only conversation with ‘Izz ad-Deen Al-Masri took place as they walked along central Jerusalem's Jaffa Road on their way to the Sbarro corner. She says he asked her a question:

Are there religious Jews in the place where we are going to conduct the attack?

Tamimi: 

That was his question and I said yes. There are religious Jews there and also other people. I had been to the area before. I knew there was a Jewish religious school near there. He asked how many religious Jews would be there. 

Interviewer:

Why did he ask about religious Jews?

Tamimi:

Because the base of the conflict between the Israelis [she does not use the Arabic word for Jews] and the Palestinians is a religious struggle. When we came to the place, he looked at my eyes and I told him: There is no god other than the mighty Allah. He went on his way and I went on my way... My emotions and thoughts focused only on [Al-Masri]  and his strong personality and his vision and his action. I could only think about him and about his great personality and I didn't think about anything else.

Interviewer: 

Do you feel sorry?

Tamimi:

No, absolutely not. Why? For what?

In fighting for justice, there has been no alternative for us but to watch the cold barbarism of our gentle daughter's hard-faced murderer. As difficult as this is, we do it so we can urge decision-makers to understand that what chills people like us actually inspires and incites people in that other world across the river. 

[For some additional context about Tamimi's views on the Jews, see "08-Oct-17: Why kill religious Jewish children? Because, says Hamas celebrity-jihadist, this is a religious struggle" on our blog.]

AND JUSTICE?

No one in power says it but the American prosecution of Tamimi is stuck. The party doing the obstructing is a needy and highly dependent ally of the United States. It's the world's second-largest recipient of annual US foreign aid amounting to billions of US taxpayer dollars each year. 

Jordan is also bound by treaty to hand fugitives over to the FBI on request. It has in fact done that repeatedly in the other fugitive Jordanian cases that came before Tamimi. 

The US is bizarrely quiet about Jordan's egregious breach of the solemn 27 year-old legal obligation. This plays into the hands of dark forces in Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world. They propagate the offensive notion that when done in the name of Palestinian Arab "resistance", terrorism isn't terror at all. It's bravery, heroism, religious devotion and a reflection, as Tamimi puts it, of a great personality.

Let's also factor in the reality that Jordan, as documented by the Anti Defamation League, has sky-high levels of antisemitism. We have argued ["27-Aug-21: Peace, terror and Jordan's under-reported attachment to anti-Jewish bigotry"] that the kingdom's comprehensive failure to address this has consequences. Either Jordan wants peace and understands that this comes with a significant commitment to change. Or it wants to allow hatred and violent extremism to go on. Via its rhetoric, its actions and its inaction, and especially by harboring the monster who bombed Sbarro and allowing the unconscionable benefits she has gained from Jordan' tolerance of her lethal bigotry, Jordan signals that it wants both. 

And that cannot be.

Malki HY"D

We don't understand the US lawmakers, diplomats and officials who sweep justice in the Tamimi case under the rug. 

We don't understand the State Department with its self-incriminating mantras about how they're trying so hard for years to get her out of the clutches of the Jordanian juggernaut. 

We don't understand Congressional lawmakers on both sides of the divide. We don't know how, given their stated principles, they can fail to demand that this Jordanian woman be immediately brought to justice in Washington.

We don't understand America's organized Jewish leadership. Their failure, an especially painful one, to stand with us on an issue that ought to be a priority, an opportunity to speak truth to power (and let's be clear that the power in this challenge is not Jordan), raises concerns they ignore.

We're ready to explain this to them. But not here.

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.

21-Sep-20: Things the world's most wanted female terrorist would like us to know

Video capture from the Facebook clip

Ten days ago, in an online webinar broadcast globally by Facebook to wherever there are Arabic-speaking fans of this kind of thing, a celebration took place. 

This one marked nineteen years to the day of the horrors of 9/11. 

Ahlam Tamimi, a fanatical Islamist, the killer of our daughter Malka Chana Roth, and a woman who was released from her Israeli prison cell after serving just eight years of a sixteen-consecutive-terms-of-life-imprisonment sentence, was its main drawcard. 

That's her in the screen shot above.

Tamimi's speech reminded those of us watching from afar of just how much improbable freedom this boastful Jordanian bomber of a Jerusalem pizzeria in 2001 and a murderer of children has managed to acquire over the years since her return to the place of her birth and education (Jordan). It's where much of her immediate and extended family lives.

Tamimi's speech underscored how it is that she became the world's most wanted female fugitive. If your Arabic allows it, watch the full video here (embedded in a Facebook account called "National Prisoners") thanks to the mindless generosity of Facebook. 

In case it "disappears" (such things have been known to happen), the video page is archived here. 

We asked some capable and helpful Arabic-speaking friends to translate the overall sense of it. The notes that follow are based on what they said.

Taking a historical view, Tamimi refers to the steady decline in the status of Palestinian Arab prisoners in the wake of the 1994 Oslo Accords. Meaning she's reaching back to 1994 when she was about the same age as Malki, our daughter, was she was killed in the explosion Tamimi executed seven years later in the center of Jerusalem. 

That's a problem in her eyes, the loss of standing and attention. In an earlier period, the fact of prisoners being released from their Israeli prison cells would have triggered meaningful festivities, she says. Today all that happens is a few family members come and greet the prisoner at the nearest Israeli checkpoint. No ceremonies, no community involvement. (For what it's worth, we see plenty of evidence via the Arabic-language social media that in many cases at least, they do make a big deal.)

Another indicator of how serious this new reality is: families are no longer as happy as they once were to see their daughters married off to released prisoners. And let's clarify that when she says 'prisoners', what she means is terrorists. 

Tamimi sees this decline in ardor and prestige as influencing the media as well. If the public no longer care as much about the prisoner issue, she asserts, the media see less need to give it coverage. 

As an instance, she cites the death of a prisoner behind Israeli bars a few days earlier. Death came, she says, via a heart attack, ending the life of the imprisoned hero just a few months before his expected release. 

She refers in a similar way to the infection of dozens of prisoners with the Corona virus. Both, she says, illustrate how the public showing little interest led to the media failing to cover them. (Again, from where we sit, there is very considerable media coverage in the Arab world for both the deaths of "prisoners" inside Israeli prisons - never the result of anything ordinary, always stemming from Israeli malevolence -  and the cruel ravages of COVID-19 which is also a direct result of Zionism in their telling.)

Though she doesn't name names, the heart attack case is probably Daoud Tala'at al-Khatib, a security prisoner with roots in Bethlehem whose death in Ofer Prison on Jerusalem's northern edge was reported in Middle East Eye on September 3, 2020. 

The story told there is that Khatib had been 

"sentenced to 18 years in prison for his involvement in anti-occupation activities as a member of the Fatah movement. The Palestinian Committee of Prisoners' and Former Prisoners' Affairs said fellow inmates at Ofer protested after learning of Khatib’s death, banging on doors and chanting. Israeli prison officers then reportedly raided the cells and put 10 prisoners in solitary confinement. Khatib’s death has reignited calls for Israeli prison services to be held accountable for its medical neglect of jailed Palestinians."

They go further over at Palestine News Network where Khatib is reliably reported to have been "martyred in Ofer prison as a result of a heart attack", while Electronic Intifada attributes his death to "an apparent stroke as the cause of death, but that has not been officially confirmed". 

None of the Arab reports give much context. But we found a Lebanese account revealing [here] that the terrorist had a history of cardiac problems. Following an earlier heart attack in 2017, he underwent open heart surgery which, since he was a prisoner, would have been done as a no-cost gift from Israel's excellent medical system. How likely is it that he would have gotten care of this quality in the free market of the world he came from?

The house organ of the Palestinian Authority, WAFA, says an autopsy showed he died of "severe heart failure resulting from cardiomyopathy and coronary artery disease". It's hard to see problems like these stemming from anything the Israeli prison system could have inflicted. But we're working from limited information and the overblown nature of the Arab narrative tends to make things more confused and unclear than they would otherwise be. 

Palestine News Network, paying some small attention to how he got imprisoned in the first place, calls him "a member of the General Intelligence Service, where he was arrested on charges of resisting the occupation". We're familiar with that kind of double-talk. Times of Israel, unimpressed by the vague generalities, says he had been "a member of the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah faction". 2002, when he was arrested, was a period in which murderous terror attacks by Fatah were a daily occurrence. (We're trying to find references from open sources that might nail down how this 'prisoner' was sentenced to a term that would normally indicate someone was killed.) 

So back to Ahlam Tamimi. 

Her next complaint: the status enjoyed by prisoners in Palestinian Arab society has to be strengthened and popular concern for them implanted in the collective consciousness. But this isn't happening enough. If it were, the prisoners/terrorists would get the respect they deserve in the media as well.

Signing the Abraham Agreement - September 15, 2020

She then moves on to the more acute - and highly current - problem of Arab normalization with Israel, the process exemplified by Israel's recent understandings with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. She sees this too as bringing lower the overall interest in the well-being of prisoners/terrorists. 

And so does the Palestinian Authority negotiating with Israel. (Note that while her terrorism career began with her joining the nominally-secular Fatah faction of the PLO in 2000, she soon left it and was recruited into the Islamism-oriented Hamas; the two are perpetually at odds, often violently so.) She makes no mention of the Abbas regime's obsessive protecting and funding of its satanic scheme to give financial incentives to acts of terrorism - often called Pay To Slay. But then she's not making Fatah's case here; she identifies with its main competitor, Hamas.

Tamimi then addresses the usefulness of the social media. She says she feels a need to breath new life into the issue of prisoners/terrorists. The advantages of the social media include that they are not subject to what the translators term "certain agendas that afflict the rest of the media". The social media, as distinct from the conventional press, television and radio, are characterized by low cost, fast publishing and a high degree of interactivity. In the world for which she speaks, these are valuable advantages.

It's important, suggests Tamimi, who was awarded a masters degree in journalism in 2019, to cultivate good relations with social media influencers. This, she says, is how you win over younger people. She names several Arab social media activists whose followers number in the millions and who could produce short video clips about prisoners/terrorists. 

She also urges reaching out to footballers and celebrities from such other fields as fashion models, religion, politics. How this fits with her adherence to Islamist conservatism is left unanswered.

Tamimi the pan-Arab celebrity formally cuts a ribbon

As far as we can tell from the account we received, Tamimi made no mention of her own deep personal involvement in, and leverage of, such social media as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. 

We have been involved in efforts, so far all of them successful, to have her accounts on those platforms shut down. Her whack-a-mole persistence in relaunching under new names immediately after being silenced speaks to a real need by Tamimi for being heard and for influencing. It's a factor that we have seen no journalist address - but it clearly bears on how the US ought to understand Jordan's shabby safeguarding of this energetic promoter of murder-by-terror.

In fact, it's hard to not see this horrifying woman as a passionate, almost uniquely toxic, influencer. How many reporters, broadcasters, bloggers, commentators do you know who have double-digit murders in their CV?! And who are safeguarded by an entire government, Jordan's, despite the country's near-total dependence on US aid and support? 

There's a far deeper and more compelling story here than most people have ever realized.  

And this important side: It's breathtaking to watch her use - and be permitted to use to keep using for years - Facebook (and the other social media platforms where she is active) to encourage others to follow in her path. To make the world a safer and more welcoming place, in blunter terms, for her brand of terrorists - those who go looking for little children in busy pizzerias.

We'll just repeat that point for the many who pay no attention or fail to see what it all means: the social media giants, pre-eminent among them Facebook with its fabulously rich resources and bold slogans about keeping the social media world safe through algorithms and vigilance, are indispensable to the modus operandi of bona fide thugs like this hideous, blood-drenched woman. 

How is this not a front page story on the world's most important news sites?

Tamimi appeared in a different setting just yesterday. We came across it while writing this post. She's  mentioned in a Palestinian Arab op ed on the Al Watan Voice website [here] that waxes poetic about the sacrifices, the devotion, the sheer decency of Palestinian Arab prisoners (i.e. convicted terrorists). 

The writer, called Hassan Al-Asi, delves into the "self-sacrificing" backgrounds of a number of cold-blooded terrorists before briefly devoting himself briefly to Tamimi:

The freed prisoner Ahlam Al-Tamimi, whose father also fell ill with Alzheimer's Disease [having just written that another 'prisoner' had the same fate] and did not recognize her, always cries if you listen to her telling her story. She says that she did not feel free after her [2011] release because freedom, in her sense, is the memories with her father and mother. She said that during her discussion of the Master's thesis [evidently a reference to a degree in journalism she received last summer from a private university in Jordan], her father remembered her for two seconds and called her by a name of endearment that he used to call her when she was young. The sacrifice of the prisoners is one of the greatest and noblest sacrifices. They are the ones who sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the freedom of their people...

Tamimi has never expressed a half-syllable of remorse for the lives she set out to destroy. If she has any regret, she has said in front of cameras and for the record, it is regret that she did not manage to murder more innocent Jews. At least not yet. 

If you follow our efforts and our writings, it will be no surprise that we have no sympathy at all for this satanic figure. The life of comfort, influence, privilege and celebrity she lives - and has lived since October 2011 - is a travesty. The hand of Jordan's ruling family in safeguarding her while keeping the arms of American justice away from her is a disgrace we wish were more widely understood. 

But our interest is explicitly not for vengeance. We have no interest in seeing her die as our Malki did, blown to pieces, alone, in grotesque pain, 15 years old. 

What we hope to see is Tamimi arrested, taken in chains across the Atlantic, put on trial and for the justice system to run its course: for her to end her life in a bed - inside a US Federal prison, an old woman looking back on a wasted, frustrated life.

We're not open to hearing her advice about social media. Or almost anything else. There is nothing she can teach that we want to learn. 

As for weeping with her as she sheds tears for a father and a mother who lived full and long lives, we're glad for her that she enjoyed their involvement in her life (the father danced at her wedding in 2012). But a tragedy it's not. Tragedy is what she inflicted, smiling, gloating, triumphant, on us personally and on six other families. 

It's going way too far when this mass-murderer who set out to destroy the lives of as many children as possible - and succeeded - brazenly invites pity, empathy, participation in the deep sadness of seeing a father in his eighties, a man whose entire working career was spent working as part of the Jordanian military, fade away into dementia. 

Ahlam Tamimi out to get justice, not sympathy. Those who see it the opposite way, no matter how elevated their status in life, ought to look long and hard into a mirror and understand the moral depths to which they have descended.

UPDATE Sunday September 27, 2020: We have emailed and tweeted to multiple addresses at Facebook on a daily basis since posting this and have not gotten a single acknowledgement. We have turned to the Department of Justice with a request that they act in accordance with the criminal provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 2339B which renders unlawful the providing of material support or resources to a foreign (non-American) terrorist organization. But the fact is the video of Tamimi appealing for more and deeper support for terrorists in the service of Palestinian Arab jihad, like herself, remains up, streaming and accessible to the world. 

A good way to show your outrage would be to sign our petition - the details are at 19-Jul-20: Extradite Tamimi: A call for your support or simply go to www.change.org/ExtraditeTamimi and sign there (without "chipping in" any payments to the change.org people).

UPDATE Friday October 2, 2020: It appears that Facebook has now quietly, not responding to us in any way, removed the video. 

UPDATE Sunday October 11, 2020: It's an honor to be able to once again thank Malgorzata Koraszewska who has very kindly produced and published a Polish-language version ("Rzeczy, o których chce nas poinformować najbardziej na świecie poszukiwana terrorystka") of this post. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland. And one more thing: Facebook is once again hosting the video clip of Tamimi urging her fans to give more support to terror and terrorists. We have taken this matter up with Facebook - who have given no sign of acknowledging that they have heard from our lawyers or us, or that they know there is a problem - and the law enforcement authorities in the United States. Stay tuned.]

21-Jun-17: An explosion in a Belgian train station: Do the news agencies realize this was not someone trying to kill himself?

Brussels: The attacker (in the background) and Tuesday's
explosion [Image Source]

Belgium, which has more reason than most other parts of Europe to be deeply concerned about terror-minded Islamists, is trying today to make sense of an explosion in its most important train station yesterday (Tuesday).

Here's how the events were depicted by one of the world's most influential news packagers:

Belgian soldiers have shot a man suspected of being a would-be suicide bomber at Brussels Central Station, officials say. He was shot after reportedly setting off a small explosion and no-one else is believed to have been injured. Prosecutors later said the man had died. They are treating the incident as a terrorist attack. According to Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique, quoting prosecutors, the man who was shot was wearing a rucksack and a bomb belt. He detonated a device when he attracted the attention of soldiers in the station, the paper says. ["Suspected suicide bomber shot at Brussels railway station", BBC, June 20, 2017]

They're careful, the BBC people. But careful readers will be left wondering about what isn't stated.

• If the man was going to commit suicide, why in a public place? Could it be that suicide was not actually his goal? Was he actually a murderer? Or a murder-minded terrorist? If so, why confuse and mislead by saying he was committing suicide? He made himself into a human bomb and that is what we owe to ourselves and victims past and future to call him and those like him. We explain the thinking here: "30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs".
• And by the way, the bomb's effect appears to have been enhanced by nails, making it "similar to the bombs used in the attacks at Brussels airport and on the city's metro that killed 32 people in March 2016." That's from Reuters mid-Wednesday morning (here). Those nails, in our view, are far more relevant and important to characterizing the killer than calling him "suicide bomber", a term we utterly abhor. They are put into bombs so as to cruelly rip apart the flesh of  the innocent victims. Our daughter was murdered by terrorists who attacked the patrons of a pizzeria in Jerusalem with a nail-and-shrapnel-enhanced bomb.
• The Brussels killer caused a small explosion, and then "later" he died. Did the explosion do him in? Or was it the Belgian soldiers who, at some point in these presumably fast-moving events, opened fire and shot him? The BBC report doesn't say. But clearly once he was shot dead, no one else was going to be hurt by him. That's a very good thing.
• The word "terrorist" gets into this BBC report only because the BBC was able to quote Belgian "prosecutors" who called it that. Does the BBC lack the discernment to be able to characterize terrorists as terrorists? No, of course not; it's self-imposed "know-nothing"-ness as a careful reading read of the politically-hyper-correct BBC "Editorial Guidelines: Language when Reporting Terrorism" shows. The BBC editors have far less difficulty or reluctance reaching conclusions on how to characterize a million and one other things; that's why we think of them as a news-reporting source.

This morning (Wednesday) there are additional details to ponder.

Numerous sources report that the fast-acting Belgians "neutralized" the attacker; it's a word that when Israel uses it (to mean killing or stopping an attacker in the course of a terror attack) attracts criticism of Israel.

The unnamed attacker, called "a Moroccan national who was not wanted for terror offences" [here] , is reported to have been yelling "Allahu Akbar" as he ran towards a soldier.

Reuters, around day-break today. reported that Belgium's counter-terrorism police are "probing the identity" of the man shot dead yesterday by "troops guarding a Brussels railway station after he set off explosives that failed to injure anyone":

• "We consider this a terrorist attack," prosecutor Eric Van Der Sypt told reporters, declining comment on witness accounts that the man had shouted Islamist slogans before detonating what witnesses said were one or two devices in luggage...
• The Belgian capital, home to the headquarters of Nato and the European Union, has been on high alert since a Brussels-based Islamic State cell organised the attack that killed 130 people in Paris in November 2015. Four months later, associates of those attackers killed 32 people in their home city. Since then, attacks in France, but also in Germany, Sweden and, most recently, in Britain, have been carried out in the name of the Syria-based Islamist militant group by other young men, many of them locals, raising fears of more violence in a city where almost a quarter of the population of 1.2 million are Muslim...
• [S]moke pouring through Central Station and a shared awareness of Islamic State attacks in the city last year and more recently in Britain, France and elsewhere, sent evening commuters racing for cover...
• Witnesses spoke of a man who shouted Islamist slogans, including "Allahu akbar" - God is greater - in Arabic, in an underground area of the station still busy with commuters making their way home and seemed to set off one or two small blasts...
• Rail worker Nicolas Van Herrewegen told Reuters that he was heading downstairs toward the underground platforms that serve long-distance and suburban lines running under the city center. "There was a man shouting, and shouting and shouting," he said. "He was talking about the jihadists and all that and then at some point he shouted: 'Allahu akbar' and blew up the little suitcase he had next to him. People just took off."
• ...As Prime Minister Charles Michel consulted his security advisers, the national alert was maintained at its second highest level. Michel, who convened a National Security Council meeting for 9 a.m. (0700 GMT) on Wednesday, tweeted his thanks to the security forces and railway staff for their professionalism and courage. Mainline trains were running through the station by the morning rush hour, but not stopping. The adjacent metro station was open as normal, the transport authorities said. ["Belgium investigates station bomber fatally shot by soldiers", Reuters, June 21, 2017]

We agree with Belgium's prime minister: it's good that his country's security personnel opened fire promptly and, acting with "professionalism and courage", killed the man and neutralized the immediate danger.

We hope Israeli diplomats remind Mr Michel of his welcome plain-spokenness the next time Belgium joins with Israel's critics in absurdly - cheaply - accusing the IDF and Israel's other security forces of "extra-judicial execution" and "disproportionate force". The Belgians don't think they engaged in those problematic behaviours yesterday, and they're right. And so is Israel when its security people put the highest immediate priority on stopping an attacker in the shortest time before he achieves his barbaric goal.

Which, to remind ourselves, is never suicide.

The politically-inspired squeamishness of the BBC notwithstanding, everyone with brains in her head understands that attackers like yesterday's in the Brussels train station and Monday's would-be bomber on Paris' Champs-Elysees (killed when he rammed his car, filled with explosive and weapons, into a French police convoy - no innocent people were injured) are motivated by religious doctrine.

And whether they are genuine lone wolves or working in packs, the inspiration, incitement and encouragement for acts of terror in the most-public places possible overwhelmingly comes from Islamic preachers.

Whether this means terrorism does or does not have something to do with Islam is a non-trivial question if we seriously want to defeat the savages and the dangers they pose to our children and our societies. We're convinced the answer is obvious for anyone thinking outside the blinkers of political correctness about those threats.

07-Apr-17: Is lethal rampage in distant corner of New South Wales tied to Islamist terror?

The scene of the killing in NSW [Image Source]

A disturbing spate of violent attacks overnight in Australia may be getting little attention elsewhere but they underscore the assertion that terror doesn't recognize distant, quiet corners. 

Queanbeyan (English approximation of an Aboriginal word meaning "clear waters") is a regional centre with a population of about 38,000 in the Southern Tablelands of south-eastern New South Wales, situated about 15 km from the Australian capital, Canberra, and about 300 km from Sydney. 

Physical evidence found at the scene of a fatal stabbing at a Queanbeyan petrol station has suggested the attack was terror-related, NSW Police say... Two boys, aged 15 and 16, allegedly entered the service station and stabbed Pakistani-born 29-year-old employee Zeeshan Akbar... Police said the two teenagers were arrested following a police chase about 6:30am. Mr Akbar was one of four victims in a violent rampage that crossed the ACT-NSW border allegedly carried out by the two teens. NSW Deputy Police... Local police reassure residents their community is safe. Monaro police commander Superintendent Rod Smith said it appeared the pair, from Queanbeyan, had also been involved in a series of "absolutely horrific" attacks nearby overnight. That allegedly included stabbing another man in the abdomen. He was taken to Canberra Hospital in a serious but stable condition. Police said another man was bashed with a tyre iron in an aggravated break and enter, while yet another was hit with a beer bottle in a nearby park. The pair was also allegedly involved in another attempted robbery at Oaks Estate in the ACT... ["Queanbeyan stabbing: Counter-terrorism police investigate fatal rampage" | Australia's ABC News | April 7, 2017]

And from a Canberra Times report this morning:

Nearby residents Robyn Hunter and her daughter, Maddy, were equally shocked by the reported gory nature of the crimes and the investigation into terrorism links. "I was a bit surprised by that, you don't expect Queanbeyan to be involved in something like that, especially our little area up here," Mrs Hunter said... "I'd understand it happening in Sydney or Melbourne or one of the bigger cities, but not here"...

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is quoted today saying the circumstances of the lethal stabbing raised ‘sufficient concern’ to warrant the involvement of counter-terrorism bodies. The evidence being hinted at is understandably the subject of media speculation. According to The Australian today:

The letters “IS”, potentially an acronym for the terrorist group Islamic State, were apparently smeared on the wall and window of the Bungendore Road service station where Mr Akbar was killed, police sources said.

15-Feb-17: Things Iran is good at

Genuflecting: The caption to this revealing Iranian news photo is: "Minister
of Communications and Information Technology Mahmoud Vaezi 
and the Swedish Minister of European Union Affairs and Trade Ann Linde
seen in this Feb 11 photo meeting in Tehran" [Image Source]

[This post, like a number of others before it, has been translated to Polish ("W czym Iran jest dobry") by courtesy of Malgorzata Koraszewska over on the Listy z naszego sadu website. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland.]

There are some striking photos in the news today and yesterday, showing Swedish political leaders - among them, self-avowed feminists - bowing their heads to men, the females donning hijabs and head scarves and generally conveying a sense of deep deference to the Islamist regime ruling Iran with an iron fist - a posture rarely seen in international affairs or among people espousing the views that the Swedes claim to hold dear.

Sweden's prime minister Stefan Löfven led the visiting delegation, and has come under angry criticism from opposition politicians and female rights among others.

“This is disastrous for what is being called a feminist foreign policy,” says Jan Bjorklund of the Liberal Party. According to him, the Swedish government should have demanded not to make the hijab compulsory for the female members of the delegation. And if Iran did not agree to that, then the trade agreements should have been signed in Sweden or a third country. The Swedish government calls itself the “first feminist government”, but Linde has defended her decision to wear the hijab in Iran, saying that the only other option would be to send an all-male delegation. Swedish companies have been lining up to gain access to Iran’s lucrative market after the lifting of international sanctions... ["Sweden defends officials wearing headscarves in Iran", Tehran Times, February 14, 2017]

The Swedish delegation to Iran has had a significant impact outside
Iran. The caption reads: "Sweden's "first feminist government" has been
called hypocritical for wearing the hijab in Tehran"
[Image Source: Screen grab from a Sydney Morning Herald video]

But Löfven would have been heartened by the local reception his team got. They were

greeted with praise from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who hailed the positive relationship between the two countries during a meeting with the Swedish premier in Tehran. "America and many European powers have played a role in causing traumatic events in Syria and Iraq, and the people of the region are aware of this interference and are rightly skeptical," Khamenei was quoted as saying by Iranian television... [Löfven] also met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani... who hailed the "moderation" in Sweden's foreign policy, ["Iran hails relations with Sweden during prime minister's visit to Tehran", DW (German State Radio), February 11, 2017]

The Swedes must have had the case of Dr. Ahmadreza Djalali on their minds while in Tehran. He's an academic physician born in Iran who has taught at universities in Belgium, Italy and Sweden. His field is disaster medicine and he traveled to Iran in April 2016 to take part in a professional conference. With no warning and without any warrant, Iranian Ministry of Intelligence officials arrested him there and charged him with “collaboration with enemy states”. The New York Times reported earlier this week [click] that he is being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison and faces the death penalty. 

An image from last Saturday in Tehran that has already gone massively
viral: Swedish "feminist" government officials' walk of shame

Djalali's wife and two children live in Stockholm so the case has a higher profile there than in the countries where most of this blog's readers live. His wife is surely wondering what, if anything, those Swedish feminists did that was helpful to his cause during their well-publicized visit with the Mullahs. We were unable to find any reference to it in the media reports of the "feminist: visit to Iran, but we may have missed it.

For the past year, there's been a serious rush of vendor delegations from Europe, Asia and North America visiting, and showing extreme deference to, the Iranian regime along with an impressive flow of cross-border business deals with the Iranians [click here for a Google search results listing]. No doubt that this is a happy time for the people in charge of Iran.

But beyond the embarrassed faces and unmistakable humiliation of the visitors on show, there are significantly more disturbing next-moves emanating from the Iranian regime as flagged, for instance, yesterday by the Washington Times:

Iran’s hard-line Islamic regime has escalated its overseas terrorist operations, establishing a network of over a dozen internal training camps for foreign fighters, the regime’s largest resistance group said at a press conference on Tuesday in Washington. The National Council of Resistance of Iran issued its intelligence report specifying the camps’ locations and the countries represented... The council’s largest member is the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (MEK). It boasts an extensive spy network inside the mullah-run government, including the all-powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its special forces wing, the Quds force, and has a track record of exposing clandestine parts of the Iranian national security apparatus.
The Quds force played a significant role in the Iraq War by training Iraqi Shiites on how to make bombs that killed scores of American troops. The Quds force is now directing thousands of Iraqi Shiite militia members in Iraq, some of whom have gone to Syria to fight for the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The U.S. calls Iran the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. However, neither the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps nor the Quds force is on the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations. The Treasury Department in 2007 designated the Quds force as a material supporter of terrorism, but National Council of Resistance of Iran officials say the U.S. government should go much further.
“The Iranian resistance has emphasized on countless occasions that the source and the epicenter of terrorism, fundamentalism and regional meddling is the fundamentalist regime ruling Iran,” said Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director of the council’s Washington office. [“Iran growing network to train foreign terrorists, dissident group says”, Rowan Scarborough in Washington Times, February 14, 2017]

The Washington Times report goes on:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has approved a directorate inside the Quds force “in order to expand its training of foreign mercenaries as part of the regime’s strategy to step up its meddling abroad, including in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, Afghanistan and elsewhere.” “The camps have been divided based on the nationality of the trainees and the type of training,” the council said. “Both terrorist training and also military training for militias are provided, enabling them to better infiltrate and advance the regime’s regional objectives.”

What skills can aspiring jihadists acquire under the Iranian auspices?

The training is divided into two types of courses; a crash-course of 45 days for troops that will be used to fight in paramilitary forces like the IRGC’s Basij force or a full training course which lasts from between 9 and 12 months... The full training course has many different sections: Heavy weaponry; Missile Launches; Marine Training; Theoretical Training (how to spend terror rhetoric); Survival Training; Commando Training; Paratrooper Training; Security Training... The report makes clear that the IRGC is in control of these terror training camps, in an attempt to export terrorism, destabilise other countries and take control in those countries. ["IRAN’S  IRGC’S TERROR TRAINING CAMPS REVEALED", Iran News Update,., February 15, 2017]

Here's something else the Iranians know to do well: fomenting yet more mischief in Gaza. It stems from the choice of a seasoned murdering terrorist to become the new head of Hamas in Gaza [we analyzed this here: "13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"]

The implication of the selection means that Iran has retaken the reins in Gaza after a long hiatus during which Egypt, on one hand, and Turkey and Qatar, on the other, tried to fill the vacuum. Iran chose to take back the reins in Gaza because of the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.  Iran fears that in the upcoming talks in Washington, President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu will discuss an aggressive option vis-à-vis Iran. It is doubtful if any “elections” were held in Gaza to choose Sinwar. The result is due to pressure by Hamas’ military wing on the political wing, and the announcement’s timing is Iran’s way of conveying a message before the Trump-Netanyahu talks. If that’s the case, don’t expect that Sinwar’s “election” foretells a new escalation from Gaza against Israel. Just the opposite, Iran will restrain Hamas in order to keep the Gaza front available for Iran’s own needs, and Iran’s alone. ["Iran Grabs the Reins in Gaza", Pinhas Inbari, JCPA, February 14, 2017]

Velayati on Aljazeera this past week [Image Source]

In the interests of fairness, we will point out that Iran does have its fans, and the Iranians don't necessarily see themselves as being the bad guys or in any great trouble. You can get a sense of that deep Persian self-appreciation from published pieces like "World owes Iran debt of gratitude for sacrifices in fight against terror" [PressTV, February 13, 2017] and "Lavrov: Exclusion of Iran from anti-terror coalition is a mistake" [Tehran Times, February 12, 2017].

Also this: Iran doesn't see any reason to discontinue its rapid development of long-range offensive missiles [reviewed here two weeks ago]. As Ali Akbar Velayati (a former Iranian foreign minister and today Supreme Leader Khamenei's Advisor on International Affairs) said three days ago in an Al-Jazeera television interview [translated into English by MEMRI here]:

"If America imagines that threats and sanctions will lead Iran to stop its missile program, this is a misconception, a mere fantasy... America is not strong enough to bring us to our knees... Mr. Trump is fickle and changes his policies every other day... Running a country like America is not an easy thing. All of Trump's predecessors faced similar problems. The most important things is that he has failed, especially with us in Iran. Mr. Trump does not possess special qualifications that would enable him to claim that he wants to take over the world. His policies are immature and have led him to a confrontation with the whole world"

This sounds like bluster - something the Iranians are also good at - but it's more serious than customary bluster given the threats that have emanated from Iranian leaders at various points since the JCPOA, the infamous unsigned "agreement" that has brought such unearned benefits to Iran, came into effect. For instance, this comment which we quoted in an earlier post ["28-Jun-16: Is Iran now threatening more nuclear plotting?"]

Discussing what president Obama has called snapback and "real consequences"] "Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said the country will be able to “immediately” reverse its commitments under a final nuclear deal with world powers if it finds out that the other side has breached commitments under the [JCPOA]... Whenever Iran feels the other side has not honored its commitments, the “reversibility” of Tehran’s nuclear program will happen immediately, he said." [Tasnim News Agency, Iran, July 28, 2015]

We think they're good at that sort of thing too.