13-Aug-21: An extinguished, precious life remembered in Melbourne

Twenty years ago we started the endless process of adjusting to life without our delightful first-born daughter Malka Chana - Malki to her friends - stolen from us before she reached her sixteenth birthday.

Our copy of the Melbourne Herald-Sun's 

front page report on August 11, 2001 is

damaged. We are trying to acquire a repaired

image.

It wasn't an illness or a tragic accident that removed Malki from the warm embrace of those who loved her. It was a gang of ideology-crazed thugs led by a chillingly satanic Jordanian woman, armed with a powerful explosive package disguised as a human being, an Arab man in his twenties, and egged on by millions of backers. 

Those millions still exert a deeply painful influence on our lives.

We scan the Arabic social media six days a week. This week on the day of the twentieth anniversary we saw - though we didn't need it - plenty of evidence of how utterly different the world in which they live their lives is from ours in this generations-long war of terror. 

It's a war that Arabs launched against against Jews in Palestine long before the name Palestine was appropriated by the Arab side. And decades before the State of Israel announced its existence as new-born state on the 1948 day the British Mandate ended and six Arab armies invaded.

A random selection of some deeply hostile and ugly anniversary messages appearing on Twitter (minus the links - we have no interest in giving these people traffic or attention):

• Today marks the twentieth anniversary of Operation Sbarro carried out by the martyr Izz Al-Din Al-Masri in Jaffa Street in occupied Jerusalem with the help of the liberated captive Ahlam Al-Tamimi in retaliation for the martyrdom of the two leaders Gamal Selim and Jamal Mansour [Arabic]
• ..A martyrdom operation in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem which led to the deaths of 20 Zionists and the wounding of 100 [Arabic]
• We do not want to forget the liberated captive, Ahlam Al-Tamimi, who carried the attacker of the Sbarro restaurant, Izz Al-Din Al-Masri, to the restaurant after which she was arrested by the occupation army [Arabic]
• Prepare it for them in the manner of the people of Aqaba and serve it [pizza] hot and delicious. Al-Masri [the name of the human bomb], go through here. Occupied Jerusalem August 9, 2001 [Arabic]
• Proud of our representative from the family in the heroic operation. The liberated captive, Ahlam Al-Tamimi, who transported the martyr Izz Al-Din Al-Masri and handed him a guitar stuffed with maddening death [Arabic - posted by a male with the surname Tamimi]
• ...Al-Masri was killed on the responsibility of the Jews and their responsibility is extensive [Arabic]
• If her parents hadn’t chosen to become foreign invaders she’d probably be alive now
• My argument is with the creation of an apartheid theocratic state created by the West (mostly by the US and Britain) in Palestine largely so Jews wouldn't immigrate to the US. I'm a Jew not an Israeli Zionist. She should never have been put in this position by her dad.

We saw no Arabic messages condemning or criticizing Tamimi or the massacre. They might exist and we're just not seeing them, but the truth is we have been looking for years and not finding.

Malki, like her father, was born in Australia. The current edition of the Australian Jewish News, a weekly community-focused newspaper, ran this editorial on Thursday. It's reprinted with the permission of its editor, Zeddy Lawrence.

‘A precious life extinguished’

"THE Australian Jewish community was in mourning this week," reported The AJN 20 years ago, on Friday, August 17, 2001. "The death of 15-year-old Malki Roth in the Sbarro bombing catapulted Israel's crisis into personal grief for much of this community."

Fifteen innocent people were killed in the terrorist attack just a few days earlier, when a guitar case packed with nails was detonated at the central Jerusalem pizza restaurant. Among the victims were seven people aged between just two and 16. Scores of other diners were wounded.

Reflecting on the death of his daughter at the time, Arnold Roth told The AJN, "This was the extinguishing of a precious life."

Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, who masterminded the attack and drove the bomber to the restaurant, was apprehended by Israel soon afterwards and sentenced to 16 life terms in an Israeli jail. But in 2011, she was one of more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners freed in exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage in Gaza for five years.

Since that time, Tamimi has lived in Jordan, feted as a celebrity, and expressing her joy at the high death toll the Sbarro bombing inflicted.

Determined to bring her back to justice, Arnold and his American-born wife Frimet have long called for her to be extradited to the US, as Malki and another victim held American citizenship.

A warrant was issued, but insisting the extradition treaty between the countries was never ratified, Jordan has never acted on it.

The latest evidence, however, appears to show that the treaty was indeed signed.

With that in mind, as the community marks 20 years since Malki's death, the Roths are hoping their sustained campaign may bear fruit.

Pressure is mounting within Washington for the US to withhold foreign assistance from Jordan, and they're urging the Australian government – who they claim have been reticent to speak out – to also take a stand.

Twenty years on, we share their hope that the authorities, both here and Stateside, will take action, so that the unrepentant, bragging terrorist who has Malki's blood on her hands will soon be back behind bars, where she belongs.

The same AJN edition carried this front-page article by senior journalist Peter Kohn:

Still seeking justice for Malki Roth

ON the 20th of Av this year (July 29), Arnold and Frimet Roth visited the Israeli grave of Malki Roth and recited Kaddish. It was their daughter’s yahrzeit – 20 years after the Australian-born teenager was murdered in a Palestinian terrorist attack at a Jerusalem pizzeria, along with 15 others, including seven children.

As seen on news-stands across

Australia this week

“Life was heavy,” Malki’s father told The AJN this week, reflecting on the yahrzeit. “You’re missing somebody desperately and feel awful about the fact that she’s not part of your life.”

But this Monday, August 9, the secular anniversary of Malki’s killing, Roth was back on Zoom and on the phone continuing his relentless campaign to see Ahlam Tamimi, the mastermind of the attack, extradited from Jordan to the US. “The ninth of August … that’s all about justice,” he stated.

Tamimi had picked out the Sbarro pizzeria targeted by her and another bomber on August 9, 2001, her accomplice dying in the attack. Tamimi left the scene disguised as a tourist, later professing her glee as the ever-rising death toll was reported.

Although sentenced in Israel to 16 consecutive life terms, she was exchanged in a 2011 prisoner swap to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity. She continues to be feted as a media celebrity in Jordan, and, according to Roth, she recently added a regular newspaper column to her stint as a Jordanian TV show host.

In the US, she faces charges relating to the death of two American citizens – Malki, who held dual citizenship, being one of them – and an extradition request was issued in 2017.

But four years on, Roth is still battling three governments to get Tamimi extradited.

For years, the US had maintained its hands were tied because Jordan had not ratified its extradition treaty, a position stated by a Jordanian court in 2017. However, in 2019, Roth learned from an American official that Jordan had indeed ratified the treaty as far back as 1995.

Last year, under US freedom-of-information laws, he even received an archived letter from Jordan’s former monarch King Hussein to the US State Department confirming that fact. He is hopeful this legal development will provide a much needed stepping stone.

Desperate for the Australian government to weigh in, Roth’s entreaties to Malcolm Turnbull when he was PM did not bear fruit. Approaches to Prime Minister Scott Morrison last year were referred to Foreign Minister Marise Payne, whose office cited constitutional problems in Jordan with extraditing its nationals, an assertion Roth rejects because oddly “it goes beyond what the Jordanians say”.

In Israel meanwhile, Roth says his fight to have Tamimi extradited to the US has been “betrayed by a chain of Netanyahu governments and, so far at least, by the new government. Of course, Israel could do something. But Israel has no charges against this woman. Israel has washed its hands of the case.”

Roth’s growing perception is that justice for Malki has become expendable to higher policy priorities in Jerusalem, Washington and Canberra.

“There’s a lot of group-think going on – among Israelis, among Americans, among media people,” he said, describing Tamimi as “the most wanted female fugitive alive today”.

The Roths maintain their ties to the families of other victims of the Sbarro bombing, particularly to a victim who remains “in a vegetative state”, he said.

Arnold remains honorary chair of the Malki Foundation, established in his daughter’s memory to support children with disabilities. Malki had been a caring, loving companion to her severely disabled younger sister and others with special needs.

“A 15-year-old girl who had a legacy – it’s unbelievable, but she did,” exclaimed Roth. “She was so good, so empathetic, so involved in making the world better for children with special needs.”

This blog isn't a memorial to our daughter. That function belongs to the website of the Malki Foundation (www.kerenmalki.org). We hope you will visit it.

In the context of terrorism and the worldwide efforts to defeat it, we write here at the site you are now visiting about our efforts to bring Malki's killers to justice - in particular Ahlam Tamimi. the Jordanian orchestrator of the massacre at Sbarro twenty years ago. 

Tamimi, now 41 years old and a celebrity in the Arab world, lives free and famous in her homeland despite being the world's most woman female fugitive with a $5M reward issued by the US State Department for her capture and conviction. 

One valuable way to give us your support is to sign our petition at change.org/ExtraditeTamimi

30-Apr-20 The Holocaust and our family

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

Text:

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

And then this:

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

— Arnold Roth (@arnoldroth) April 29, 2020

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

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

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

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

As Arnold wrote to our family yesterday:

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

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

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

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

This is how he met and then married Gucia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10-Nov-18: In Melbourne, the stabber is called "lone wolf" but with connections to Islamic State

Image Source: Video capture

I am traveling [this is Arnold Roth] and am spending a few days in Melbourne, Australia.

Here's a summary of the terrorist attack that turned the downtown area here into a murder scene during this past Friday afternoon's peak hour.

• A man drove his utility vehicle - a Holden Rodeo - onto the sidewalk of the central business district's Bourke Street, near the busy corner with Swanston Street where around 4:20 pm Friday it exploded in flames. It later emerged that he had loaded it up with gas cylinders. A large explosion was evidently his plan.
• A man, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, aged about 30, exited the vehicle armed with a large knife. He attacked several pedestrians in an evidently random way, stabbing 74-year-old Sisto Malaspina. According to one Australian source, the man yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the attack "but [police] Commissioner Ashton said this had not been confirmed."
• Malaspina is the well-known co-owner of Pellegrini's Espresso Bar, a Melbourne icon. 
• Two other men were next: Rodney Patterson, 58, suffered head injuries; a male security guard aged 24 is injured in the neck, evidently from being stabbed. Both of them are in stable condition as of Saturday night as we write this.
• Transit police arrived at the scene. The attacker punched one of them through the window of their vehicle.Many more police quickly arrived as the two transit police engaged with the attacker. The knifer then lunged at them with his weapon. A bystander tried to assist police by ramming a shopping trolley between them and the suspect.
• At about this point, a police officer fired at the attacker. He was hit in the chest and fell to the ground. He was rushed to hospital in critical condition and later died.
• In the words of The Age, a Melbourne daily, "Police have said it was a lone-person terror attack, and that the threat has been mitigated."
• All streets in the vicinity remained closed to traffic and pedestrians until 8 on Saturday morning as police examined the attack scene.
• The knifer, a child migrant who arrived in Australia with his parents from Somalia and now dead, is widely described tonight as "known to counter terrorism agencies... and 
  known to have radical views
  ... 
  His passport was seized in 2015  when he made plans to travel to Syria". Though he "had links" to ISIS, he was "not actively monitored". 
• Australia's national broadcaster, ABC, reported that "his family is well known and respected within the Somali community in Melbourne."
• They attended the Virgin Mary Mosque in Hoppers Crossing, west of Melbourne.
• His wife, parents and siblings have been questioned by police in the past day and his home raided and combed for evidence.
• The Age again: "The police have been given the green light for the first time to use preventative detention, where they may detain terror suspects for four days without a court order."

Lots of questions to be answered here.

28-Nov-17: In Melbourne, a would-be terrorist shooter is in police hands

Image Source

In Australia, there's a breaking story about major terrorism thwarted by alert police action. This report comes from Australia's ABC Online:

A man has faced court charged with terrorism offences after allegedly trying to get a gun and plotting to "shoot as many people as he could" on New Year's Eve. Ali Khalif Shire Ali, 20, from Werribee, was arrested at a home in Melbourne's south-west just before 3:00 pm on Monday. He appeared before Melbourne Magistrates' Court this afternoon charged with preparing to commit a terrorist attack and gathering documents to facilitate a terrorist act. He was described by police as one of their "high persons of interest", and the charges relate to actions Mr Ali took between March and April this year, and in June. Earlier, Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton said they believed Mr Ali was trying to get an automatic rifle to "shoot and kill as many people as he could" around Federation Square, in Melbourne's CBD [Central Business District], during New Year's Eve celebrations. Police said they moved in today because he had been having face-to-face meetings about getting a gun. Mr Ali, who police said was connected to other extremists, did not manage to obtain one, Deputy Commissioner Patton said.
Federation Square is one of the most popular spots in Melbourne to bring in the new year. Mr Ali is an Australian citizen with Somalian parents.

Another source, Melbourne Herald-Sun, describes him as "born in Australia to Somalian parents" who has lived in Victoria (the state of which Melbourne is the capital) all his life, and whose "extremist behaviour gradually escalated over time". There's something vaguely familiar about the newspaper's recounting of the accused's ordinariness:

The young man attends prayer regularly with his family at Virgin Mary [sic] mosque in Werribee. Worshippers described the family as decent members of the community and they had not noticed anything suspicious about his behaviour... The suspect’s boss Warsame Hassan said he had been working at his Footscray computer business part-time for about three months to learn new skills and had not shown any signs of radicalisation. Mr Hassan said the young man often asked to use a computer in the back of the store and usually explained that it was to sell and buy on website eBay. He had not shown any worrying behaviour, Mr Hassan said. “If I had (noticed any) then I would have told the police,” he said. “It’s very sad, it’s a shock. "He is a very quiet guy,” said Mr Hassan. “This is an absolute shock.” He said he had not been to work for about a fortnight. Detectives raided the business yesterday afternoon and seized a computer which had been used by the suspect. [Melbourne Herald-Sun, today]

The local Somali community is worried:

Somali youth leaders have condemned Mr Ali’s alleged actions. “I’m here to reassure the Australian wider community that as Australian Somalis we obviously are shocked ourselves,” Ahmed Dini said. “We want to stand together and we want to make sure that these actions never take place.” The radicalisation of disenfranchised youth was a “global threat”, the youth leaders said at a press conference today, and high unemployment and lack of education could make Australia’s Somalian youth particularly vulnerable. Mr Dini said global terror groups had easy access to youth through the internet. “When some young person excludes themselves from society... they become friends with the internet and you can find a lot of dark things on the internet,” Mr Dini said. “We’re calling upon government and also our friends in the Australian community ... help us, support us in making sure that we do what ever we can to build the capacity of our youth.” [Melbourne Herald-Sun, today]

Dini is not described any further in the article. We found these background details.

Somalis have been immigrating to Australia in significant numbers since the early 1990s in the wake of the outbreak of civil war in their country. About 80 per cent arrived under Australia's Refugee and Special Humanitarian Program. Most live in Melbourne's suburbs. A 2016 source says they number two to three thousand.

03-May-16: Impossibly painful loss and those who survived: Remembering the Holocaust

Melbourne, Australia, where we lived from soon after we married until August 1988 when we moved in Israel, is frequently said to have one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors per capita of any community outside of Israel.

Jewish Care, the Victorian Jewish community's welfare arm, has created and now begun showing this short film, focusing on the recollections of about a dozen quite elderly Melbourne Jews who survived and rebuilt their lives Down Under, as a tribute to the imperative that we never forget.

Video clip from Jewish Care, Melbourne, Australia - 16 minutes

For viewers who are not made of rock, it may be moving in the extreme to see how, confronted with recollections of the terrible losses they suffered almost eighty years ago, the men and women speaking into the camera relive the reality and the extreme trauma in ways that remind us how such tragic events are never forgotten by those who suffered them.

These people were once young, once had bright futures, once had loving relationships with parents, lovers, siblings, spouses, friends. We don't possess lexicons rich enough to capture what it must have felt like to be part of the uniquely cruel process that forever and in unimaginably cruel ways took all these relationships and experiences away from them forever.

We are left to recite the dry facts: that between 1933 and 1945, the German government led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party carried out the systematic persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews. This genocide is now known as the Holocaust. All we, the survivors and children and grandchildren of the survivors, can and must do, is remember.

The internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, a date selected because it marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In Hebrew, Holocaust Remembrance Day is called Yom HaShoah. This year it starts tomorrow evening, Wednesday, May 4 and ends the following evening.

24-Mar-16: Unbearable questions: A Purim meditation

It's Purim today everywhere in the world except where we live, Jerusalem. (Jerusalem marks Purim a day later than everywhere else, which this year means Thursday night and Friday.) 

The short essay below was first published on March 19, 2005 on the Aish website. We have reposted it here a couple of times since then.

Age Fifteen 

Arnold Roth | Fifteen is the number that conceals God's name, and is the mysterious turning point for three generations of one family.

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

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

1967: Digging trenches at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel in the very
tense days before the outbreak of the 
Six Day War [Image Source]

The Six Day War happened when I was 15. The weeks of rising tension leading up to it left an indelible mark on me: the grainy television images of Egyptian and Syrian troops on the march; Nasser's strident speeches and unilateral blockade of the sea lanes to Eilat; the massing of Egyptian forces on Israel's Sinai border and of the Syrians on the Golan frontier; U Thant's disgraceful capitulation in removing UN peace-keeping forces from Sinai precisely when they were most needed. And the blood-curdling threats of one after another of the Arab dictators and monarchs: "The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified... This is our opportunity to erase the ignominy which has been with us since 1948... Our goal is clear -- to wipe Israel off the map."

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

My mother grew up near Lodz in a town located close enough to the Polish/German frontier to have been overrun by Nazi forces on the first day of the war. Among the men rounded up by the invaders on that September day was her father, the grandfather whose name I was given. As a father myself, I have to breathe deeply in calling to mind the image of my mother throwing herself at the feet of a German soldier, begging, screaming for her father's life to be spared.

Our daughter Malki z"l and her grandmother
Genia visiting from Melbourne

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feige z"l on the left, and her great-niece Malki z"l

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

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

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

Arafat's intifada war against Israel's civilian population broke out around the time we received those precious pages. From the diary she kept, it's evident that the near-daily toll of injuries and deaths weighed heavily on Malki's mind. She writes of having to leave her classroom to weep in privacy upon learning of another terror attack... and another and another. We, her parents and siblings, were unaware of the depth of her empathy for the victims of the war raging in her precious land. The turmoil and pain, to Malki, were deeply personal. Though born in Australia, she had lived in Jerusalem since age two. She felt deeply connected to Jewish history.

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

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

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

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

Hamantashen, a traditional Purim delicacy

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

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

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

Here in Jerusalem, a day later than almost everywhere else in the world, Purim is marked on the 15th day of Adar. Jewish calendar dates are written using a simple alphanumeric code: alef is one, bet is two and so on. But longstanding tradition is to avoid the straightforward way of writing the number 15. You would expect it to be yud-heh (lit: ten-five); however these two letters happen to form the first half of God's name and are accorded special treatment and respect.

Accordingly, 15 is written as tet-vav: nine-six. God's Name, as it were, is hidden within the number 15.

Purim is odd in another way: the name of God is completely absent from Megillat Esther [the Book of Esther]. Does this mean the victory of the Jews over their oppressor happened without His involvement? Jewish tradition answers with a firm 'no'. God's role was crucial, but our ability to make sense of how and why He acts is limited, inadequate.

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

Our daughter Malki's memory is honored by the Malki Foundation, a well-run charity that supports families wanting to provide their severely disabled child with quality home care. More information at www.malkifoundation.org as well as at the Malki Foundation blog.

15-Feb-16: Weaponizing of Pal Arab children goes on as major news media pretend not to see

"Israel shoots dead..." is the entire message
Today's Melbourne Age [source]

A tragedy is being made worse by those who report it. Or better: fail to accurately report it.

Those of us following with horror the ongoing and escalating weaponization of children by the Palestinian Arab leadership will not be surprised to find corners of the mainstream media for whom the telling of the events entails a reflexive laying of principal blame at the feet of the Israelis.

Reuters, for instance.

Here [link] is how a syndicated report they issued on Sunday night [link] is being megaphoned via news channels across the global news landscape today. It's their take on the violence and bloodletting we reported here yesterday ["15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem", and "14-Feb-16: Sunday bloody Sunday"]. But at a deeper and more worrying level, it's an instance of agit-prop packaged up to advance a shallow, misleading and eventually dangerous re-telling of the Palestinian Arab descent into self-destruction.

Reuters professional editors and reporters - along with most of the editors at the news channels who syndicate their stories - manage not to even notice (or pretend not to) how most of yesterday's Arab-on-Israeli shootings and stabbings were done by children. The words child and children are completely absent. This takes determination and, to an extent, talent.

By looking away from the real story - the indoctrination of yet another generation of hope-deprived youngsters and equipping them with the zeal and self-negation that it takes to kill and be killed - ensures more deaths and injuries of children in the days to come. The toll is already far too great.

Click for some of our previous posts about the astonishing ways Pal Arab society relates to children's lives - not only its own, as we as bereaved parents of a murdered child know, but especially its own.

How great if the Reuters people would take to heart some words we quoted here a few months back [20-Oct-15: Children and what a soulless society can do to them]. An acclaimed leader of oppressed people who understood how this works said:

 "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, addressing the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, South Africa, May 8, 1995 [source]

17-Jun-15: In Australia, heightened security concerns for Melbourne's Jews

A suspicious vehicle triggered a security scramble near one of
Melbourne's Jewish schools in August 2014 [Image Source]

In Melbourne [for background, see our post from yesterday "16-Jun-15: Australians, troubled by Islamist terror in their midst, are more worried than they have been for years"], the arm of the Jewish community that stays watchful for signs of radical extremism (alternatively insert your preferred euphemism) has issued an alert today:

The Community Security Group (CSG) announced today that there is new and current intelligence which indicated that a radicalised person may attack the Melbourne Jewish community. “No particular facility or organisation has been identified and no particular timeframe has been specified,” CSG said in a letter to key communal organisations today. The letter said that CSG enacted its internal escalation plan last week and that the information has been conveyed to Victoria Police and other Australian security agencies. CSG “is working in collaboration with those organisations to verify its authenticity and respond accordingly.” CSG is calling on the community to take their own safety measures and to report any form of suspicious activity to the 24/7 CSG hotline – 1300 000 274. [Australian Jewish News, today]

(There's additional background at the excellent Jwire news site.)

Melbourne is generally reckoned to be home to about 60,000 Jews, making it the largest of Australia's Jewish communities. The CSG is manned by trained volunteers.

Amid what the Melbourne Age called "heightened terror concerns" and the need to "bolster security at schools, offices and religious buildings", Melbourne's Beth Weizmann Community Centre received a substantial government grant in May 2015 to enable security improvements, including a purpose-built security wall "to make the building bomb-resistant."

Sign of the times.

16-Jun-15: Australians, troubled by Islamist terror in their midst, are more worried than they have been for years

Australians, when we were growing up there, generally had a sense of being distant from the rest of the world and its problems. It felt a safe place to be. A famous post-apocalyptic novel ["On the Beach", Neville Shute] popular in the late fifties and later the basis for a Hollywood movie depicted a world ravaged by nuclear destruction - and Melbourne the last remaining somewhat-untouched (temporary) haven.

No longer.

Findings based on data collected in a major annual survey has found record levels of insecurity among Australians. Key points from the annual Lowy Institute for International Policy report, released today are that, first, they identify the lowest feeling of safety among Australians, and the sharpest decline in optimism about the nation’s economic performance in the world, in the 11-year history of the poll. A very significant majority (69%) sees Islamic State as a high risk to Australia's security. About the same proportion, 69%, supports Australia’s military participation in Iraq. But at the same time, Australians appear to understand how complex this process is, since only 20% think taking these steps will make their country safe from terrorism in the future.

The authors at Lowy provide some interpretation of the responses received to the questions posed to some 1,200 Australian respondents:

• [I]n 2015... the world seems to be a bleak place to many Australians. Fewer Australians feel safe now that any any time during our 11-year polling history. 
• Only 24% of Australian adults say they feel 'very safe' this year, 18 points down from the 42% who felt very safe when we last asked them in 2010.
• It appears the threat of terrorism is being keenly felt here, after the Martin Place siege late last year [we blogged about that in December 2014 and in January 2015] and the gruesome scenes and confronting news coming out of Iraq and Syria. 
• Terrorism-related risks rank first, second and third out of eight potential risks to Australia's security in the next ten years, with 69% of Australians rating 'the emergence of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria' as a high risk to our security (the highest-ranked risk), and majorities seeing 'terrorist attacks on Australians overseas' and 'home-grown terrorism in Australia' as high risk...
• [Most Australians] (69%) support Australia's participation in military action against Islamic State in Iraq (air strikes and training and support to Iraqi forces), even though a majority believe that such participation increases the risk of terrorism to Australia now, and only 20% say it makes us safer from terrorism in the future.

Inevitably (our view - not Lowy's) some part of the growing anxiety comes from Australians seeing their neighbours' children embracing Islamist values and moving heaven and earth to personally become part of the current Arab-on-Arab bloodbath convulsing vast swathes of the Middle East. 

Australian-born jihadist father, his Australian-born son,
the severed heads that so amuse them, and the question
on the minds of a majority of Australians [Image Source]

For instance, here is part of a May 29, 2015 radio interview given by Assistant Commissioner Tracy Linford of the Victoria Police, and head of its Intelligence & Covert Support Command (Melbourne is the capital of the state of Victoria). She was addressing reports prominently broadcast across Australia's news media two weeks ago (like this one: "More than a dozen young women from Melbourne flee to conflict zones to support Islamic State militants, and in some cases become jihadi brides"]: 

You know, it's difficult for us to collect information from overseas and we have to rely either partner agencies or alternatively you know, what families feed us from their contact with their children who are now overseas so it is hard for us to quantify. I do suspect that there's more than 12 that have actually gone over to support other, you know, jihadi fighters within ISIS but we're not quite sure.
Interviewer: And what is the lure?
Well, I think there's a romanticised view for some young women and if I could press the point that the vast majority of the women that we know who have travelled are very young, you know, they're 18 to 20 years of age.
And I think they're given some sort of romanticised view that, you know, they'll go over there and life will be really good for them, that they will be you know, put on a pedestal, that they're there to help create or help establish the caliphate over there, bear and raise jihadi children, that they'll be respected as women and that their lifestyle will be good.
The reality is that the information we're getting back from overseas is that the lifestyle is not so good at all. [Source: ABC Radio, May 29, 2015]

Sydney's Daily Telegraph ["Full list of Aussie jihadis fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq", April 16, 2015] asserted that ISIS, the self-styled caliphate occupying parts of Syria and Iraq, had emerged as 

a magnet for disillusioned Australian Muslim teenagers consuming hate sermons on their laptops and mobile phones... The Australian fighters are seen as trophies by their jihadi masters – manipulated and used by the IS propaganda machine to attract new supporters. Bankstown apprentice butcher Abdullah Elmir – known as the “Ginger Jihadi” because of his pale-skin and hair colour – has appeared in two videos... The list of Sydney’s jihadists includes a champion boxer, four brothers, a convicted terrorist and standover man, university and high school students, a butcher’s apprentice, a former soldier, street preachers, and a private school girl. Of those who successfully made it to Syria, linking up with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra, almost nine in 10 were young males with an average age of 23... [N]ine impressionable young Muslims from Sydney’s south-west have been killed, blinded by terror recruiters and a call to arms via Twitter, Facebook and Ask.fm. Other Sydney jihadists, who haven’t been identified, are also believed to have been sent to their death... Former NSW Police counter terrorism boss Peter Dein told the dailytelegraph.com.au last year that south-west Sydney had become a hotspot for radical recruitment... [Daily Telegraph, April 16, 2015]

How surprising is all of this? According to one authoritative source - quite:

The London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence reports that between 100 and 250 Australians have joined Sunni militants in Iraq and Syria. Given Australia's vast distance from the region and its population of just 24 million, it is a remarkable number. The center estimates that about 100 fighters came from the United States, which has more than 13 times as many people as Australia... [Business Insider, March 23, 2015]

What ought the Australian authorities to do? Simple solutions are, inevitably, in short supply. But there are some bold criticisms as well as some creative suggestions in a short opinion piece published, again, by the Lowy Institute, just a few weeks ago. Entitled "Muslim radicalisation: Why Australia's strategy is failing, and how to fix it", it's authored by a Pakistani scholar with degrees from Cambridge, George Washington University and Oxford:

The Australian Government has spent millions since the London bombings of 2005 on programs and projects to counter radicalism in Australia's Muslim population, yet the threat appears to be growing. What went wrong? Well, frankly, everything — from the basic premise of what leads and drives radicalisation, to what contains and neutralises it. The fundamental flaw in the Government's counter-radicalisation policy is that it has relied heavily on Muslim community leaders to understand the roots of radicalisation. Not only are the Muslim community leaders no experts on the subject of radicalisation, but they are are also distant from the younger generation of Muslims who undergo an identity crisis triggered internally by Australian society (which functions contrary to their beliefs) and externally by sophisticated propaganda which they digest over social media... The truth is, in Australia and other Western countries, radicalisation of Muslims starts in the home, often unconsciously. Muslim parents in Western societies who want to raise their kids with Islamic ethics and morals go overboard, feeding manipulated Islamic teachings they deem suitable to keep their children 'on track'. But such teachings clash directly with what young Muslims are exposed to at school and in public places. Kids either end up living two different lives or get strangled by an identity crisis... countering radicalisation may need a non-religious and social strategy that goes down to the household level to tackle the identity crisis that gives rise to radicalism...

Addressing the problem within the home. Sounds to us like a serious basis for a different kind of approach.

09-May-15: Melbourne, Australia: Bright, ambitious, kind, gentle teen and a Mother's Day terror plot

Heavily-armed state and Federal police swoop onto the suspect's
two-storey home on Clare Boulevard in northern Melbourne's Greenvale
neighbourhood Friday [Image Source]

In Melbourne, Australia, a fresh round of police raids on Friday and a 17 year old is at the heart of the action.

People are asking themselves - yet again - how the suspicion of the security authorities could possibly have fallen on a teenage boy "from a successful migrant family", a "bright teen" with "ambitions to follow his father into medicine and one day work together".

As the news channels are reporting now, it's another instance of a terrorist bombing attack foiled before anyone was hurt. And with live explosives being detonated (by police) in the streets of a leafy Melbourne suburb.

The outline below, and the collection of quoted passages in the opening para, comes from "Mother’s Day bomb plot: Teen allegedly blocked family and friends from Facebook posts",  Herald-Sun (Melbourne), May 10, 2015:

To his family the teenager charged with allegedly plotting to launch a bombing terrorist attack was a quiet and humble boy most comfortable at home. Until recently, it might have been hard to believe the 17-year-old from a successful migrant family — originating from Syria — could be suspected of involvement in such an alleged plot.
“He is kind, gentle and softly spoken. He never raises his voice,” his 21-year-old sister told the Sunday Herald Sun.
Still shocked after dozens of counterterrorism police officers swooped as his mother was reversing out of the driveway on Friday afternoon, his family struggled to understand why officers suspected the teen. But online posts show his persona morphs from the shy and softly spoken boy the family knows to a passionate ideologue who espouses a strict interpretation of Islam. He claims on his Facebook page Muslims should hate the “kafir” (unbelievers) and that those from the Shi’ite sect of the religion “were not human”. The boy had blocked his parents and extended family from viewing the comments. But his sister dismissed the posts as the writing of an emotional teen, troubled by what is happening in his father’s homeland. She said the family had lost relatives in Syria and the three-year civil war was a very emotional topic. She said it was unlikely her brother had come under the influence of others as he had few friends, outside the family... His sister said the bright teen had ambitions to follow his father into medicine and one day work together. The teen’s father is a doctor, who was born in Syria... The boy’s family said the teen did not have an income, a passport or a bank account — and any money he received he borrowed from his father. He is reliant on his mother or sister for lifts — ­either to his mosque or school — and it was when they were on the way to a mosque that the Special Operations Group with weapons raised pounced, the family said. His mother first thought the police were “some type of terrorist group”. The distressed woman, who cannot be named, said she thought police shot at her car as she backed out of the driveway, but police sources said the bangs were flash charges, thrown beneath the car to distract the teen. “I was reversing, they started shooting into the tyres, around the car ... five or six times, it was just shooting then I saw smoke,” she told the Sunday Herald Sun through her daughter interpreting. “I thought I was being shot at, I thought I was going to be killed.”
With automatic weapons drawn, police pulled the 17-year-old from the car and yelled at his mother to get out, the family said. Victoria Police yesterday said no guns were discharged but would not comment further on the tactics employed during the raid.
The boy’s sister, who watched the arrest unfold from the house, rushed outside but she said she was confronted by three police with drawn guns who yelled “do not move”. The sister screamed to her friend to “call the cops” but she said the armed men answered back “we are the cops”.Later a police officer told the family they had been concerned about what the teenager had been posting about “Islam online”.
As the family was evacuated and the bomb squad police began to search the home, they remained confident nothing would be found. Within hours police had found “devices”, which were detonated in a controlled explosion. Yesterday morning, the family was unaware the boy had been charged overnight with planning to commit a terrorist act and possessing things connected with a terrorist act...

From the national radio network ABC ["Teen charged with terrorism offences after Melbourne police raids"] there additional details. It's being called "an imminent threat to the community".  Says Mike Phelan, AFP Deputy Commissioner: "[L]et me tell you, something was going to happen. As a result of Victoria Police and AFP interception yesterday, some Victorians are going to be alive because of it. Had we not intervened, there was a real threat of action being taken."

Comfortable, quiet Melbourne suburbia: The scene
of Friday's police raid [Image Source]

And these words of advice from Victoria Police Acting Deputy Commissioner Robert Hill:

He urged family and friends to be aware of what young people were doing, particularly on social media. “The solution lies with mums and dads, brothers and sisters, making observations of behaviours that are somewhat strange and not normal,” he said. “This is a challenge for law enforcement agencies not only in Victoria, around Australia, but across the western world. “We have a new challenge where we have young people, young people that are being influenced by radical thinking, something that we’re dealing with as a law enforcement body, with government but more importantly with community.”

The explosives, according to one source, were packed into "crude pipe bombs" but that's small comfort:

"They were very rudimentary but that doesn't really matter because at the end of the day an explosion is an explosion," [Deputy head of Australian Federal Police, quoted here]

AFP quotes authorities in Australia describing this as a Mothers Day terror plot though at this stage it's far from clear when an attack was actually going to happen and which targets were intended. (In Australia, Mothers Day is marked tomorrow, Sunday.)

Just four weeks ago, another dramatic police raid involving 200 heavily armed officers stormed properties in Melbourne's southeast over what was said to be an Islamic State-inspired terror plot planned for Anzac Day, Australia's national day - April 25. In that intercept. three males all aged under 20 were arrested and charged with serious criminal offences including the planning of a terror act and possessing prohibited weapons. We provided some background here ["30-Apr-15: Militants, insurgents and activists: a global terror snapshot"].

It must be jarring for Australians to adjust to the emerging reality of actual, physical terrorism, including bombs and high-velocity shooting devices, in the midst of their comfortable, live-and-let-live communities. What did they ever do to deserve this?, many of them seem to be wondering out loud.

Just as we do about our own lives here in Jerusalem.

30-Apr-15: Militants, insurgents and activists: a global terror snapshot

There's more going on in this ongoing war waged by men and women with terror on their minds than most people realize. The reports, extracted below more or less at random, all arose in the past 24 hours.

German police examine what they found after the
arrests last night [Image Source]

German police prevent terror attack, paper reports | Deutsche Welle today

German police have detained a married couple suspected of planning a terrorist attack, according to a media report. Authorities found a pipe bomb and weapons, and one of the suspects allegedly had contact with al Qaeda. The two suspects, identified as Halil and Senay D, were arrested overnight in Oberursel near Frankfurt, Die Welt newspaper reported Thursday. While searching the suspects' apartment, police found a pipe bomb, explosives, a rifle and ammunition, as well as tools that can be used to detonate a bomb, the paper said on its webpage. The suspects had been put under police surveillance several weeks ago, after buying unusually large quantities of chemicals of the type which other terror groups in Germany had previously used to make explosives. The couple reportedly used false names during the transaction. Recently, Halil D. was observed surveying an area around Oberursel, near the path of a bicycle race scheduled for May 1. This prompted the police to arrest both him and his wife in order to avoid endangering participants and the audience, according to Die Welt. The investigators also believe that Halil is connected to the al Qaeda terror network and Islamist groups in Frankfurt, the newspaper reported. The police confirmed that the arrests have been made and that more places are being searched, but refused to comment on the background. A news conference is scheduled for later Thursday.

Islam, convicted yesterday [Image Source]

Teenager Kazi Islam found guilty of terror grooming | BBC yesterday

Kazi Islam was said to have used "flattery and threats" in exchanges on social media to try to persuade Harry Thomas to kill two soldiers and buy ingredients for a pipe bomb. Islam, 18, of Newham, east London, was found guilty at the Old Bailey of preparing to commit acts of terrorism.
He claimed he was conducting research... The trial was told Islam befriended the then 19-year-old Mr Thomas in October 2013 - five months after Fusilier Rigby was attacked in the street near Woolwich Barracks - after meeting him the previous year on an IT course at college... Speaking to the BBC, Mr Thomas, who has learning difficulties, described Islam as a "very, very manipulative person" but said he had no intention of carrying out his requests. He said: "He makes out he's this really kind person because that's how he comes across at first but deep inside he's evil." Mr Thomas added: "He's not scared to go to prison, he told me that. And he says he'll end up in a better place for the crimes he's committed. He said his God will look after him and think he's done a really good thing." Commander Richard Walton, head of the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command, said: "We continue to appeal to anyone who may have knowledge of people with similar intentions. The earliest we can intervene to prevent terrorism the better. We also remind the public that there is currently a need to protect vulnerable or impressionable adults or children from this brand of Islamic extremism." The plot was said to have been unwittingly sabotaged by Mr Thomas, who failed to buy any of the right ingredients for a bomb and revealed what was going on to "a few friends"... While the court heard he had also downloaded a document on explosives himself, Islam said his interest in extremism was "purely for research purposes and to understand the political side of my religion".

Third accused Melbourne terror teenager denied bail over weapons charges | Channel 9 News (Australia) today

Mehran Azami has appeared in Melbourne court after being accused of importing 200 weapons for an alleged Anzac Day terror plot. A third teen has been charged with terror offences relating to the alleged Anzac Day attack plot foiled by police in Melbourne earlier this month... He appeared at Melbourne Magistrates Court this afternoon accused of importing 200 weapons he had ordered online from China. Some of the weapons were intercepted by Australia Post and Customs, however other items are still in the community with authorities keen to retrieve them. Included in the list of outstanding weapons are AK47 tactical knives, batons, butterfly knives, trench knives, knuckle dusters and iPhone tasers... The judge refused bail and Azami will reappear in court in July. Police allege Azami was supplying the weapons to the two teens accused of plotting the Anzac Day attack in Melbourne,..

Anzac Day, Australia's national day of remembering the fallen of its wars, and marking the 100th anniversary of the catastrophic military assault on Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915, was marked this past Saturday, April 25. Two Melbourne men in their late teens were arrested a week before Anzac Day and charged with conspiracy to commit acts done in preparation for a terrorist attack that Australian news sources called "shockingly similar" to the 2013 murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in south-east London [our post from then is here: "24-May-13: Allegedly slaughtering people on the streets of London, and what we know about it"]. Media reports (including the Melbourne Age) provided details that have not yet been put in front of the courts, including these:

• The plot was part-payback for the death of a Moslem teenager Abdul Numan Haider, shot dead last September after stabbing two anti-terror police officers in Melbourne. For background, see our post: "24-Sep-14: More on the Islamist knifing attack on police in Melbourne".
• Some of the young men arrested in the pre-dawn counter-terrorism raids on April 18, 2015 "were with Haider before he attacked two officers with a knife" and had "discussed opening fire at one or more Anzac Day events in south-east Melbourne suburbs, possibly at a local RSL march". RSL is Australia's major veteran's organization.
• The plot also involved running down a police officer and killing him with a knife. Then taking the officer's gun and going on a "shooting rampage in an Islamic State-inspired attack... that would have ended in their deaths",

Now it appears there is a British co-conspirator, and he is just fourteen years old:

Anzac Day terror attack plot: UK police charge 14yo boy with inciting terrorism overseas | Australian Broadcasting Corp | April 24, 2015

British prosecutors have charged a 14-year-old boy with inciting an alleged plot to carry out a beheading and attack a parade in Australia on Anzac Day... Prosecutors referred to a "terrorism plot", saying that the boy had incited someone "to carry out an attack at an Anzac parade in Australia with the aim of killing and/or causing serious injury to people". "The second allegation is that on 18 March 2015, the defendant incited another person to behead someone in Australia," Ms Walsh said, adding that the prosecution would be in the "public interest"... The boy, from Blackburn in north-west England, is the youngest British person to be charged with terrorism offences. Police said he may be tried in an adult court because of the seriousness of the offences.

Sevdet Besim, 18, charged following the Anzac Day attack
raids. His father says it's a set-up [Image Source]

Anzac Day terror plot: accused Melbourne pair postpone bail bid | The Australian | Today

Two teenagers accused of plotting a terrorist attack on Anzac Day have postponed their bids for bail. Sevdet Besim and Harun Causevic, both 18, had been due to apply for bail in the Melbourne Magistrates Court today following their arrest on counterterror raids this month. Mr Besim is alleged to discussed the plot with a 14-year old British boy, who has been charged in the UK with two offences of inciting terrorism overseas.

Meanwhile the father of one of the accused terrorists, Vehid Causevic, has a comprehensive explanation:

"That is all a set-up," he said. [Source]

Six suspected militants charged over terror plot in Malaysia | PressTV Iran | Today

Malaysian security forces have charged six suspected militants for allegedly planning to carry out a series of terrorist attacks... According to court documents, the militants, aged between 25 and 48, were charged with being "party to a conspiracy to promote terror in Malaysia..." Police sources say the group was planning a series of attacks in the country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, and in nearby Putrajaya, which houses Malaysia's federal government apparatus. The militants had been also planning to rob banks and raid police stations to obtain weapons... Malaysian authorities are worried that the ISIL terrorist group is gaining an increasing number of recruits and supporters in the country. The government has identified nearly 70 of its nationals who have joined ISIL in Syria and Iraq, and five who have been killed while participating in the group’s terrorist activities. Malaysian security sources say another 120 people, including men and women, with suspected links to the ISIL are being kept in custody. 

Sunderland man Mohammed Kahar in court over 10 terror offences | BBC | April 29, 2015

A man from Sunderland has appeared in court charged with terrorism offences, including one relating to Syria. Mohammed Kahar of Burnville Road, faces 10 charges, including disseminating terrorist publications, preparing a terrorist act and terrorist financing. Westminster Magistrates' Court heard he was allegedly caught with extremist material including a document called 44 Ways To Serve And Participate In Jihad. The 37-year-old was remanded in custody to appear at the Old Bailey on 14 May. He did not enter any pleas.

Islamist Fighters Seize Southern Syria Crossing | Reuters | Today

The hardline Ahrar al-Sham group in Syria and other insurgents seized a crossing in the southwest frontier area near Israel on Thursday from a small group of rival Islamist fighters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. If confirmed, the capture would represent a further advance for Ahrar al-Sham, one of the main jihadist groups in Syria alongside Islamic State and al Qaeda's Syria wing Nusra Front... The Observatory said Ahrar al-Sham and allied fighters took the crossing in Syria's southern Quinetra province from a group called Army of Jihad, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State. Control of the crossing has passed between several insurgent groups, who have occasionally worked together but have also fought each other in Syria's chaotic conflict. The area is sensitive due to its proximity to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights... 

As we said, a random selection. The real problem? Tomorrow is another day.