 |
Video capture from the Facebook clip |
Ten days ago, in an online webinar broadcast globally by Facebook to wherever there are Arabic-speaking fans of this kind of thing, a
celebration took place.
This one marked nineteen years to the day of the horrors of 9/11.
Ahlam Tamimi, a fanatical Islamist, the killer of our daughter Malka Chana Roth, and a woman who was released from her Israeli prison cell after serving just eight years of a sixteen-consecutive-terms-of-life-imprisonment sentence, was its main drawcard.
That's her in the screen shot above.
Tamimi's speech reminded those of us watching from afar of just how much improbable freedom this boastful Jordanian bomber of a Jerusalem pizzeria in 2001 and a murderer of children has managed to acquire over the years since her return to the place of her birth and education (Jordan). It's where much of her immediate and extended family lives.
Tamimi's speech underscored how it is that she became the world's most wanted female fugitive. If your Arabic allows it, watch the full video here (embedded in a Facebook account called "National Prisoners") thanks to the mindless generosity of Facebook.
In case it "disappears" (such things have been known to happen), the video page is archived here.
We asked some capable and helpful Arabic-speaking friends to translate the overall sense of it. The notes that follow are based on what they said.
Taking a historical view, Tamimi refers to the steady decline in the status of Palestinian Arab prisoners in the wake of the 1994 Oslo Accords. Meaning she's reaching back to 1994 when she was about the same age as Malki, our daughter, was she was killed in the explosion Tamimi executed seven years later in the center of Jerusalem.
That's a problem in her eyes, the loss of standing and attention. In an earlier period, the fact of prisoners being released from their Israeli prison cells would have triggered meaningful festivities, she says. Today all that happens is a few family members come and greet the prisoner at the nearest Israeli checkpoint. No ceremonies, no community involvement. (For what it's worth, we see plenty of evidence via the Arabic-language social media that in many cases at least, they do make a big deal.)
Another indicator of how serious this new reality is: families are no longer as happy as they once were to see their daughters married off to released prisoners. And let's clarify that when she says 'prisoners', what she means is terrorists.
Tamimi sees this decline in ardor and prestige as influencing the media as well. If the public no longer care as much about the prisoner issue, she asserts, the media see less need to give it coverage.
As an instance, she cites the death of a prisoner behind Israeli bars a few days earlier. Death came, she says, via a heart attack, ending the life of the imprisoned hero just a few months before his expected release.
She refers in a similar way to the infection of dozens of prisoners with the Corona virus. Both, she says, illustrate how the public showing little interest led to the media failing to cover them. (Again, from where we sit, there is very considerable media coverage in the Arab world for both the deaths of "prisoners" inside Israeli prisons - never the result of anything ordinary, always stemming from Israeli malevolence - and the cruel ravages of COVID-19 which is also a direct result of Zionism in their telling.)
Though she doesn't name names, the heart attack case is probably Daoud Tala'at al-Khatib, a security prisoner with roots in Bethlehem whose death in Ofer Prison on Jerusalem's northern edge was reported in Middle East Eye on September 3, 2020.
The story told there is that Khatib had been
"sentenced to 18 years in prison for his involvement in anti-occupation activities as a member of the Fatah movement. The Palestinian Committee of Prisoners' and Former Prisoners' Affairs said fellow inmates at Ofer protested after learning of Khatib’s death, banging on doors and chanting. Israeli prison officers then reportedly raided the cells and put 10 prisoners in solitary confinement. Khatib’s death has reignited calls for Israeli prison services to be held accountable for its medical neglect of jailed Palestinians."
They go further over at Palestine News Network where Khatib is reliably reported to have been "martyred in Ofer prison as a result of a heart attack", while Electronic Intifada attributes his death to "an apparent stroke as the cause of death, but that has not been officially confirmed".
None of the Arab reports give much context. But we found a Lebanese account revealing [here] that the terrorist had a history of cardiac problems. Following an earlier heart attack in 2017, he underwent open heart surgery which, since he was a prisoner, would have been done as a no-cost gift from Israel's excellent medical system. How likely is it that he would have gotten care of this quality in the free market of the world he came from?
The house organ of the Palestinian Authority, WAFA, says an autopsy showed he died of "severe heart failure resulting from cardiomyopathy and coronary artery disease". It's hard to see problems like these stemming from anything the Israeli prison system could have inflicted. But we're working from limited information and the overblown nature of the Arab narrative tends to make things more confused and unclear than they would otherwise be.
Palestine News Network, paying some small attention to how he got imprisoned in the first place, calls him "a member of the General Intelligence Service, where he was arrested on charges of resisting the occupation". We're familiar with that kind of double-talk. Times of Israel, unimpressed by the vague generalities, says he had been "a member of the armed wing of the Palestinian Fatah faction". 2002, when he was arrested, was a period in which murderous terror attacks by Fatah were a daily occurrence. (We're trying to find references from open sources that might nail down how this 'prisoner' was sentenced to a term that would normally indicate someone was killed.)
So back to Ahlam Tamimi.
Her next complaint: the status enjoyed by prisoners in Palestinian Arab society has to be strengthened and popular concern for them implanted in the collective consciousness. But this isn't happening enough. If it were, the prisoners/terrorists would get the respect they deserve in the media as well.
 |
Signing the Abraham Agreement - September 15, 2020
|
She then moves on to the more acute - and highly current - problem of Arab
normalization with Israel, the process exemplified by
Israel's recent understandings with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. She sees this too as bringing lower the overall interest in the well-being of prisoners/terrorists.
And so does the Palestinian Authority negotiating with Israel. (Note that while her terrorism career began with her joining the nominally-secular Fatah faction of the PLO in 2000, she soon left it and was recruited into the Islamism-oriented Hamas; the two are perpetually at odds, often violently so.) She makes no mention of the Abbas regime's obsessive protecting and funding of its satanic scheme to give financial incentives to acts of terrorism - often called Pay To Slay. But then she's not making Fatah's case here; she identifies with its main competitor, Hamas.
Tamimi then addresses the usefulness of the social media. She says she feels a need to breath new life into the issue of prisoners/terrorists. The advantages of the social media include that they are not subject to what the translators term "certain agendas that afflict the rest of the media". The social media, as distinct from the conventional press, television and radio, are characterized by low cost, fast publishing and a high degree of interactivity. In the world for which she speaks, these are valuable advantages.
It's important, suggests Tamimi, who was awarded a masters degree in journalism in 2019, to cultivate good relations with social media influencers. This, she says, is how you win over younger people. She names several Arab social media activists whose followers number in the millions and who could produce short video clips about prisoners/terrorists.
She also urges reaching out to footballers and celebrities from such other fields as fashion models, religion, politics. How this fits with her adherence to Islamist conservatism is left unanswered.
 |
Tamimi the pan-Arab celebrity formally cuts a ribbon
|
As far as we can tell from the account we received, Tamimi made no mention of her own deep personal involvement in, and leverage of, such social media as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
We have been involved in efforts, so far all of them successful, to have her accounts on those platforms shut down. Her whack-a-mole persistence in relaunching under new names immediately after being silenced speaks to a real need by Tamimi for being heard and for influencing. It's a factor that we have seen no journalist address - but it clearly bears on how the US ought to understand Jordan's shabby safeguarding of this energetic promoter of murder-by-terror.
In fact, it's hard to not see this horrifying woman as a passionate, almost uniquely toxic, influencer. How many reporters, broadcasters, bloggers, commentators do you know who have double-digit murders in their CV?! And who are safeguarded by an entire government, Jordan's, despite the country's near-total dependence on US aid and support?
There's a far deeper and more compelling story here than most people have ever realized.
And this important side: It's breathtaking to watch her use - and be permitted to use to keep using for years - Facebook (and the other social media platforms where she is active) to encourage others to follow in her path. To make the world a safer and more welcoming place, in blunter terms, for her brand of terrorists - those who go looking for little children in busy pizzerias.
We'll just repeat that point for the many who pay no attention or fail to see what it all means: the social media giants, pre-eminent among them Facebook with its fabulously rich resources and bold slogans about keeping the social media world safe through algorithms and vigilance, are indispensable to the modus operandi of bona fide thugs like this hideous, blood-drenched woman.
How is this not a front page story on the world's most important news sites?
Tamimi appeared in a different setting just yesterday. We came across it while writing this post. She's mentioned in a Palestinian Arab op ed on the Al Watan Voice website [here] that waxes poetic about the sacrifices, the devotion, the sheer decency of Palestinian Arab prisoners (i.e. convicted terrorists).
The writer, called Hassan Al-Asi, delves into the "self-sacrificing" backgrounds of a number of cold-blooded terrorists before briefly devoting himself briefly to Tamimi:
The freed prisoner Ahlam Al-Tamimi, whose father also fell ill with Alzheimer's Disease [having just written that another 'prisoner' had the same fate] and did not recognize her, always cries if you listen to her telling her story. She says that she did not feel free after her [2011] release because freedom, in her sense, is the memories with her father and mother. She said that during her discussion of the Master's thesis [evidently a reference to a degree in journalism she received last summer from a private university in Jordan], her father remembered her for two seconds and called her by a name of endearment that he used to call her when she was young. The sacrifice of the prisoners is one of the greatest and noblest sacrifices. They are the ones who sacrifice their freedom for the sake of the freedom of their people...
Tamimi has never expressed a half-syllable of remorse for the lives she set out to destroy. If she has any regret, she has said in front of cameras and for the record, it is regret that she did not manage to murder more innocent Jews. At least not yet.
If you follow our efforts and our writings, it will be no surprise that we have no sympathy at all for this satanic figure. The life of comfort, influence, privilege and celebrity she lives - and has lived since October 2011 - is a travesty. The hand of Jordan's ruling family in safeguarding her while keeping the arms of American justice away from her is a disgrace we wish were more widely understood.
But our interest is explicitly not for vengeance. We have no interest in seeing her die as our Malki did, blown to pieces, alone, in grotesque pain, 15 years old.
What we hope to see is Tamimi arrested, taken in chains across the Atlantic, put on trial and for the justice system to run its course: for her to end her life in a bed - inside a US Federal prison, an old woman looking back on a wasted, frustrated life.
We're not open to hearing her advice about social media. Or almost anything else. There is nothing she can teach that we want to learn.
As for weeping with her as she sheds tears for a father and a mother who lived full and long lives, we're glad for her that she enjoyed their involvement in her life (the father danced at her wedding in 2012). But a tragedy it's not. Tragedy is what she inflicted, smiling, gloating, triumphant, on us personally and on six other families.
It's going way too far when this mass-murderer who set out to destroy the lives of as many children as possible - and succeeded - brazenly invites pity, empathy, participation in the deep sadness of seeing a father in his eighties, a man whose entire working career was spent working as part of the Jordanian military, fade away into dementia.
Ahlam Tamimi out to get justice, not sympathy. Those who see it the opposite way, no matter how elevated their status in life, ought to look long and hard into a mirror and understand the moral depths to which they have descended.
UPDATE Sunday September 27, 2020: We have emailed and tweeted to multiple addresses at Facebook on a daily basis since posting this and have not gotten a single acknowledgement. We have turned to the Department of Justice with a request that they act in accordance with the criminal provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 2339B which renders unlawful the providing of material support or resources to a foreign (non-American) terrorist organization. But the fact is the video of Tamimi appealing for more and deeper support for terrorists in the service of Palestinian Arab jihad, like herself, remains up, streaming and accessible to the world.
UPDATE Friday October 2, 2020: It appears that Facebook has now quietly, not responding to us in any way, removed the video.
UPDATE Sunday October 11, 2020: It's an honor to be able to once again thank Malgorzata Koraszewska who has very kindly produced and published a Polish-language version
("Rzeczy, o których chce nas poinformować najbardziej na świecie poszukiwana terrorystka") of this post. Our sincere thanks to her, and great appreciation to readers of this blog in Poland. And one more thing: Facebook is once again hosting the video clip of Tamimi urging her fans to give more support to terror and terrorists. We have taken this matter up with Facebook - who have given no sign of acknowledging that they have heard from our lawyers or us, or that they know there is a problem - and the law enforcement authorities in the United States. Stay tuned.]
