04-Oct-20: The Sbarro bomber's husband has been forced to leave Jordan: A snapshot of developments

Nizar Tamimi giving an interview in his Amman home

This past Thursday, reports emanating initially from Tamimi clan sources and then later via the Arabic media in Jordan said the husband of Ahlam Tamimi, the admitted bomber of the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in 2001, has suddenly been expelled from Jordan. 

He appears - that's what reports are saying - to be taking up residence in Qatar. But note that the government of Jordan has said precisely not one word. And no reports of him actually being in Qatar have emerged yet. There's room to be cautious in interpreting what's happened.

Where things appear to stand

Middle East Eye reported Friday (October 2, 2020) that 

Jordanian authorities on Thursday declared the liberated Palestinian prisoner Nizar Al-Tamimi persona non grata and asked him to leave the country, according to sources who spoke to Arabi21 news site. Nizar al-Tamimi is the husband of Ahlam al-Tamimi, who served time in Israeli prisons. Ahlam, who holds Jordanian citizenship, is wanted in the United States. Washington had previously requested her extradition, but Amman refused due to the absence of a law allowing the extradition of Jordanian citizens abroad. Her husband only has Palestinian citizenship, and is not on any wanted list by any country. A Jordanian source told Arabi21 that Nizar al-Tamimi had been renewing his residence permit every three months, but this time Jordanian authorities refused to extend his stay, and asked him to leave the country, even though his wife is a Jordanian national. The source said that Nizar left on Thursday to Doha [Qatar] despite attempts to mediate and solve the issue without having him deported. The source confirmed that “the decision to deport Nizar al-Tamimi is linked to his wife's involvement in a suicide attack against Israelis during the Second Palestinian Intifada, which prompted the US authorities to pursue her ever since”. The source also considered that “deporting Nizar al-Tamimi would cause major problems for the family, especially since his wife's departure from Jordan might threaten her safety and expose her to arrest”. The Trump administration indicated a few months ago its intention to cut off aid to Jordan as a way to pressure the kingdom’s authorities to hand over Ahlam to Washington, Arabi21 reported. In 2013, the US Department of Justice put Ahlam al-Tamimi on the FBI's most wanted terrorists list, and charged her with "conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against US nationals outside the United States". 

Nizar Tamimi, at the time a member of the Fatah terror organization and a resident of the Palestinian Arab village of Nabi Saleh ["17-Mar-13 A Little Village in the Hills and the Monsters it Spawns"] was charged in 1993 with his involvement in the murder of an Israeli student of Jewish religion, Chaim Mizrachi ["The murder of a West Bank student highlights the plight of the Jewish religious communities confronting Palestinian rule", Sarah Helm, The Independent UK, November 7, 1993]. The young Mizrachi had made the fatal mistake of buying eggs from a Palestinian Arab farmer. It's an appalling story. 

Tamimi was subsequently convicted for his part in the cruel and gruesome homicide and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two other Tamimi cousins were convicted at the same time. 

The extremely unlovely Tamimi clan

Nizar Tamimi's uncle, the prominent agitator Bassem Tamimi who was Nizar's mother's brother was initially thought, according to reports we have seen, to have been involved. (Worth noting that there is a huge degree of consanguinity - marrying within the clan - among Nabi Saleh's many Tamimis. Almost every resident of the village was born with that name, and Nabi Saleh's Tamimis routinely marry Tamimis.) 

Then after Bassem Tamimi suffered head injuries while in Israeli police custody, those homicide charges seem to have been dropped with no public explanation. They are almost never mentioned in media reports about Bassem Tamimi's otherwise quite public life. 

Bassem Tamim is also a cousin of Ahlam Tamimi, Nizar's wife. 

And he is the father of Ahed Tamimi, the previously very-high-profile young woman, often referred to as Shirley Temper in news reports ["24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey"] for her availability, from early childhood onwards, to perform on demand when the media cameras were rolling. 

Nizar Tamimi walked free in the extortionate deal Israel did with the terrorists of Hamas in 2011 to secure the freedom of a young hostage, Gilad Shalit. So did his cousin Ahlam Tamimi. And so did 1,025 additional convicted terrorists. Those two Tamimis - Nizar and Ahlam - were married in Jordan less than a year later ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"]. 

Bassem Tamimi and his family traveled to Jordan to take part in the celebrations and appear in many of the published photos of the celebrations.

This past week

The London-based Arabic Al Araby news site (October 3, 2020) - which is the source for most of what Middle East Eye published above - under the headline "Ahlam Al-Tamimi appeals to the Jordanian monarch to allow her husband to return to Amman", reports from Amman, Jordan's capital, that Ahlam Tamimi has just sent a message to Jordan's ruler, King Abdullah II. 

She asks him to allow her husband Nizar Al-Tamimi to return to Jordan and go on residing there.

Addressing the king in traditional fashion as "the father of all Jordanians", she praises him fulsomely as one who extends "hospitality for everyone who sought asylum in this country and who took refuge in it, bearing all the economic, political and social consequences... Jordan has been a pioneer in embracing me and giving a safe haven for me and my husband after we were released from the occupation prisons". 

Tamimi, regarded in some parts of the news industry as the most wanted female fugitive alive, describes the nearly eight years she has lived in Jordan after being released by Israel in the Gilad Shalit Deal as "the most beautiful days of my life". 

Then referring to the events of the past week, she declares that "we were surprised by the request that my husband leave [Jordan] quickly" causing them "the pain of separation".

The Al Araby report goes on to say by way of background that the Palestinian Prisoners and Executives Affairs Authority issued a statement on Thursday October 1, 2020, saying Jordan had refused to renew the residency of Nizar Al-Tamimi, husband of Ahlam Al-Tamimi, demanding that he leave Jordan. It says the Jordanian government and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs had failed to issue any comment on the matter. 

It mentions how "Jordan rejected the request of the American authorities to hand over the freed captive Ahlam Al-Tamimi, and the Court of Cassation at that time, the highest judicial body in Jordan, approved a decision issued by the Amman Court of Appeal, ruling not to hand Ahlam Tamimi over to US authorities."

Note: None of this includes anything from any official Jordanian source. 

Al Araby connects the expulsion of Nizar Tamimi to the statements made by newly-installed US ambassador to Jordan, Henry Wooster, who stated in May 2020, before he had been confirmed by Congress to the long vacant position of ambassador to Amman, that the United States, in the paper's words, "might suspend foreign aid to Jordan if Ahlam al-Tamimi were not handed over". 

Then it shifts into full-blown conspiracy mode:

The Tamimi case has become one of the pressure points used by Tel Aviv [sic] and Zionist lobbies [sic] pressing in the United States towards forcing Jordan not to object to Israel's plan to annex about a third of the West Bank to it and to implement the American dictation plan to liquidate the Palestinian issue known as the "Deal of the Century"...

Nizar Tamimi (r) with his mother's brother Bassem Tamimi
in October 2011 shortly after his release from an Israeli
prison cell as part of the Shalit Deal 

Quds Press International News Agency (October 3, 2020) [archived] publishes a "special statement" given to it by Ahlam Tamimi that day. The expulsion of her husband from the Hashemite Kingdom came "suddenly and without prior coordination" and "at a very sensitive time... in light of increasing American demands to extradite me to there... The deportation of my husband Nizar was met with much joy and pleasure in the Zionist newspapers." 

The husband's deportation is, she fears, "a prelude to handing her over to the American authorities." This is very wrong since, as she puts it, "it is my right for my husband to live with me on Jordanian lands with dignity just like all other Jordanian women married to non-Jordanians." 

Good luck with that.

Why now? 

Quds quotes her saying "it seems the Jordanian side is betting I will join my husband in Qatar but this is not at all possible since there is an Interpol request distributed at airports around the world for my extradition to Washington." 

The world's most sought female fugitive ["31-Jan-20: Fox News break ranks with the mainstream media on Tamimi and Jordan"] now thinks staying in Jordan is the safest option for her since "the highest Jordanian court (the Court of Appeal) made the decision not to extradite me to Washington - a strong and destined position and therefore my exit would be like someone who places himself in the lion’s mouth, exposing myself to the American danger, and therefore I will not leave Jordan ever... " 

Getting her husband back, according to Tamimi "is a right guaranteed by the constitution". 

Quds quotes the husband saying that last week "the [Jordanian] security authorities asked me to leave Jordan immediately and that their decision is final and irrevocable and would not be withdrawn under any circumstances."

Nizar and Ahlam Tamimi in their Amman apartment

Shehab News Agency (October 3, 2020) [archived] writes under the headline "MP Al-Shanti: Ahlam Al-Tamimi is an icon of the Palestinian woman revolting against the occupation", that a Gazan Palestinian Arab "parliamentarian" has denounced "the arbitrary measures" directed against the female "fighter against the Zionist occupation", calling them illegal "by all laws".

Jamila Al-Shanti, a key figure in Hamas and (according to this Wikipedia source - but there may have been another woman who had that role) the widow of arch-terrorist Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, the political head of Hamas until eliminated in 2004 by Israeli fire, says "Zionist American terrorism targets the released prisoners through assassination, re-arrest or deportation. Ahlam spent ten years in detention before her release in 2011 under the Wafaa Al-Ahrar prisoner exchange deal", a reference to the Shalit Deal.

She calls Ahlam Tamimi "a candle for the world’s women who aspire to freedom, an icon in the heart of every Palestinian and Arab woman fighter defending her right - Ahlam knows the path of resistance and will continue."

Next moves

But rhetoric doesn't have much impact on fast-moving developments and the reality is that Ahlam Tamimi's options have suddenly gotten a good deal narrower. 

It's obviously an ongoing and complicated story which, given our interest in seeing her sent to Washington to face trial there for spearheading the Sbarro pizzeria massacre, we will be following closely. And to those trying to learn something from all the moving parts and surprise twists: we follow the Arabic media fairly closely and have not yet seen a single article there which mentions the people Ahlam Tamimi killed. This is actually stunning, not in a good way. 

It's the real story here.

[UPDATE Sunday October 11, 2020: There have been many developments worth reporting in the past 72 hours. We've been flat out dealing with them behind the scenes. However we do hope to update readers of this blog in the coming 24 hours.]

30-Jul-18: Neither Ahed's gaze nor her ideas are the problem – it’s what others do with them

Monday's media focus on Ahed Tamimi was wide, attentive - and
spectacularly shallow [Image Source]

A version of the opinion piece below by Arnold Roth was published today [online here] by the Jerusalem Post. 

It was solicited, we think, to be one of the alternative voices in the context of the wide and largely depressing current news reporting around the release from prison of Ahed Tamimi on July 29, 2018.

More horror than heroism
Arnold Roth

My sweet-natured daughter Malki, brimming with empathy and generosity toward others, always with a smile on her face, was 15 when she was murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria massacre seventeen years ago this week.

The experience of losing her, of trying to rebalance my life and my family’s and of trying to make sense of the reactions of other people has shaped much of what I believe about terrorism.

We know who plotted the Sbarro barbarism. It was not Ahed Tamimi. But when her clan, the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh, get together to celebrate it as we know they do, she is an enthusiastic participant.

In a village where almost everyone is related by blood and (yes, and) marriage, Ahed is a cousin of Ahlam Tamimi in multiple ways. Ahlam now lives free in Jordan. She boasts that she chose the site for the explosion, seeking to kill as many Jewish children as possible, and planted the human bomb. Via social media, public speeches and (for 5 years) her own TV program, she urges others to follow her lead.

When Ahlam married Nizar Tamimi ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"], also a murderer from the village, a few months after both walked free in the Shalit Deal, Ahed was there to dance and gaze adoringly at the bride.

But neither her gaze nor her ideas are the problem. It’s what others do with them.

Ahed’s parents make a living from propagandizing against Israel. They fashioned and groomed Ahed ["24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey"], leveraging her blondeness, pushing her into staged conflicts with Israeli soldiers from when she was 10, deliberately putting her at real risk on a weekly basis for years, long before she had the ability to discern what was being done to her.

Though all they had to go by was mostly-staged images of her thrusting fists at Israeli soldiers, too many reporters and editors responded (and still do) with absurd comparisons to Joan of Arc and Malala.

On the day of the slapping/kicking incident that led to her facing Israeli charges, Ahed’s mother pointed one of her cameras at the girl. She told her to speak to the world. And she did. The girl’s message was angry, urging anti-Israel violence and more conflict.

Though published and promoted by advocates of the Israeli cause, what Ahed said in that clip was largely ignored. As if she had said nothing. Its harsh reality was and still is denied.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by their own society, even by their own families, is so incomprehensible to outsiders that it seems many deny its reality for that reason alone.

They deny what Ahed symbolizes too: identification with the vicious murderers in her own clan, with explosive rage, with a horrifying zealotry that brings people to push their society’s innocent children into the front lines. The Palestinian Arabs have many needs but what this girl stands for – more anger, more bitterness, more failure – delivers nothing of value to them.

They don’t hear this from the news industry - the reporters and editors who have built a podium for Ahed Tamimi and her enablers.

They don’t hear it either from their own utterly failed leadership who exploit Ahed Tamimi as another cheap diversion from the disasters they have brought on their people.

[Arnold Roth brought his family to Jerusalem from Australia 30 years ago. A lawyer and manager in Israel’s emerging technology industries, he now devotes his time to advocacy for special needs children and with his wife Frimet established the Malki Foundation in their murdered daughter’s memory.]

04-Feb-18: The embarrassing violence of Ahed Tamimi and its fig-leafers

Nariman, Bassem and Ahed Tamimi of Nabi Saleh

[Image Source]

We have more than the regular amount of interest in the in-your-face bigotry and incitement-to-extreme-violence of the loathsome Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh. We have explained why over and again in past posts.

But for anyone fresh to this blog or to us - the parents of Malki Roth - or to the news industry's sickening and highly-selective fixation with the media-centric doings of the Tamimis, we suggest to start here:

• 24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey
• 19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists
• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
• 17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

With the background in mind, think now about the stream of news articles during the past six weeks that have delivered up softball versions of Tamimi analysis, driven by yet another in a long series of reports of what are in reality self-engineered "clashes" with the IDF. 

The central player is, invariably and as always, Ahed Tamimi.

Today she's a young woman of seventeen (born January 31, 2001) who, as we sit here writing these lines, is being held behind bars in an Israeli prison while a phalanx of publicists, reporters, TV presenters and politically-active non-governmental organizations calls with rising urgency for her unconditional release. 

We leave to readers to figure out for themselves why she was arrested and whether and on what terms she ought to be let loose.

Our concern here is to cover matters that one high-profile news article after another in the past month and a half have simply ignored: what are her actual values? Where does she stand on the subject of real, physical Arab-on-Israeli violence of the lethal kind? (Given the obvious confusion about this in the media, the questions have surprisingly clear-cut answers.)

Our comments are prompted by an egregious case, the latest in a depressing series, of superficial and therefore second-rate reporting, this time from a serious source: "Meet 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, the new face of Palestinian resistance" [Derek Stoffel, Middle East Correspondent for CBC, the Canadian national broadcaster, February 4, 2018]. 

It's simply too painful to quote from. The link is there for anyone patient enough to read the same re-hash of Tamimi PR hand-outs.

It's not the poor reporting per se that is so enraging but the absence of two key elements that if the reporters had disclosed them would have put a fully-justified violent frame around (gritting our teeth) the charming portrait of a blonde girl with curls:

• The connection between Ahed Tamimi and her idol, Ahlam Tamimi with whom she is related closely and in multiple ways and at whose 2012 wedding (to Ahed's cousin) little Ahed danced and gazed worshipfully at the bride for the cameras.
• The terrorism-rich personal credo that the adorable Ahed recently recorded for her mother's video camera and which no reporter should ever dare to ignore in telling news-consumers the things worth knowing about this not-exactly-new "new face of Palestinian resistance".

Ahed Tamimi captured by her mother's video camera, responding to her

mother's request to share "a message to the world", December 15, 2017

[Source: YouTube]

The historian and analyst Petra Marquardt-Bigman has followed the violent Tamimi clan for some years and does an unparalleled job of providing a context to the often-context-free promoting that passes for journalism in much of the news industry.

Here's a small and highly relevant part of what she knows but CBC's man does not:

As reported by media around the world, Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager, has been charged by Israeli authorities with assault, after she was filmed by her family kicking, punching and slapping Israeli soldiers in mid-December.
Nariman Tamimi, Ahed’s mother, live-streamed the incident and its aftermath on her Facebook page. About seven minutes into the video, when the soldiers Ahed had attacked – supported by her mother and a cousin – had left, Ahed was asked by her mother to send a “message to the world.” As you can see in this subtitled clip, Ahed seemed embarrassed for a moment, but then she responded by dutifully repeating the slogans she had grown up with.
“I wish that everybody would participate in demonstrations because that is the only way for us to get results; because our strength is in our stones; and I wish that everybody all over the world would unite so we can liberate Palestine, because Trump must bear responsibility for the decision he took for any Palestinian reaction – be it stabbings, martyrdom-seeking operations [i.e. suicide bombings], throwing stones – everyone must do something. So we can unite this way, so we can get our message across in the required way and get this result, that is the liberation of Palestine, Allah willing.”
As shocking as it is to hear a girl who is just approaching her 17th birthday (on January 31) to casually list “stabbings” and “martyrdom-seeking operations” among the actions she wants others to take in support of her cause, there is no doubt that Ahed’s mother was pleased to hear her daughter express exactly the views she had been taught throughout her childhood. [From "Advocates for Terror: Why Ahed Tamimi and Her Family are No Heroes", Petra Marquardt-Bigman for The Tower, January 5, 2018] 

The entire video "message" in Arabic with English subtitles is here on YouTube.

June 16, 2012: Ahed Tamimi on stage in Amman, Jordan, gazes longingly at

her role-model cousin and Nabi Saleh's pride and joy, the boastful and

confessed murderer-who-got-away-with-it Ahlam Tamimi. The occasion

is the wedding of the Tamimi woman with another Nabi Saleh

murderer (who is also the bride's cousin as well as little Ahed's cousin),

Nizar Tamimi, the male in the photo. Everyone in the

picture is a blood-relative of everyone else. [Image Source]

There's another aspect to the journalistic wrong done by the Canadian: the absence of background. How did we get here? What caused this innocent child to develop her ideas, her attitudes, her fists?

The reality is that Ahed Tamimi has been groomed, trained, weaponized, hardened and massively exposed for years - and by the same manipulative pair of people the whole way: Mummy and Daddy. This is all a matter of the public record that remains just as public when reporters who ought to know better choose to ignore the record.

So Mr Stoffel, and the CBC people who oversee your work-product, please thumb through what we published here: "24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey" And the excellent piece by Shoshana Keats Jaskoll that Forward published a month ago: "Why Is No One Talking About Ahed Tamimi’s Call For Stabbings?"

Articles like these and like the post you are browsing now are unlikely to get you to see things more clearly or very differently. But ignoring them turns your article into a shallow piece of cheap, amoral flim-flammery.

05-Jan-18: In Jordan, the FBI fugitive Ahlam Tamimi pays tribute to her slapping/taunting/kicking Tamimi cousin

Last weekend's Jordanian "Festival" in homage to Ahed "Shirley
Temper" Tamimi [Image Source]

Some months ago, an Australian TV journalist contacted us about doing an interview after the Jordanians rejected a US request to extradite our daughter's killer.

The felon, a Jordanian woman called Ahlam Tamimi, murdered 15 innocent Israeli civilians, most of them children, in the bombing of Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in the summer of 2001. She did this on behalf of Hamas as its first-ever female jihadist. Our daughter Malki, 15, was one of the people she killed.

In 2011, as part of the Shalit Deal, she was set free and returned to Jordan where her family lives and where she was born, raised and educated.

Two of Jordan's courts, in strange decisions several months apart (the first in September 2016; the second in March 2017) ruled that there are problems with Jordan's 1995 extradition treaty with the United States. As a result, they decided, she doesn't have to be extradited and the US treaty request can be refused. The US doesn't agree:

• The State Department's official listing of valid treaties ["United States Department of State | Treaties in Force | A List of Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States in Force on January 1, 2017" at page 240] includes the one with Jordan, stating that it "entered into force July 29, 1995". No suggestion that the US sees any legal problems with it.
• The Department of Justice have confirmed to us that the treaty is valid and in effect.
• The FBI are actively pursuing the Jordanian woman. (More about that later.)

The Australian guy arranged for some inquiries to be made in Jordan and then got back to us saying his producers had decided not to interview us. Why? Nothing to do with us, he said, but because

1. it turned out Tamimi's spoken English isn't very good - somehow leading to the conclusion that if she doesn't speak well enough, why bother hearing what the parents of one of her victims (meaning the two of us) have to say. Or more sharply: Our audience is more interested in hearing what the murderer says about the extradition story than what any of her victims think; and 
2. Tamimi had been told by Jordan's government to lower her profile for a while. In simpler terms (our words) if Jordan was going to stick its finger in the eye of its American strategic ally, protector and benefactor (as it has and as it continues to do), it would be prudent not to publicly flaunt the gift of freedom that King Abdullah has given her. It's good to know that though it likes to call itself a constitutional monarchy, Jordan operates more like an absolute monarchy. If King Abdullah wanted Tamimi extradited, she would be have been shipped to Washington the same morning.

Last weekend, in response to the intense media attention on Ahed "Shirley Temper" Tamimi, the Jordanian media reported on a public event that took place in Amman. (For some excellent background, see "Why Is No One Talking About Ahed Tamimi’s Call For Stabbings?" in Forward, January 4, 2018). Some prominent Jordanian speakers were in the line-up which was heard by an audience filled with elderly men. Also: some women.

What caught our eye is that one of the speakers was Ahlam Tamimi, the mass-murdering fugitive jihadist in the flesh.

She appears to have decided to bring the brief keep-your-head-down phase of her career to an end in order to do the Tamimi thing. And although her extradition was blocked by a Jordanian court ruling on extremely technical grounds, no voices in Jordan that we know of have called for Jordan to do something against her. She's a national treasure. Murderer, maybe; but she murdered Jews, so where's the problem? (We have written about this several times, notably including "21-Mar-17: Tamimi extradition: When it's claimed that something is illegal in Jordan..." and "13-Jun-17: The hunt for our daughter's killer: today's radio interview".)

If anyone has a problem with our way of telling it, let them point us to Jordanian voices calling publicly for an end to the shame and embarrassment of Jordan openly harboring a confessed murderer of children who's on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list. There aren't any.

Our child's murderer, Ahlam Tamimi, speaking at last weekend's
Amman tribute to various things and her cousin Shirley Temper
[Image Source: Video Screenshot]

Last weekend's event was 'modestly' titled “The Festival for the Support of the Jerusalem Holy Sites and the Palestinian People and Declaration of Solidarity with Ahed Tamimi”. There's video coverage of the event and the speeches (all in Arabic) on YouTube (Ahlam Tamimi starts at about the 4 minute mark).

There are multiple Arabic newspaper reports in Al-Rai, JO24, AmmanNet and others. (We archived the Al-Rai version here; that's important if someone decides to take the source articles down for some reason.)
We haven't found any English-language reports from any Arabic source yet. Some might see that as significant. 

What Tamimi said to the crowd is predictable:

• "The Hashemite leadership stood by the holy Islamic sites, and Prince Ali supported Ahed Tamimi with his words. (Prince Ali bin Hussein is the half-brother of Jordan's King Abdullah II. Incidentally, he's also the husband of Princess Rym Ali, the founder of the Jordan Media Institute - see "20-Jan-18: Shutting down media critics in Jordan isn't quite the challenge it might seem to be".)
• "The Zionist Project wishes to remove the Hashemite supervision of the Aqsa Mosque, and the response should be to terminate all the agreements and treaties with the Zionist enemy.
• "Jordan should use its influence to  confront the American-Zionist plans in all areas."
• "Ahed Tamimi is experiencing loneliness and sorrow in the Zionist prisons, which Ahlam has experienced herself, in addition to the numerous female prisoners and children prisoners into whose cause Ahed has breathed new life.

The thing we want to emphasize is this. Very prominent Jordanians, members of the country's political elite, have no problem sharing a public platform with a confessed killer of Israeli children who is also an FBI fugitive and the subject of American efforts to have her extradited to the US to face serious federal charges. Can you imagine this happening anywhere else? She's a wanted criminal but not in Jordan where she's a hero.

And Jordan, for those wondering, has given no sign it intends to prosecute Ahlam Tamimi in its own courts; in other places, that's the kind of thing that occasionally does happen when an extradition request is rebuffed on narrow technical or constitutional grounds. But not Jordan, which for all practical purposes is the largest and most powerful of the three Palestinian Arab countries, the other two being the Hamas entity and the Fatah/PLO/PA entity. (Again, a talking point for another time.)

Enthusiastic backers of the sixteen year-old Nabi Saleh Tamimi girl
at last weekend's Amman gathering [Image Source: Video Screenshot]

So what did those Jordanian dignitaries on the platform who had no problem sharing the limelight with the self-admitted, mass-murdering, Jew-hating fugitive from justice say?:

• Taher al-Masri, a Palestinian Arab who served briefly as prime minister of Jordan said Arab claims to Jerusalem and Palestine concern not only the Palestinians but every Arab, every Muslim and every free person in the world. He called on the Arabs to support "our people in Palestine" and come to "the defense of the Islamic faith that is the basis of the concepts of our societies". Ahed Tamimi, the blonde girl from Nabi Saleh, "represents the spirit of Palestine". It is "no longer possible for us to remain silent on what is happening to Jerusalem and the Palestinian cause." And some anger directed at America: "The transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem is the second stage of the Zionist project, America's recognition of Greater Jerusalem as the capital of "Israel" (quote marks are in the source text) meaning that Jerusalem is no longer part of the occupied Palestinian territories". He gave voice to a favourite Palestinian Arab theme - a Jewish Temple is going to be be constructed over the ruins of what he called "the Al-Aqsa Mosque". 
• Saleh Armouti, a member of Jordan's parliament (we quoted him here last year) and one of Jordan's most prominent and noisy Islamists: "The American assistance and aid can go to hell if it will cost us our dignity." He's a man who's bothered by what he calls "shameful Arab silence" in the face of attempts to divide Palestine and Jerusalem which "are one and we do not accept any division between the two". Armouti is enraged by the "occupation" of what he called West Jerusalem which makes up 80 percent of Jerusalem. And another serve to America which, he said, "is a partner in the aggression against the Arab and Islamic nation. It must be boycotted and Trump should be tried before the International Criminal Court". 
• Khamis Attia, deputy speaker of Jordan's lower house of parliament (and was the prime mover in an effort to get energy-starved Jordan to cancel its gas-importing deal with Israel in 2014): Jordanian anger over Trump's Jerusalem decision, he said, is great and the position of His Majesty the King on Al-Aqsa Mosque and on the Trump decision is honorable. 
• Rula al-Hroub, a prominent former MP and (we're fairly sure) also a Palestinian: Praised King Abdullah "and the Hashemite leadership" on their resistance to the Trump decision. Wants the Oslo Agreements "to be brought down". "Palestine is Arab Muslim from the river to the sea and no one has the right to relinquish it, or any part of it."

For those new to Ahlam Tamimi's history: She was an undergrad student of journalism at the time she carried out the 2001 Sbarro pizzeria massacre. She was a part-time news-presenter at a Palestinian Arab TV station in Ramallah. She has described for the record how she rushed from the scene of the terror attack in the center of Israel's capital, having left the human bomb behind to explode a few minutes after her safe departure. She rode a bus back to the other side of the Green Line where, a few hours later in front of the cameras, she reported in straight-faced fashion on the massacre she herself had executed with her own two hands. She of course did not reveal her role as mastermind of that day's killings though she has said she wishes she could have revealed all to the exultant people in the cab:

"Afterwards, when I took the bus, the Palestinians around Damascus Gate [in Jerusalem] were all smiling. You could sense that everybody was happy. When I got on the bus, nobody knew that it was me who had led [the suicide bomber to the target]... They didn't even know one another, yet they were exchanging greetings... While I was on the bus and everybody was congratulating one another, they said on the radio that there had been a martyrdom attack at the Sbarro restaurant and that three people were killed. 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.'" ...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." [MEMRI Arabic-to-English transcript of Ahlam Tamimi interviewed on Al-Aqsa TV, July 12, 2012]

Tamimi was born and raised in Jordan. She was sent back there when, despite the 16 terms of life imprisonment ("with no possibility of parole or early release" in the words of the judicial panel that had sentenced her) she hit the jackpot and was freed by Israel in the catastrophic Gilad Shalit Deal of October 2011. She married soon afterwards to a cousin who is also a convicted and freed murderer and a Tamimi like her. She has been living in Amman, Jordan ever since.

In March 2017, the  United States announced that  Federal charges had been brought against her, she had been added to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list and the US had requested Jordan hand her over for prosecution under the 1995 Jordan/United States extradition treaty. Jordan refused and has continued to maintain its refusal. She lives free as a bird with no suggestion by Jordan it will prosecute her itself under Jordan's criminal code or in any way abridge her freedom of movement.

The all-powerful king of Jordan has powers that include appointing the judges, rotating the parliament at very frequent intervals and controlling the media. In its 2017 report, Freedom House rates Jordan's media "Not Free", ranking the country at 150 in a table of 199 countries.

Some of Jordan's friends in the US Congress might want to reflect on the implications of that and Jordan's derisory response to a US extradition request when they review relations between the two countries.

Also: that the murder of two Americans - one our daughter, one a tourist visiting Israel briefly with her husband and pregnant with her first child - mean nothing to the people, government and courts of America's Jordanian ally. They're with the loathsome Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh and let no one have any illusions about how that works.

28-Dec-17: So how old is the Tamimi girl?

Screen shot

Depends whom you ask (as we originally wrote here).

In the order in which the following media reports were published, she was

• Twelve in September 2011 [quoted by Israellycool from an Arab source]; 
• Eight in August 2012 [Source: +972, a far-left Israeli site]; 
• Thirteen in December 2012 [Source: TimeTurk News and other Turkish sources]; 
• Ten in December 2012 [Source: World Bulletin]; 
• Thirteen in June 2013 [Source: Your Middle East];
• Twelve in February 2014 [Source; The Guardian];
• Fourteen in September 2015 [Source: NBC News];
• Sixteen in February 2017 [a South African source]. 

So depending on which media report you want to believe, she was born (in the same order as those links above) in 1999, 2004, 1999, 2002, 2000, 2002, 2001 and 2001.

Making her now thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and/or eighteen.

It's hard to be precise. We assume all this vagueness is intentional and part of the family's manipulation of her appearance, her image and her life.

UPDATE January 1, 2018: We tweeted this evening [here] that the Tamimi girl is now 16 years and 11 months old according to the Israel Prison Service, quoted today over at JewishPress.com We think this emphasizes how, since the age of 9, she has been the product of her clan's and parents' inputs, cynical manipulation and child abuse.

28-Dec-17: At a northern Jerusalem security checkpoint, a girl with knives and stabbing victims on her mind

Qalandiya Crossing and some of its security personnel who watch for
attackers [Image Source]

Barely noticed by reporters and overwhelmingly ignored by mainstream news editors, there has been a non-lethal security incident at one of the main entry points through which Palestinian Arabs pass on their way into Israel's capital city, Jerusalem.

But non-lethal was not the goal of the attacker.

A Palestinian teen was arrested Wednesday after trying to illegally enter Israel and allegedly carry out a terror attack, police said. The suspect, an 18-year-old female, was turned away at the Qalandiya crossing near Jerusalem, and later tried to cross again using her 7-year-old sister’s permit. When she was refused, she began arguing with border guards and tried to force her way in, a police spokesperson said. During subsequent questioning, the teen admitted to planning an attack in the Jerusalem area. A source with knowledge of the case told The Times of Israel that the Palestinian planned to buy a knife and stab a police officer. The woman, from the town of Qataneh, was jailed, pending a remand hearing. Her name was not released by police... ["Palestinian teen caught planning stabbing attack — police", Times of Israel, December 27, 2017]

You might want to note how:

• The terror-minded suspect is about the same age as the young woman from Nabi Saleh of whom we wrote earlier this week ["24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey"]. "Girls" of seventeen or eighteen are older, often by several years, than a steady stream of Palestinian Arab teens who have perpetrated (or been thwarted trying) terrorist Arab-on-Israeli attacks during the past two years. [Click on "Weaponizing Children" for dozens such recent cases.]
• News about Jerusalem gets remarkably uneven coverage in the mainstream news industry. The decision of the Trump Administration to recognize that Israel's capital city for the past seventy years has been Jerusalem got vastly more coverage, even though no one's life was directly threatened by it.
• In Qataneh (sometimes written Qatane), from where yesterday's would-be attacker lived, Israeli forces two years ago uncovered a massive weapons cache that included ammunition, knives, IDF uniforms and binoculars [source]. The village is located right next to the Israeli community of Har Adar, 12 km north of Jerusalem. The neighborhood has been in the news recently for the worst kind of reasons ["26-Sep-17: At Har Adar's entrance, an Arab-on-Israeli shooter with problems and a solution"] 
• The security personnel who man the Qalandiya Crossing have realistic expectations by now of what some Palestinian Arabs, and in particular children, have on their minds. Consider for instance events that took place there just a few months back: "20-May-17: A child, a knife and another thwarted stabbing today on Jerusalem's northern edge". That attack-child was 14.

Over at Israel National News, their report of Wednesday's thwarted attack includes this rather poignant additional commentary:

The police said that "the soldiers and policemen work throughout the year at the crossings around the Jerusalem area and in their activities constitute human shields for the residents [of the city], prevent the entry of unauthorized persons into Israel and the smuggling of weapons. This is all in order to protect the residents of the State of Israel."

We can relate to this.

On the day our 15 year-old daughter Malki and 14 other innocents were murdered in the Hamas attack on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria, the terrorist bomber and her human bomb passed through this same security crossing, Qalandiya. Tragically, no one thought to stop and interrogate the young man with the guitar case slung across his back that afternoon. In those simpler times, we didn't know our neighbours included people with the monstrous capacity to conceal a massively-explosive, shrapnel-packed weapon-of-mass-destruction inside a musical instrument container and then go looking for Jewish children to kill and maim.

Ahed Tamimi, the woman from Nabi Saleh now being called "girl" in much of the heavy media coverage, danced at the wedding of her cousin, the Sbarro massacre mastermind. Like other members of the Tamimi clan, she identifies with the achievement of the convicted-murderer and celebrates the deed and the doer.

24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey

Ahed Tamimi in court last week
[Image Source]

A depressingly large number of people posting in various social media channels are hammering away right now at a campaign that tries to characterize the Palestinian Arab teen Ahed Tamimi as a victim of Israeli oppression, as a human rights activist, as a freedom fighter.

She's the young woman many know as Shirley Temper, a photogenic and compliant performer who for at least eight years now has been the central child figure in a long-running propaganda performance orchestrated by her father, the full-time propagandist Bassem Tamimi and his publicity business he operates, Tamimi Press.

What others say about this is very much on our minds. What Bassem Tamimi himself says is a matter of record. Child abuse? Manipulation? Ha! The ugly manipulation in which he and his fellow villagers engage chronically is dismissed in masterful fashion: "Our children are doing their duty and must be strong." It's an appalling message of which the directors of the Hitlerjugend would have been proud. 

We keep running into people who think they know the story of the Tamimi clan. But it's clear to us that in reality few understand the rich and ugly detail of their hatefulness. It's expressed not as mere protest and words but the kind of physical violence that has ended dozens of lives on the Tamimi side and among their many victims.

FBI Most Wanted Terrorist: The Arabic version is here

Regular readers of this blog know our oldest daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre engineered by Bassem Tamimi's niece, Ahlam Tamimi. 

Since March 2017, that Tamimi woman has been a fugitive from US justice, wanted by the FBI to face federal charges in Washington arising from the bombing/massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem 16 years ago.

She has confessed often and in great detail about her role as the mastermind of the slaughter.

Meanwhile Bassem Tamimi has been crowned a hero of and by Amnesty International. In a shockingly cynical move that in large measure backfired on them, Amnesty's agitprop specialists sent him on a coast-to-coast roadshow in 2015.

We tried to get some straight answers from him and from his generous sponsors at the time to some straightforward, related questions... but all we got was ignored: see "04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may".

But Ahlam Tamimi, the confessed murderer, along with her uncle and aunt and cousin Nariman, Bassem and Ahed, are simply part of a long list of Tamimis associated with Arab-on-Israeli terror. Some of the details have been deliberately obscured or hidden. We have been doing what we can to publicize them.

We revisited some of the barely-known details just a few days ago - see "19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets".

On any objective view, enthusiasm for the "bravery" of Ahed (sometimes written Ah'd and Aahd) Tamimi is a strange thing because of how it ignores the trajectory of her emergence as a media figure and the center of a multimedia "Free Ahed Now" project.

How old is she? 

Depends whom you ask. She was 12 in September 2011 [quoted by Israellycool from an Arab source]; 8 in August 2012 [Source: +972, a far-left Israeli site]; 13 in December 2012 [Source: TimeTurk News and other Turkish sources]; 10 in December 2012 [Source: World Bulletin]; 13 in June 2013 [Source: Your Middle East]; 12 in February 2014 [Source; The Guardian]; 14 in September 2015 [Source: NBC News]; 16 in February 2017 [a South African source]. Thus she was born (in the same order as those links) in 1999, 2004, 1999, 2002, 2000, 2002, 2001, 2001. It's hard to be precise. And to be clear, it's fair to assume all this vagueness is intentional.

[UPDATE January 1, 2018: The answer is - she will turn 17 on January 31, 2018, having been in 2001. Much if not most of what has been written and published in past years about her age has been wrong, and almost certainly deliberately fudged. See what we wrote here.]

We have pulled together some images (below) from public sources that chart the process by which her family and her village - but most of all her parents - cultivated a media-ready provocateur. It's a dismaying chronicle not only because it shows how there are loathsome people who, even though they are parents, would do this to a child. But also because of the individuals, a distressing number of them progressive Jews, who have embraced this distressing and very obvious child-abuse while giving no sign they see the malice, the hate, the bigotry and the overt and calculated manipulation that has accompanied it from the outset until today.

▲ July 2, 2010: Screaming on demand for her father's cameras and just 9 years old, Ahed Tamimi is confident enough to walk up to a fully armed soldier and shriek into his face. It's very likely someone told her not to worry, everything will be OK, just show fierce little-girl anger while the cameras roll. And so a career is launched. See more in this video from which the photo above was screen-captured. And here: "06-Sep-15: The making of a pigtailed provocateur". Watch carefully and you can see the child's mother in the same video clip. Mostly - since she has much less to offer than her child does - she stays out of camera range.

▲ June 16, 2012: With live-action TV news cameras everywhere, this is Ahed Tamimi on stage, age 11, in Amman, Jordan, gazing longingly at her role-model cousin and Nabi Saleh's pride and joy, the boastful and confessed murderer-who-got-away-with-it Ahlam Tamimi, our daughter Malki's killer. The occasion is the wedding of the Tamimi woman with another Nabi Saleh murderer (who happens also to be a Tamimi, the bride's cousin and little Ahed's cousin), Nizar Tamimi, the male in the photo. Everyone in the picture, along wih many of the wedding guests, is a blood-relative of everyone else. (The Tamimi's are deeply committed to marrying within their tribe.) As the published videos and photos attest, many members of the Nabi Saleh Tamimis traveled to Jordan to be present. Background: "22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"

▲ September 2012: Here she's eleven years old. The CAMERA caption reads: "Mahmoud Abbas congratulates A'hd (right) and her cousin Marah for their "bravery" (From the Nabi Sabeh Solidarity blog)" 

▲ November 2, 2012: Still not quite 12, and captured on video by the cameras of Tamimi Press while stage managed by Bassem Tamimi, her deeply-cynical father, Ahed screams "I spit in your face". [Image Source]

▲ December 24, 2012: Recognizing the power of a little blonde tyke, aged almost 12 and who teaches the Israelis a lesson, Mevlüt Uysal, then mayor of the Istanbul district of Başakşehir (and currently mayor of Istanbul) awards the always-willinng Tamimi girl the Başakşehir Hanzala Courage Award trophy [Image Source]

▲ December 31, 2012: The Tamimi handlers manage to set up an encounter for the sub-teen child with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [Image Source]

▲ December 31, 2012: Next thing you know, he gives her breakfast [Image Source]

▲ A widely-published portrait of Ahed with the proud parents (father on the left) in February 2013 [Image Source]. She's aged 12.

▲ March 17, 2013: That's twelve-year-old Ahed in the bottom row among the other eager "peace-makers" of Nabi Saleh. Her father and chief manipulator Bassem Tamimi is at top left; her mother Nariman Tamimi in the bottom left corner. Everyone's a relative of everyone else here - a major promotion for bigotry-rich terrorism from the editors of one of the world's major sources of news. Some people read this and may think the Tamimis are talking about some future activity of a peaceful nature. A reminder that in the so-called second Intifada, the death toll among Israelis was huge; among Arabs, substantially larger. We urge you to absorb some of the background: "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns". And this follow-up: "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters". And another: "01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists".

▲ November 21, 2014: AlwatanVoice publishes one of the many Tamimi Press snapshots of the Tamimi village children boldly marching to another entirely-artificial and contrived weekly "clash" with Israeli soldiers. As always, Ahed Tamimi, not quite 14, is placed by her father (she's always being placed by one of her parents) in the most photographed position. Right behind her is Naji Tamimi, a full-time paid Fatah "activist" and cousin or brother (according to different sources) of Bassem Tamimi

▲ March 13, 2015 Ahed Tamimi is 14 here. The weekly Nabi Saleh media-focused confrontation with remarkably restrained and patient Israeli soldiers [Image Source]

▲ March 13, 2015: Ahed, 14, playing the customary featured role she's been bred to fill, in the weekly performance-for-the-media outside Nabi Saleh. Once again, she's screaming on cue [Image Source]

▲ August 28, 2015: With her father Bassem moving into the camera's view for a brief moment (green shirt), but doing nothing to protect his daughter, Ahed Tamimi, 14, photogenically writhes and struggles with an embarrassed, lone Israeli serviceman who could have theoretically used his gun to get out of a difficult situation but naturally did not. It's as viral an image as Bassem Tamimi can ever have planned. [Image Source: CNN]

▲ September 2, 2015: Bassem, Nariman, Ahed (14) and other members of the family are again honored by a personal audience with the president-for-life of the Palestinian Authority [Image Source]

▲ September 3, 2015: Not to be outdone by his boss, Sabri Saidam, the Palestinian Authority's minister of education visits the little town of Nabi Saleh to get a grip on developments there. Background: "10-Sep-15: It takes a village: The passion for violence of the peace-loving Tamimis". No such visit would be complete without an Ahed pose. She's 14.

▲ November 2015: Bassem Tamimi, Ahed's father, is paraded around the US by Amnesty International, In Ithaca, NY, where this photo is taken, he addresses an audience of school-children from Grade 3. There's outrage in the city ["School District: Ithaca 3rd graders exposed to anti-Israel rhetoric in the classroom" and "Judge sends Ithaca schools a message over pro-Palestinian speaker"]. Shortly afterwards, his visa to enter the United States was permanently revoked by the Obama administration.

▲ November 2015: An invaluable examination by Petra Marquardt-Bigman of the Ahed Tamimi phenomenon, the horror of the messages emanating from her parents and cousins, and the context in which all this has been happening [The Tower] 

▲ Some months ago, Ahed Tamimi, not yet 17 and following the instructions of the event planners, addressed in Arabic a committee in the European Parliament.

▲ From the Jewish Voices for Peace Twitter feed

The idea of referring to Nariman Tamimi, Ahed's mother, as a person with a "voice full of love and tenderness" is delusional. Don't believe us? Check out "02-Oct-15: Truth, honesty, love, murder... and useful idiots".

But if the subject of "butchered childhoods" is mentioned, we happen to know something about how that actually works. Our daughter Malki, who never once thrust a fist into the face of anyone let alone a soldier, was just fifteen years old when she became an unwilling participant in the explosive moment which the murderous Tamimi clan celebrate yearly with such huge enthusiasm. 

The photo of Malki (above) stands for the absolute opposite of what the Tamimi propaganda machine is marketing: goodness, kindness, concern for others, embracing the different and the weak and the damaged, always optimistic.

It's tragic how many people fail to understand that simple truth.