08-Jul-19: The BBC and Pay to Slay

Frimet and Arnold Roth with BBC's Yolande Knell

After several years of being below the media radar, we appeared on BBC News last week.

Its Middle East correspondent, Yolande Knell, prepared a report that examined how Israelis - in this case, the two of us (Frimet and Arnold Roth) view the Palestinian Authority's relentless program of incentive payments to imprisoned terrorists and to the families left behind by dead Palestinian Arab terrorists.

Being the BBC, the report then focused on how the same appalling payments are viewed within Palestinian Arab society. Or at least among that segment which benefits in a personal sense from those payments.

Note also - again, this being the BBC - that the word "terrorist" - is not mentioned once.

BBC_World_News-2019-06-28_12-14-16 from BBC Middle East on Vimeo.

There's a scene in this which shows a rent-a-crowd assembly of Palestinian Arabs, mostly women, holding up placards with the faces of 'prisoners' while telling the interviewer "we're all in  prison". One of those faces, unmentioned, belongs to a convicted killer for whom we have especially low regard. Read about him here: "18-Apr-17: So what, in reality, is Marwan Barghouti?"

A related story by Ms Knell went to air on BBC radio some days earlier. We are heard in that too, but it has somewhat different content compared with the video. Click to hear it now.

We don't claim to be dispassionate observers. The Hamas savages responsible for executing the Sbarro pizzeria massacre in which our daughter Malki and fifteen other innocents were murdered in 2001 have collectively pulled in more than a million dollars in the years since their act of barbarism turned so many lives upside down. We provide the details here: "24-Aug-18: What aid funds handed to the Abbas regime ($1 million and growing) have done for savages who kill Jews".

The United States and the European Union are the major sources of the foreign aid cash that makes those Abbas payments possible. But Norway is prominent in the list as well as are the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

We have posted a stream of background pieces about their culpability and lack of good sense. For instance (and these are from four months of 2016 alone) -

• 27-Mar-16: In UK, facing up to UK Aid's scandalous ongoing financing of Palestinian Arab jihad 
• 27-Mar-16: The PA's "Rewards for Terror" scheme and the lies that keep the pounds flowing in 
• 28-Mar-16: Is it time yet for UK's foreign aid office to come clean on their part in funding Palestinian Arab terror?
• 31-Mar-16: More on UK funding of Abbas' Reward for Terror scheme
• 02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror
• 04-May-16: The PA's Rewards for Terror scheme: Abbas, fobbing off Norwegian criticism, incriminates self
• 13-May-16: Ongoing gullibility: UK foreign aid and the Palestinian "Rewards for Terror" scheme 
• 25-May-16: Wall-to-wall agreement at last: The Pal Arab kleptocrats and the devastation they wreak
• 14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers

As we said, there are many others. Click on "Rewards for Terror" to see dozens more.

(Illness is the main reason why our posts have been so few these past two months. Hopefully, that's behind us now.)

29-Dec-18: A quiet weekend

Dutch police action [Image Source]

A handful of terror-centric reports that arrived in our news filter this quiet weekend and that, for the most part, have gotten very little media attention.

Friday night Arab-on-Israel rocket attack

A rocket was fired Friday from the Gaza Strip into Israel, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office said, the first such incident in over six weeks. The Red Alert alarm warning system was not activated as the projectile landed in an open area, the spokesperson added. No injuries or damage were reported. [Times of Israel]

Five men arrested in Rotterdam on terrorism charges 

Five men have been arrested in Rotterdam on charges of preparing a terrorist attack, broadcaster NOS said on Saturday. Four were arrested early on Saturday morning at homes in the centre and east of the port city and the fifth man was picked up later in the day. The first four are aged 20 to 30 and have a ‘non-western’ background, broadcaster NOS said. One is said to be a Syrian refugee with residency status named as Saleh H. A second man is said to be an Egyptian national... [DutchNews.nl]

Egypt security forces kill 40 suspected terrorists in raids - report 

Egyptian security forces killed 40 alleged terrorists in raids in the Giza and North Sinai regions early Saturday, state media reported, a day after four people were killed when a roadside bomb struck a tourist bus in Giza. Egypt's Interior Ministry said the raids, conducted at dawn Saturday, targeted three suspected hideouts of terrorists who were planning hostile acts during the Christmas holidays, according to the state-run Al-Ahram online newspaper. Ammunition, firearms and improvised explosive devices were recovered in significant numbers... Three Vietnamese tourists and an Egyptian tour guide were killed and at least 11 people were injured in the attack Friday in a central tourist area of Giza, near Cairo, where the pyramids are located... [CNN]

...meanwhile from the Palestinian Authority's media mouthpiece:

"...Spokesman Yousef al-Mahmoud said in a statement that the Palestinian people and its leadership stand with Egypt in fighting “this cowardly terrorism aimed at innocent people and the security and stability of the Egyptian people.” He expressed belief that Egypt is capable of fighting terrorism and those who stand behind it, calling on Arab countries to stand together in fighting terrorism and extremism targeting the Arab world in particular and the world in general.

Three charged with planning terror attack in Sweden

Sweden's prosecution authority said on Thursday it had charged three men with planning a terror attack in Sweden, warning the plot could have caused serious damage had it not been prevented... The men, aged between 30 and 46, originally hail from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Their residency status in Sweden could not immediately be verified... The three are suspected of "obtaining and storing large amounts of chemicals and other equipment with the aim of killing and wounding other people," the prosecution authority said in a statement. "If the terrorist crime had been carried out, it could have seriously hurt Sweden." The trio were also charged, along with three other people, with financing terrorism. Prosecutors accuse them of sending money abroad to fund the so-called Islamic State's operations... According to Dagens Nyheter, at least one of the suspects had been in contact with Rakhmat Akilov, a radicalized Uzbek asylum seeker who mowed down pedestrians in Stockholm with a stolen truck in April 2017, killing five people. Akilov was sentenced to life in prison in June 2018... [TheLocal (Sweden)]

13-Mar-17: Jerusalem and the (alleged) knife-men

The Old City and Lions' Gate [Image Source]

At about 4 this morning (Monday) there was a slightly elevated police presence in Israel's capital city because in Jerusalem it's the festive day of Purim. (Everywhere else in the world celebrated Purim a day earlier.)

An Arab assailant managed to squeeze into an occupied and cramped guard booth adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem's Lions' Gate, armed with a large butcher knife. He embarked on a frenzied stabbing attack, injuring the two Border Guard police inside.

"One of the officers fought his way out of the guard booth, loaded his weapon and shot the assailant, police said. The assailant was shot and critically wounded during the attack. He later died of his injuries." [Times of Israel today]

The Border Guard men are recovering at Hadassah Medical Center's Ein Kerem hospital where they were rushed for emergency treatment, arriving there in stable and fully conscious condition according to a hospital spokesperson.

The assailant has been named in the Arab media as Ibrahim Mahmoud Mattar, described by Israel Police as a 25-year-old resident of East Jerusalem’s notorious Jabel Mukaber neighborhood from which a significant number of Arab-on-Israeli shooters, rammers and stabbers have emerged in the past two years (click to see some relevant earlier posts).

The attacker's knife [Image Source: Foreign Ministry]

Ma'an News Agency, whose work is in large measure paid for by the mostly unwitting and increasingly unwilling taxpayers of several European countries, adopted its customary alternative-reality approach to reporting on Palestinian Arab terror, starting with the headline of its tendentious report: "Witnesses: Israeli police 'execute' Palestinian in Jerusalem over alleged attack":

Israeli police shot and killed a 25-year-old Palestinian near the Lion’s Gate entrance to occupied East Jerusalem's Old City early Monday morning over an alleged stabbing attack that left two Israeli police officers lightly and moderately injured. The slain man was identified as Ibrahim Mahmoud Matar, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood Jabal al-Mukabbir, located south of the Old City. The shooting happened ahead of the al-fajr (dawn) prayers, as worshipers were headed to Al-Aqsa Mosque inside the Old City. Witnesses told Ma'an they saw a dispute inside an Israeli police post located near Lion’s Gate, between an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian "who was carrying a stick.” Israeli police then forced the young man outside of the enclosure and “executed” him at point blank range with with four bullets, leading to his immediate death, witnesses said. Referring to the dispute that lead up to the shooting, eyewitnesses told Ma’an that Israeli police were “controlling the situation” and could have easily detained Matar without using lethal force... Following the killing, Israeli forces were heavily deployed in and around Lion’s Gate and prevented many Palestinians from reaching Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, with witnesses saying the lockdown lasted from 4:30 until 6:00 a.m. Later Monday morning, Israeli forces raided Matar’s home in Jabal al-Mukabbir and detained his brother, parents, and his uncle, according to locals and Israeli police.

A few words about the journalistic values on display here. We follow Ma'an's reporting more closely than most people. The reflexive use by its editors of the cowardly term "alleged" to describe most Arab-on-Israeli attacks is a constant. But the mostly outlandish claims of Arab so-called witnesses and their fanciful explanations for how knives and guns ended up in Arab hands are almost never termed "alleged". 

Taking Ma'an's Palestinian-Arab-centric reportage at face-value requires a prior commitment to a thoroughly partisan view of events. In war, that's not unusual or even in some ways unacceptable. What's outrageous is that none of this could be done without the massive ongoing funding its editors and managers have gotten since its inception in 2005 from Western sources. Most of that money is from governments which means from tax-payers. And while many of the government bureaucrats in Europe signing off on those cheques and foreign aid forms are ideologically comfortable with how the money they supply is spent, it's a certainty that many, probably most, of the people actually providing those funds have no such political leanings.

NGO-Monitor does first-rate, systematic work examining how government funding from the West often gets wasted and channeled into very dark places connected with the Arab/Israel conflict. You might want to know that it has a resource page [here] devoted to shining some light on the quiet funding that is Ma'an's life-blood. 

Most people don't realize, but NGO-Monitor documents this, that for years Ma'an - an outlet for news in several languages - has been the recipient of millions (dollars and Euros) in foreign aid. Initial funding came from the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands. 

Since then, the torrent has continued to arrive from (among others) the governments of Denmark, Sweden, the United States,  Switzerland, Netherlands, the European Union and the United Kingdom. Several human rights and humanitarian juggernauts, in particular Catholic Relief Services, UNESCO and most egregiously Save the Children, have found ways to justify sending some of their budget to the Bethlehem offices of the propaganda agency. Why donors accept this is a puzzle - assuming they know.

UPDATE Monday March 13, 2017 at 10:00 pm: Elder of Ziyon notices, on visiting Facebook, that

Naturally, Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah is extolling him as a "martyr" and making sure that his act is viewed as a religious obligation. This is all to let the next terrorist know exactly how his acts will be honored.

Tragically, it usually plays out this way.

09-Jul-15: When incitement to murder is financed by foreign aid, where will the accounting come from?

Sitting in an Israeli court, the bomb maker who has murdered 66 people
until now says he wants to kill some more. Makes his father
so proud. [Image Source]

Our daughter Malki - graceful, pretty, smiley, a musical prodigy, a social activist on behalf of children with severe disabilities - will never reach her sixteenth birthday.

That privilege was stolen from her (and us) by a gang of Islamist men and women on August 9, 2001. A thunderous, sickening flash of explosives and thousands of flesh-ripping nails destroyed Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria and with it the bodies and lives of fifteen innocents, the majority of them children. Malki (whose photo is over there on the right of this page) was one of them. Her best friend, the girl who lived next door and was standing at the counter with her, was another.

The explosive device was concealed inside a guitar case carried on the back of a man. He was a human bomb, brought to the center of our city - Israel's capital, Jerusalem - by the engineer of the massacre ["17-Nov-11: A monster walks the streets and she has many accomplices"]. He is of course dead, but the planner of the massacre is not. She hosts a TV program that is produced in Amman, Jordan, and since 2012 has gone to air on Fridays to an eager global audience of Arabic speakers.

Rejoicing in streets of Lebanon as news of the
massacre in Jerusalem is announced, August 9, 2001 [Image Source]

The man who constructed the diabolical guitar-case bomb, and several others similar to it, has haunted our thoughts through the years since we first learned of his monstrous savagery. Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti with Jordanian citizenship, sits in an Israeli prison cell today, serving 67 life terms to which he was sentenced in a 2004 trial. 

From inside, Barghouti has reminded every possible audience of the bestiality that underpins his murderous nature. 66 innocent people killed? Not enough, he declares - explicitly. In 2006, in the intimate setting of a quiet interview beamed throughout the world, Barghouti notoriously said

"I feel bad because the number is only 66. This is the answer you want to hear? Yes, I feel bad because I want more." [Quoted on a CBS site]

The panel of judges who sentenced him expressed regret that the death penalty was not an option. (The only time a death penalty has been carried out in Israel was that of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman in 1962.)

What he did was horrifying. But hardly less horrifying are the reactions of wide parts of Arab society who stood solidly with the killers, rejoicing at the deaths. Major news services carried photos that day of macho men expressing their joy in Arab streets (like the one above). Children were provided with platters of candies to hand out in celebration of the massacre of Jewish youngsters. 

Every last member of that gang of jihadists became a celebrity in the societies in which they live. And the Mahmoud Abbas-controlled Palestinian Authority ("chronically short of funds... perpetually requesting handouts") has been paying the bomb-maker, along with all the others in the gang, a rich salary since at least April 2011 ["20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?"]

Having researched this, we know of not a single article in the Arab language published anywhere in the world that condemns the perpetrators and their act, or bemoans their corrosive impact on Arab and Moslem societies. If anyone among our readers can point us to even a single instance (an offer we have made numerous times already), we would showcase it here and let people know. 

CBS promo for the still-online 60 Minutes platform it gave
our child's killer in 2006. The voice, the pain, the anger of victims 
like us interests them much less [Image Source]

We pointed out eight years ago ["10-Apr-07: Regarding Abdullah Barghouti"] that he pleaded guilty to all charges at his trial on 66 counts of terror-inspired murder. He told the court he "did this to kill as many Israelis as possible".

Reporter Bob Simon fronted a segment called Terror Behind Bars on the CBS "60 Minutes" television program in 2006 which did much to elevate Barghouti to celebrity-dom outside the Arab world (he was already a global Arab hero).

"I get my best piece, the guitar. I have it, I like it, I respect it... I open it, make a bomb inside it, close it, send it with the guy. And he make the bomb. And it's done." [Abdullah Barghouti boasting on CBS News' 60 Minutes program, April 2006]

We wrote an open letter at the time to his TV network, CBS, in New York (published here) expressing our deep pain and fierce anger in calm and fairly reasonable terms. CBS ignored us.

There is no room for doubt about this: the massacre at Sbarro, along with the untold number of similar acts of murderous barbarism carried out against Israelis and Jews in the past decade and a half in the name of Palestinian Arab 'resistance' have had the widest support right across the Arab world. We offered some evidence here, referring to Barghouti: "1-Jul-13: 66 acts of murder make him a hero in parts of the Arab world. What does this tell us about parts of the Arab world?"

We learned of another public display of this today.

The self-styled 'independent' Palestinian Arab news network Ma'an broadcast a television program in June focused on Barghouti. Ma'an TV broadcasts its content live via the web [here] and by satellite throughout the Arabic-speaking world. The tone of this particular Ma'an show is plain from the text, rendered into English by Palestinian Media Watch.

PMW's report begins with this brief introduction:

The independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an, on the TV program In a Prisoner’s Home, interviewed the father of the terrorist in his home. Both the TV host and the father referred to the killer of 67 as a “hero.” Barghouti’s father added he was “proud” of his son, who he sees as a “noble fighter” who acted “generously” for “Palestine.” He encouraged “every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem”:

The convicted, confessed, proud, hungry murderer has a father
with a message [Image Source: Video clip via PMW]

The original Arabic of the interview, as rendered by PMW's translators into English:

• Independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an’s TV host: “We are now in the home of the heroic prisoner Abdallah Barghouti, in the month of the blessed Ramadan.”
• Father of bomb maker Abdallah Barghouti: “Abdallah Barghouti, I am proud of him, because everyone knows of Abdallah Barghouti and what he generously did for Palestine. I am proud of him and I say: Praise Allah who gave me this hero, noble fighter for Palestine and its cause. I say: Praise Allah, Lord of the Universes, Abdallah fought for Palestine and left his family, his father and mother, and left behind three children, two girls and a boy, and sacrificed everything for the Palestinian cause. I ask every Palestinian of noble soul to follow in the footsteps of Abdallah Barghouti for Palestine and Jerusalem.”

We feel no need to say anything to the father or to the host. They are what they are. The message they intend to convey via the interview is about as clear as messages get: Barghouti the son murdered dozens of Jews, and Barghouti the father says it's something noble to do the same, again, now. 

Barghouti: Serving 67 life terms in an Israeli
prison. His advocates call him a 'detainee' and want him
freed. The 66 murders? No big deal.

Incitement to murder, and glorification of the killer, rarely come much clearer than this.

Now we have some questions for those who fund Ma'an, an organization entirely dependent on its foreign supporters. They include (according to NGO-Monitor and to the Ma'an website):

• The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs
• The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark
• United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
• European Commission Technical Assistance Office (ECTAO) 
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
• The Danish Representative Office to the Palestinian Authority (PA) 
• The Netherlands Representative Office to the PA

None of these bodies ever spends private money. In every case, it comes from taxpayers - by far the easiest form of money for ideologically-motivated people to spend (as we have observed here over and again). Our questions:

• Do Danish, Dutch and other European tax-payers know that civil servants funded by them are passing along serious money, millions of Euros and of dollars, also funded by them, to encourage murder? For turning a confessed killer of 67 innocent people into a figure to emulate?
• Does this shock them? 
• Do those civil servants and public officials have anything they would like us - the parents of a victim of the beastial killer at the heart of the interview above - to know about their complicity in Ma'an's incitement to ongoing and new acts of murder? 
• Do they need to know our email address? Here it is. We're waiting.

16-Jan-15: Scenes from the warzones

Belgium [Image Source]

The past 24 hours in the ongoing war in Europe...

Verviers, Belgium last night: Two armed men, evidently Islamists with plans for launching terrorist attacks on Belgian targets, were shot dead and another wounded by security people from Belgium's federal police after opening fire with automatic weapons on Thursday evening. Belgium is now on high alert. BBC quotes officials saying the shooters were part of a group that had returned to Belgium from fighting in Syria "and planned imminent attacks on police targets". In a search of the terrorists' premises - a flat above a bakery (source) - four Kalashnikov guns, bomb-making equipment and police clothing were seized.

Brussels, Belgium last night (as well as nearby towns Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Anderlecht and Schaerbeek): Searches were carried out overnight by security personnel hunting for additional embedded Islamist terrorists.

Antwerp and Brussels, Belgium this morning: Jewish schools were closed "after they were informed that they could be potential targets" according to the BBC quoting the Belgian newspaper Joods Actueel.

Zaventem, Belgium: Two Islamists suspected of involvement in acts of terrorism or planning them were arrested Thursday (source).

Across western Europe: CNN has a breaking report today "that the ongoing terror threat appears to involve up to 20 sleeper cells of between 120 to 180 people ready to strike in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The source said that European Union and Middle East intelligence agencies identified an "imminent threat" to Belgium, possibly also to the Netherlands."

Montrouge, France: The suburban Paris apartment, rented on a short-term basis by Amedy Coulibaly, the jihadist killer who seized a kosher grocery store in Paris last Friday and cold-bloodedly murdered four of the unarmed Jews on the premises, turns out to have been an armaments repository. French police yesterday showed what they found there: "four Tokarev pistols similar to a pair found at the store, a revolver, and sticks of dynamite... mobile telephones, tear gas grenades, a flak jacket, binoculars, a flag similar to the ones used by the Islamic State (Isil), a copy of the Koran and a car rooftop beacon similar to those used by police" (source). Many thousands of Euros were spent in accmulating what the young thug had there.

Berlin, Germany: Overnight raids on Thursday/Friday by German security personnel involving "250 officers and three Special Operations commands carried out the raids on 11 homes" resulted "in the arrest a pair of Turkish men for planning a terrorist attack on Friday", (source)

More coming.

10-Jan-15: An unusually sharp Israeli look from within at Europe's Moslem communities

Starting at the 1h17m05s mark, Zvi Yehezkeli
visits the Charlie Hebdo offices and speaks with the editor
and his colleagues

In August 2014, we published a blog post here about a television documentary in four parts that was about to go to air on Israel's Channel 10. It's an incisive and, in some ways, quite unique documentary series that looks closely - from right inside - at some aspects of Europe's Islamic communities. Here is a reprise of what we said then. (We also wrote about it in September and 

October 2012 when it first appeared on Israeli screens.)

The series is called "Allah Islam" in Hebrew, and "Muslims in Europe" in the English-sub-titles version. It is a collaboration between Israeli film director and journalist David Deri, and Zvi Yehezkeli who is Israeli Channel 10's senior news reporter on Arab affairs. 

Made principally for an Israeli audience, the narration and subtitles are in Hebrew. So is the general viewpoint; the makers are clearly addressing an Israeli audience and examining concerns that Israelis have about Europe. Don't be put off by the thought that this is an examination of Israel-specific issues. Mostly, it's not. 

As we wrote two years ago, the series deals in an extremely effective way with the mutual interaction of European society and a very particular immigrant group. Our sense is that as important as this issue is for many, and especially for Europeans, it gets too much of the wrong sort of attention.

The fact that Yehezkeli, a fluent speaker of Palestinian-accented Arabic, succeeds in passing himself of as a non-Jewish Palestinian Arab is key to its success, and we think to its uniqueness. We cannot imagine a made-in-USA documentary that could penetrate as deeply and cleverly into the very loaded subject matter.

Final scene in the series was filmed in Malmo, Sweden

To be sure, it does not pretend to take an encyclopaedic view, preferring to focus on the challenges thrown up by the interaction - and to a great extent the clash - between Europe's liberal outlook and those of the large Moslem migrant communities in the UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium and Sweden. Yes, terrorism is examined but so too are many other dimensions of this complex matter.

An English-subtitled version, blending all four parts into a single file of nearly 3 hours, can be viewed online via YouTube. The searing events in Paris of the past three days are echoed in a brief segment where Yehezkeli visits the editorial offices of the Charlie Hebdo in Paris and interviews Stéphane Charbonnier who was murdered this past Wednesday.

The four separate original parts and their titles:

Part 1: Isolation [from the start] [Hebrew-only version here]  

Part 2: Sharia law or State law [starts at 0:44:02] [Hebrew-only version here] 

Part 3: Terror [starts at 1:23:23] [Hebrew-only version here] 

Part 4: Europe's Jews [starts at 2:06:55] [Hebrew-only version here]

Even before this week's violence in Paris, we would have given the experience of viewing this our highest recommendation. Today, it's more important than that.

10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred

The Jordan Media Institute campus, Amman [Image: Sahar.Ahmed - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

How did a promising initiative, funded and supported by Western governments and NGOs and designed to produce world-class journalism in the Arabic world, end up creating a pedestal for one of Hamas' ugliest achievements, the 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria?

A major Arab media conference  took place this past weekend in the Jordanian capital, Amman. A published opinion piece authored by a senior member of the organizing team opens with these words:

"The lights of free speech are being steadily extinguished across the Arab world, heralding a new era of ignorance, intolerance and repression..."

As bad as this is, aspects of the news reporting industry in the Arab world are even more profoundly disturbing than she and her professional colleagues seem to realize. Allow us to explain.

Jordan, like the rest of the Arab world, lacks a free press. The respected human rights watchdog organization Freedom House in its 2014 update calls the Hashemite Kingdom “Not Free” and gives it a score of 6 on a scale of one to seven for freedom of the press. (Seven is the worst score.) It notes “a marked increase in the number of incidents of intimidation and physical attacks” on members of the media during 2013. Reporters Without Frontiers, which also tracks press freedom, says Jordan’s authorities further tightened their existing grip on its media in the past year.

Princess Rym Ali is a former CNN reporter who married King Abdullah II's half-brother in 2004 and thereby became part of Jordan's royal family. She is the daughter of Lakhdar Brahimi, once Algeria's Minister for Foreign Affairs and a senior UN official. She was raised in Great Britain and Algeria; educated in France and the United States.

A high-performing professional, she is the prime mover behind the establishment of an Arabic-language graduate school of journalism, Jordan Media Institute, which opened its doors in Amman in 2010. Its mission was to “raise professional standards and become a regional beacon” on the model of the princess' alma mater, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Sitting on the JMI board of directors are prominent individuals from journalism, law, publishing, the royal family of Jordan and the long-time head of the Agence France-Press bureau in Amman.

To judge from the JMI website and its use of all the right-sounding phrases, its arrival heralds something uplifting and positive. Its professed values and mission statement echo those of the best global journalism schools: “media freedom and human rights”, an “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”, “innovative curricula”, “world-class facilities”, “highest international standards”, “emphasizing accuracy and ethical journalistic procedures” in order to “provide the public with increased access to fair and balanced news”. Lovely.

All of this, while acknowledging "the distinctiveness of Arab culture and philosophy".

An impressive list of funders and strategic partners are providing “in-kind, financial or technical assistance” to make it happen: Anna Lindh Foundation, Sweden; Australia via its International Development Aid agency; Canada via its International Development Aid agency; EU via the European Commission Delegation in Jordan; the German government; Journalists for Human Rights; Netherlands government; Norwegian Institute of Journalism; Reporters Without Borders; Saatchi and Saatchi, the global ad agency; The Swedish Institute; the UK government; UNESCO, and some others.

The button links to the jmijournalists.com site

Visit the homepage of the JMI website and you see a button that links to a related website hosting the work-product of JMI’s own cadre of young journalists. It's in Arabic only, naturally enough; these contents are not meant for the Western sponsors and international partners. They're the work product of JMI's insiders. 

But intentionally or not, it is these pages – along with the invaluable help of Google Translate’s Arabic-to-English service - that shine a revealing light for non-Arabic speakers like us on what all that NGO and government money, inspiration and support is enabling for this “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”.  

On every page of the site, under the headline “Success Models”, a journalist called Tamimi is profiled. She is the murderer of our daughter, Malki.

They provide a large photograph of Tamimi and certain biographical details concerning her journalistic background. But important things about the “success model” offered up by this new centre of journalistic “excellence” are omitted:

• Tamimi brought a human bomb to the center of Jerusalem on August 9, 2001 to destroy the busy Sbarro pizzeria. She was instrumental in planning this major terrorist attack.
• Fifteen people were blown to pieces that day and 130 injured, many of them children and infants.   
• The sixteenth victim – a young mother with her two year-old daughter – has never regained consciousness.
• The people traveling on the bus with Tamimi from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the hour after the explosion beamed with delight as the scale of the carnage was reported on the radio.
• Tamimi was barely able to contain her own happiness [video], the joy that came from secretly being the one responsible for the massacre and no one on the bus knew.

We first published this image four years ago

Tamimi is a convicted killer, a psychopath who boasts on YouTube that she selected the site of her massacre so that the dead would include as many young religious Jews as possible. She famously smiled broadly with perverse pleasure [video] when informed of how many children’s lives were extinguished in the attack she masterminded.

JMI tells its English-speaking sponsors what it wants them to hear – that JMI embraces the “highest international standards” and “ethical journalistic procedures” – and the financial support flows. Yet in Arabic, the language of its Jordanian audience, JMI embraces a much darker narrative, one in which it glorifies a mass murderer. Do the Western funders understand this?

If we are wrong about JMI’s embrace of Tamimi, we would expect an urgent outburst of Arab rage at the affront to the honor of their society. 

But bitter experience tells us not to hold our breaths.

The JMI outrage does not exist in isolation. Consider the distinctive way Jordan’s legal system views terror. It might not be what most people think:

The Lower House [of Jordan’s parliament] on Wednesday endorsed draft amendments to the State Security Court (SSC) Law following extensive discussions over its provisions. The deputies excluded “resistance actions” against Israel from the court’s jurisdiction, following a proposal to do so by Deputy Tareq Khoury (Zarqa, 1st District). The deputies agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be “terrorism” at all; hence, they approved a provision that excludes actions against Israel from terrorism crimes. [Jordan Times, December 11, 2013 Note that this page is no longer reachable via a regular Google search. But it remains stored on the Wayback Machine, the archive.org repository of pages that never disappear. Click to see it here.]

The repugnant - and almost totally unpublicized - manner in which they have adjusted their laws is something to keep in mind when the Jordanians next stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe and the US in the battle against the jihadists. The State Department, by the way, bizarrely continues to call them “a strong ally in combating terrorism and violent extremist ideology”.

Princess Rym, interviewed before JMI opened its doors, said “Everybody talks about the media explosion in the Middle East“. She probably was not thinking of Tamimi, the budding young media student in the final year of journalism studies at Birzeit University who moonlighted as a news-reader at a West Bank television station. 

When Tamimi joined Hamas in 2001 as its first female jihadist, an explosion was what Tamimi had in mind. And on August 9, 2001, she made it happen.

The transcript of her subsequent trial on multiple murder charges shows Tamimi confessed it all to the court, and with no remorse.  She told the judges:

"The smile on my face will not be erased. I will not ask forgiveness... I will be smiling always because I won."

The impact her bloodless words had on the court can be gauged from the way the presiding judge handed down the sentence:

“It is our responsibility to distance the defendant from society forever… Let the normal pleasures of life therefore be denied the accused until the time of her death behind bars. We sentence the guilty party, unanimously, to fifteen life sentences and add to them one further life sentence for her other crimes… [and] recommend that the guilty party not be eligible for pardon by the military commander, nor to early parole by any other means.”

Justice unfortunately was not done. Less than eight years later, to our horror, Tamimi walked out of her Israeli prison cell to freedom. She was one of 1,027 undeserving beneficiaries of a successful act of terrorist extortion, the Gilad Shalit transaction that subsequently cost so many innocent Israeli lives and did so much irreversible harm to fundamental principles of justice.

On the day she was freed, Tamimi was transported immediately to Cairo for a photo op with the arch-terrorist who heads Hamas. Then, right after that, a flight to Jordan, her homeland, and a triumphant reception in her honour on the premises of her country’s Family Law Court in downtown Amman. Numerous additional gala events followed in Jordan and abroad. Soon she was given a weekly television program of her own on one of the Hamas satellite channels. Via television, cable, the social media and rallies in public places, she leveraged her status as an icon, as the incendiary unchained voice of the murder-minded terrorists still behind Israeli bars.

During Operation Protective Edge this past summer, as hundreds of rockets were being fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel’s towns and homes, Tamimi was the anchor for a series of blood-curdling, morale-boosting prime-time television programs produced by Hamas and beamed far, wide and via YouTube. She has become central to their jihadist war against the hated Jews.

But it’s her status as the poster girl, literally, for JMI, one of the Arab world’s most promising, well-resourced initiatives that ought to be causing deep dismay in the West.

Actually, it goes well beyond dismay. There’s a screaming contradiction at work here. On one hand, a politically-correct pledge to lofty journalistic values; all the right words. On the other, the marketing of Tamimi, a psychopath whose public appearances are replete with the language of religious zealotry, as the embodiment of Arab journalism’s courageous new wave. Lethal journalism personified.

This echoes aspects of the cultural encounter between Western democracies and Arab Muslim societies in which both use the same terminology but mean different things. The scandalous exploitation of video footage claiming to show a Gazan boy, Muhammad al Durah, being shot dead by Israeli soldiers in 2000 illustrates what we mean. 

(The Al Durah affair centers on a shocking video clip that went phenomenally viral 14 years ago. The Arab boy is terrified; his father is powerless; the Israeli bullets keep coming, until finally they strike home; the boy is dead. The part not screened at the time, right after the point where he is declared dead by the voice-over, shows the boy peeking out at the camera from under a raised elbow, plainly not dead. The consequences continue to exact innocent lives and are still being litigated in France’s courts.)

Jerusalem, August 9. 2001: The aftermath of the attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria,

proudly engineered by JMI's "success model"

A sound-bite [here] from a longer video interview shows a PA official who doctored the Al Durah video footage explaining that the tampering was done to fulfill the journalists’ duty “of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.” He looks satisfied as he says it, convinced he did the right thing. For audiences with a Western outlook, it exemplifies how blood libels, updated from their medieval origins, work in today’s world.

Mass murderers like Tamimi, honored by her peers for putting journalism to effective use for the benefit of their cause, evoke a similar sense of horror. Do these people seriously not understand what she did? Where did we lose each other? If Jordan’s best-educated cohort of emerging influence-builders thinks and does this when they believe no one outside the Arabic-speaking world is looking, what hope is there of a better future?

One answer is: there is hope. There is always hope. 

The beautiful, tragically short life of my daughter shows that. Malki loved life, loved making people smile, loved doing good. Her devotion to children with severe disabilities, starting with her own youngest sister, was inspirational. The work of the foundation we created in her memory  – The Malki Foundation – with families from every part of Israeli society (Christians, Druze, Moslems, the unaffiliated, Jews) who care for a child with severe disabilities is our way of creating a success model.

The 13 years since Malki was killed have been replete with reminders of how differently the people on the other side view things. For us, remembering our tragedy and honoring our child’s stolen life has involved bettering the lives of strangers, trying to affirm what we share. It’s the polar opposite of what the JMI journalists’ success model stands for. Finding a common language with them will take far more than political correctness and mission statements.

[A version of this post appears on Times of Israel today under the headline "By their role models shall ye know them"]

UPDATE December 1, 2015: Much has happened since we published this post a year ago. What we have learned about the Jordan Media Institute affair - and the involvement of Jordan's establishment including the royal family that owns and operates Jordan - is an ongoing scandal. It's compounded by an inexplicable cover-up by several major foreign governments, by some of the world's most important NGOs, and by an embarrassingly large collection of members of the media. It touches on multiple issues (funding, development, journalism, government among others) but on none more sensitive or dangerous than terrorism. 

We want readers who have gotten to this page to at least be aware of what we added to our understanding during these past 12 months:

• 11-Dec-14: Is it newsworthy when journalists make a terror-addicted murdering colleague their role-model?
• 11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan
• 16-Jan-15: Incubating terror-minded journalists in Jordan but they have an answer to the criticisms
• 19-Jan-15: The dilemmas of funding and enabling terror
• 05-Jun-15: Beyond the politics, the business and the misunderstandings at Orange, a question of terror
• 30-Nov-15: Incitement to savagery costs lives on all sides so why doesn't everyone want to shut it down?