14-Aug-23: Getting Tamimi to US justice: A modest positive step

The admitted Sbarro bomber hosted a made-in-Jordan weekly TV

show from Amman between February 2012 and September 2016.

Taking a robustly pro-terror line, it went to air globally via the
Hamas Al Quds TV satellite channel with a generous
assist from YouTube.

A small but meaningful step forward by America's organized Jewish communities in addressing a subject they have avoided confronting for years happened, to our surprise and appreciation, a month ago. 

But first some background.

The woman who brought a suicidal/murderous human bomb to the door of a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem 22 years ago this week lives in Jordan today. 

A fugitive with a $5 million reward on her head from the Rewards for Justice unit of the US State Department, she's free but not only that. 

She's also a media celebrity. A 21 year old TV news reader when she spearheaded the Sbarro massacre, she went on to host a television program aimed at a global Arabic-speaking audience that was produced in Amman, Jordan's capital, and beamed from there throughout the world weekly from February 2012 for the next almost-five years. 

If she wasn't already famous, the terror-focused show called "Breezes of the Free" turned her into a pan-Arab public figure. If anyone has a claim to being an icon of Islamist terror, a person who more than anyone else embodies murderous lust for dead Jews and Israelis, it is Ahlam Ahmad Aref Al-Tamimi. 

But this isn't about her. 

What's disturbed us more than any other single factor through the years that we have striven to see her arrested in Jordan, put on a plane and brought in chains to Washington where federal US charges have faced her since July 15, 2013, is the incomprehensible passivity of so many parts of American society.

And none more incomprehensible than America's Jewish organizational leadership. 

The still-thwarted US prosecution of Tamimi ought to have been embraced as an American-Jewish issue par excellence. The woman is open about having targeted Jews, and in particular Jewish children, in the massacre she engineered at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. And in this, she succeeded on a shattering scale: a death toll of sixteen, half of them children, most of the rest women, and three US nationals among them. 

She is on the record saying that nothing she did left her feeling any moral or other doubt: 

I have no regrets, and no Palestinian prisoner regrets what he or she has done. We were defending ourselves. What are we supposed to regret? Should we regret defending ourselves? Should we regret that the Israelis killed one of us so we killed a different one of them? We have no regrets. [Palestinian Media Watch]

And not only no regrets but redemptive theological conviction:

This is the path. I dedicated myself to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and Allah granted me success. You know how many casualties there were [in the 2001 attack on the Sbarro pizzeria]. This was made possible by Allah. Do you want me to denounce what I did? That's out of the question. I would do it again today, and in the same manner (Source; Tamimi interviewed in Jordan in October 2011 - translated by MEMRI).

Referring to two separate Jerusalem bombng attacks which she spearheaded, she brags (to a Turkish audience in October 2021) that 

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.

With years of detailed, recorded and filmed interviews, speeches and public rallies behind her, there is absilutely no reason to doubt Tamimi's deep belief in the righteousness of the crimes that have made her one of the FBI's twenty-four Most Wanted Terrorists. 

* * *

Jordan's supremely shabby role in keeping this appalling woman free and out of reach of America's law enforcement agencies is a matter of record. 

The Hashemite Kingdom entered into an extradition treaty with the United States in 1995. But in March 2017, just six days after the Justice Department in Washington unsealed its long-secret 2013 charges against Tamimi, it repudiated the bilateral agreement ["20-Mar-17: The Hashemite Kingdom's courts have spoken: The murdering FBI fugitive will not be handed over"]

There is no legal validity to Jordan's judicial assertions, whatever the Jordanians may claim. 

The United States has made a variety of official statements - some relatively forceful, some whispered, and none of them directed at Jordan in any public way - confirming that it views the treaty as in force. We summarize them here: "29-Mar-23: The Sbarro bomber's thwarted extradition from Jordan: Where does the State Department actually stand?" 

It's a troubling chronology.

Treaties and legal obligations are. of course, only as effective as the people who enforce them. In the Tamimi case, no one answers to that description with the exception, as we know from our own experience, of the prosecutors and investigators of the Department of Justice and of the FBI. Almost all the obstacles we know about, and to a large extent have experienced, emanate from the Department of State.

How do State Department officials justify stepping into the path of US law enforcement? How can they explain taking measures to ensure Tamimi isn't handed over to US marshals? Why would they align their interests and those of the US government with a monstrous terrorist responsible for he deaths of sixteen innocents including three Americans?

They don't. 

In fact, in an unclassified October 2022 fax to the parents of Malki Roth, one of Tamimi's many victims, they assert that Tamimi

must be held accountable for her role in the terrorist attack that claimed the life of your daughter and 14 others [that became 15 in March 2023 with the death of an American woman who had been left in a coma in the pizzeria atrocity]... The U.S. government remains fully committed to bringing Tamimi to the united States to face federal terrorism-related charges in U.S. courts. The U.S. government is pursuing all viable options to hold Tamimi accountable, including ongoing engagements with the Government of Jordan. I can sure you that pursuing justice for American victims of terrorism, including Malki, is a formost priority for the United States...

and so on.

Nothing substantive has happened to bring this loathsome woman to US justice in more than a decade. Nontheless some of the most senior officials at the pinnacle of US power continue to say how much they want her, how hard they're working to get her, that their thoughts and prayers go out to the families of her victims. 

It's not a terribly complex picture. Most people can figure out the truth of what's actually going on.

* * *

But in the midst of this remarkable saga where America's lawmakers, senior government officials and - to a surprising extent - America's mainstream media all show a striking passivity, there has been a long-overdue positive development. 

One of American Jewish life's leading advocacy organisations made an announcement a month ago that marks one of the very few positive moments in the years-long struggle to prosecute the Sbarro bomber. They addressed the US government with a request that efforts be made to get this extradition done. This is good news.

Here's how Jewish Insider reported it on July 13, 2023.

16-Sep-22: Speaking of Malki, her legacy and her murder on Jewish Insider's podcast (AUDIO)

Earlier this month, Rich Goldberg and Jarrod Bernstein, the co-hosts of Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast”, invited Arnold Roth to join them in a conversation conducted via video conference and then published via their podcast.

Limited Liability Podcast is a new weekly podcast for readers of Jewish Insider. Hear from the key players generating buzz and making headlines in conversation with two top political operatives, Jarrod Bernstein and Rich Goldberg. One Democrat, one Republican. Both hosts have extensive experience in the political arena and a deep rolodex to match. It’s Jewish Insider’s Daily Kickoff brought to life. [Source]

This was an opportunity for Arnold to speak about our daughter Malki: her life, her death in a massacre at a Jerusalem pizzeria filled with children. And about our family’s efforts to hold the murderers - in particular the Jordanian woman who spearheaded the atrocity - accountable.

The program, produced in Washington DC, went to air on September 5, 2022 and can be heard on demand via this link to the Jewish Insider site or through Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and these additional streaming sites.

Here, by courtesy of Jewish Insider, some excerpts from the conversation.

*****

Roth: Malki was the youngest of the four children that we brought with us from Australia when we moved to Israel in the summer of 1988, she was just 2 ½ years old. [In] 2001 she had just finished 10th grade, had acquired the leadership of a group of girls through a youth group and had proven herself to be terrifically good at this, and was an advocate for change in her own circle in the school, in the social setting, for children with disabilities. I mentioned that, because the youngest of our children, who lives with us today and who was born 10 years after Malki, is catastrophically disabled. And Malki was somebody who just looked right past that and saw a sibling, a sister whom she adored. That was actually a large part of her personality. She was always smiling and very engaged with other people, just a wonderful human being to be around.

*****

Bernstein: Twenty years ago seems like a long time, but in many ways, it’s like yesterday. So many of us came of age in that time; I remember the Sbarro bombing pretty vividly. Take us back to that day and the days that followed.

Roth: At around 2 o’clock I got back from lunch, my wife was on the phone, and she was shrieking into the phone, something I’m not at all used to, and she said that there had been a “פיגוע” — a terror attack — in the center of Jerusalem. She knew that because she was on the floor with our youngest child watching CNN, and her message was, “I can’t reach the children,” and then she hung up. Naturally, like everybody else in Jerusalem, I reached for my phone and called all of my children one after the other… And I found very quickly that the cell network had gone down…An hour later, I still hadn’t reached Malki and I had spoken to the other children. And from there it was just a movie plot that just got darker and blacker and more awful…

Around 5 o’clock, 5:30 that afternoon, this is the ninth of August 2001, and the downstairs neighbor, [a] lovely lady who’s no longer alive, came up the stairs with an awful look that I’ll never forget on her face, and she said, “Michal is dead.” Michal was our daughter’s best friend and we knew that they were together, and we hadn’t had any status update. Well, the television had provided the first status update, so we knew we were in something that was more worrying, more catastrophic than anything that I think we were prepared for. And so it went until 2 in the morning. Two in the morning, our two oldest sons had been accompanied by a social worker, they went down to the government forensic center in Yaffo near Tel Aviv, and at roughly 2 o’clock they phoned home from there and they said they had found Malki. And that was, as you can imagine, just one of those moments you never forget.

*****

Roth: We didn’t know who the people were behind the label “Hamas” until several weeks later. And then, as has been the case from that day pretty much until today, everything we learned came through the news. So, we learned through the news that a woman had been arrested and charged, and that several men had been arrested and charged, and in the fullness of time they were put on trial. And when the trials happened, we learned about that through the news. We learned about what they said and what the court said and what the verdict was, through the news, and eventually we learned that they’d been sentenced.

In the case of Ahlam Tamimi, the woman who as we now know and certainly did not know at the time, had found the site, sought it out because of the large number of Jewish children in a strictly kosher pizzeria in the center of town on a school holiday. She has been, in effect the poster child, for the redemptive value of murdering Jewish children…She was arrested, charged, convicted and sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment…with a strong recommendation by the panel of three judges, that there be no circumstances under which should ever be released or have a shortened sentence.

Of course, that’s not the way it played out. In 2011, with the euphoria around the release of [kidnapped IDF soldier] Gilad Shalit and a government deal between Israel and Hamas, she walked free against our deeply, deeply bitter opposition to her being released. But it was useless, no one was interested, no one listened, and we were really talking, in addition to talking to the international media, we were talking to the wall. She went back to Jordan, which is where she came from — she was a Jordanian citizen born and bred, her father served in the Jordanian army — and she arrived back in Jordan as a genuine, certifiable VIP. She was very quickly caught up in public appearances all over the kingdom, and then later throughout the Arab world. And starting in February 2012, so we’re talking now, three months, three or four months after she was given back her life through the Shalit deal, she began a TV career as a presenter of her own program.

*****

Bernstein: What is the Jordanian position, given the [1995 U.S.-Jordan extradition] treaty given that the facts here really aren’t in dispute in any way, shape or form?

Roth: The Jordanian position was articulated six days after the charges were unsealed in March 2017, so that on the 20th of March, the highest court for this purpose…in Jordan, pretty much out of the blue from the point of view of the American Embassy and me, handed down a ruling that the 1995 extradition treaties entered into between Jordan and the United States, or more particularly King Hussein, the father of today’s King [Abdullah II], and the Clinton administration, was invalid…

To jump to the bottom line, it’s been so infuriating to us [to] not get support and the shoulder-to-shoulder that I was talking about before, that we actually litigated. We filed an application under the Freedom of Information Act in the United States asking the State Department to hand over the documents that related to that extradition treaty of 1995, which, by the way, the United States continues to regard as being valid, and we were ignored. We filed papers a second time, and we were ignored. And then we decided we’re going to sue the U.S. government. And we did, and we got a settlement almost immediately, almost as if they were waiting for us to do this, but by this time it had taken us several years, and then we got the documents…And the most key of the key documents is a document of ratification of the treaty signed in the personal hand of King Hussein, who talks about God ensuring that no one will ever come to undermine the treaty in the future…

The bottom line of all of this is that Jordan is telling whoppers when they say they don’t have to hand her over. But the much more worrying thing, because in the end I don’t really care what the Jordanians say, is that the United States government seems to be perfectly OK with saying in a very quiet voice, “We’re asking for the extradition to happen and that’s the law,” and in a much larger voice saying, “Hey, the Jordanians, they are our buddies in the Middle East.” President Biden, and he’s not the only one in this story whom I’m going to invoke as president of the United States. I could say the same about Obama and about Trump, almost word for word, but President Biden has now taken several opportunities to say, “King Abdullah is a loyal friend in a tough neighborhood.” And I’m sorry, but I’m fed up to the back teeth with that kind of empty throwing around of slogans. Talk about tough friends when they’ve handed over the people they’re obliged to hand over under bilateral treaties. That’s not what’s happened.

*****

Roth:  This has not weakened in the smallest way, my devotion or that of my wife and our family to Zionism. We know why we’re living in Israel…we came here to raise our children in Israel, and we love what’s happened, we are happy, and we have children and grandchildren living here…So, it has not changed our connection to Israel in the smallest way. But it has sharpened, I would use the word contempt, the contempt that I personally feel towards politicians in multiple places and multiple levels of seniority.

*****

Malki was a talented classical flautist

Bonus — Malki’s favorite things: 

Roth: “Malki loved music. She was terrifically talented, she played in the Jerusalem Youth Orchestra briefly. She was a classical flutist, and after she was already gone, and in the shiva house when we were sitting in our home with many guests coming to comfort us, we learned that she had written a song. That song is on the website of the Malki Foundation…

“The most meaningful way that we have found for, a) dealing with the profound pain of losing Malki and, b) forcing people to remember her life, has been by creating a charity in her name, which is really very active today…

“Malki loved music. She had this wonderful song which has now gone to every part of the world and has different versions of it, but the musical spirit that she carried with her is something that really sustains us…I want people to know about the happy side of Malki’s life. She wasn’t an unhappy person, she left behind unhappy people, her parents, but that she was really an uplifting, inspiring kind of person, and the Malki Foundation really carries on the spirit of inspiration, the wonderful things that she did for children with disabilities.”

*****

During the podcast' episode's last minute, they play a sample of Shir Lismoach (Malki’s Song), written by Malki and (in this particular arrangement - and there are many) is performed by members of the Ezra Zionist Youth Movement in Jerusalem.

Learn more about the Malki Foundation and listen to multiple versions of Malki’s song on the Keren Malki website.