15-Nov-21: What values guide our societies and where does justice fit in?

Wanted posters issued in multiple languages by the US Department

of Justice and the FBI when terror charges against the
Jordanian fugitive were unsealed in March 2017

In October 2020, a little over a year ago, Arnold Roth - one of the two bloggers who produce the contents of this site - was interviewed by British media presenter, sports journalist, and political commentator Jonny Gould.

The discussion ranged from what the most important single part of the British media had just done ["22-Oct-20: Whose business is it if BBC engages in advocacy journalism?"] to some unreported consequences of the 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner release deal and on to the large and consequential matter of justice and what happens when our societies and their leaders stop giving it the absolute respect it has to get. 

And along the way, the matter of how can peace be done with Jordan. As Jonny Gould notes in the interview, the US is Jordan's largest provider of foreign aid. It gives billions of dollars to the Hashemite Kingdom each year. Why, he asks, is the US cozying up to the Jordanian king, Abdullah II, even as Jordan provides ongoing sanctuary to a killer who faces trial in the United States for her role in the murder of US citizens. (The reference is to our murdered daughter Malki, 15, who was a US national.) 

We're currently involved in renewed, immensely frustrating, contacts with senior officials of three governments as we continue to press for the Jordanian government (with whom we are not in any sort of dialogue and never have been) to be told what it must do - but still refuses - with the fugitive pizzeria bomber whom they have illicitly harbored since 2017, Ahlam Tamimi.

Against that background, here is a video of last year's interview.

Our sincere appreciation to Jonny Gould. Few journalists of the many with whom we have engaged in all the years of our campaigning come as well prepared as Jonny or as articulate as he is.

16-Mar-21: I remember shedding tears that day: Four years later

The article below is cross-posted from Frimet Roth's The Good, The Bad, The Ugly blog and was authored by Frimet. 

It was published there on March 15, 2021 under the heading A call to President Biden. Please check out the video clip at the bottom; we produced this - with the help of talented friends - to mark the anniversary about which Frimet writes.

---

Exactly four years ago, during the evening hours of March 14, 2017, Department of Justice and FBI officials invited my husband and me to a meeting in a Jerusalem hotel.

There they shared with us news that we believed would herald the arrest and trial of our child's murderer. Ahlam Tamimi had by then been enjoying freedom and security in Amman for five and a half years. In October 2011, she had been released in the lop-sided Shalit Deal with the terror organization Hamas.

The moment she landed in her native country Jordan, she began boasting of the terror bombing attack she had masterminded on Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in August 2001. The eatery had been packed with families that hot summer afternoon. The number of victims reached 15, including 8 children, among them our Malki.

Tamimi repeatedly urged her admirers to follow in her footsteps from the platform of a weekly talk show she hosted on the global Arabic-language Al Quds TV station. She also addressed live audiences both in Jordan and in several neighboring Arab countries to which she travelled during those years with ease.

On that March 2017 evening - it happens to have been my birthday - those US officials told us charges against Tamimi, the existence of which we knew nothing about until that moment, had just been unsealed. And her extradition to the US for trial had been demanded of Jordan pursuant to the 1995 Extradition Treaty between the two countries.

I remember shedding tears that day as I sat at the table across from those officials. I had little doubt that this monster would soon be where she belongs - behind bars in a US Federal penitentiary, this time until her last day on earth.

But here we are in 2021 and we are no closer to justice now than we were then. 

King Abdullah's regime steadfastly refuses to honor the extradition treaty that Jordan signed and ratified with the US in 1995. 

Jordan receives generous financial aid from the US as well as praise and adulation from the White House and from numerous individual members of Congress.

My husband and I are incredibly disturbed by the apparent passivity on the part of the US in the face of Jordan's brazen contempt for the rule of law.

It often seems to us that Jordan is the tail wagging the dog in this much lauded "partnership".

We truly hope that you, President Biden, will impress on Jordan that the existential support lavished on the Hashemite Kingdom is contingent on this evil woman being brought to justice.

We produced the video below with friends to mark the fourth anniversary this past weekend. It's also accessible via YouTube.

20-Nov-20: I wish Malki were here to encourage me

Malki was three years old when we celebrated
Israel's Independence Day for the first time in our
Jerusalem home after making aliya a year before

Frimet Roth's op ed below originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post edition of August 12, 2020, the week that marked nineteen years since the massacre at the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria. That's where the life of our daughter Malki, just 15, ended. And so did fifteen additional lives did too - 14 of them absolutely and immediately. And one more, the life of a young mother who was in the fast food place with her toddler daughter and has been in a a vegetative state ever since.

We're reposting it here now for a number of reasons, among them for the benefit of the members of Secretary of State Pompeo's entourage who have been here in Jerusalem since Wednesday and are flying out today. 

We would have very much wanted to discuss the Tamimi case with them - their strange and inexplicable silence in the face of Jordanian recalcitrance in particular. And their office's passivity. Perhaps next time.

Why is Ahlam Tamimi still free, 19 years after the Sbarro bombing?

The US has demanded her extradition from Jordan, Yet Jordan’s King Abdullah II refuses to accede to that demand.

By Frimet Roth | August 12, 2020 | The Jerusalem Post  

Nineteen years ago, our angel Malki was snatched from us in the Sbarro terror bombing.

Some may wonder how a pain can linger, oppress, ache and resist comfort for so long. Well, let me assure you, it can. And it does.

Sometimes, it feels more heart-wrenching to remember her life than it did when she was first murdered. There are so many family experiences and events from which she missed out.

The bombing that took her life and those of 14 other innocent Jews was uniquely horrific. It has spawned numerous “miracle” legends about lucky people who came eerily close to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has even inspired a minor writer to fabricate an entire interview with me which he included in his published memoir as well as in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

It is often the only one of many bloody attacks mentioned when the Second Intifada is revisited. Photographs of the site minutes after the explosion - it is the busiest intersection in Jerusalem’s city center – are often reprinted. The sight of baby carriages and strewn body parts is emphasized.

But for some reason what doesn’t attract press coverage is the travesty of justice that ensued.

To the bafflement of my husband and me, despite our years of effort to achieve justice for our Malki and the other victims, there’s remarkably little concern about how the mastermind, the main perpetrator of the Sbarro terror attack, is today a free woman.

Jordanian Ahlam Tamimi scouted Jerusalem’s streets during the summer of 2001 for a target that would offer the greatest possible number of Orthodox Jewish children. Having traveled with him by public transport from Ramallah, she escorted her “weapon,” a suicide bomber called al-Masri, on foot from East Jerusalem to the Sbarro location.

She boasts of how she spoke English to him during their walk in order to pass as tourists. Police were at that very hour combing the city’s streets for a terrorist about whom they had been alerted.

After instructing him to wait ten minutes before detonating so that she could escape unharmed, she fled back to Ramallah. There she calmly reported the attack on the nightly Arab language news program where she worked as the on-camera presenter.

In front of cameras, Tamimi has smiled to learn how many children she murdered and expressed dismay that the number wasn’t higher. She has urged audiences on Hamas TV and on social media to emulate her deeds. The depths of her evil are apparent to all.

My husband and I are astounded. Why is it that she is still free? Why does this not disturb people more than it appears?

The US has demanded her extradition from Jordan. It has an extradition treaty with Jordan that was signed and ratified by both countries and has been valid since 1995. Yet Jordan’s King Abdullah II – the totalitarian ruler of his kingdom – refuses to accede to that demand.
Nonetheless, the US State Department, the White House and US Congressmen from both sides of the aisle persist in praising “His Majesty” as they are wont to call him. The reverential tone they adopt when addressing him or referring to him is utterly cringe-worthy.

It is impossible to relate this outrage and omit our own leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While he is now a footnote in the sequence of events, it cannot be overlooked that Tamimi is free in Jordan because he chose to send her there. The several pleas that my husband and I published, circulated and delivered to Netanyahu to remove Tamimi from the list of freed murderers included in the infamous Shalit Deal, were all in vain. He never responded to us at any stage or in any form.

What he did do was tell the press that he sent letters of apology to all victims after the Schalit Deal. His staff personally told me when I called his bureau in the weeks after the Schalit Deal that hundreds of such letters were mailed out.

That is a lie. None were mailed out.

And so the travesty endures. I would note that a faint glimmer of light at the tunnel’s end now uplifts us. Several US politicians, global celebrities and major Jewish organizations have joined us in demanding that the US pressure Jordan to extradite Tamimi by withholding the generous annual financial aid it receives from the US A new law empowering such a sanction was passed in December 2019.

Prior legislation entitles the US Department of Justice to arrest and try suspects for offenses committed against US citizens overseas. Malki was, as I am, a US citizen. That US law specifies that a suspect can and must be pursued by US law enforcement and brought to trial in the United States. Jordan has raised a single objection, which American authorities have told us is spurious. But the fact is she is still in Amman with her family and not in a Washington courtroom.

Malki left behind a detailed diary recording the events of the last year of her life. It makes for a painful read, not to mention an eye-straining one since she wrote it in microscopic script. She clearly wanted to pack in the maximum.

Each year as her yahrzeit approaches, I read a few more entries and publicize one of them:

“February 4, 2001: There was a mortar firing in Netzarim [Gaza Strip] and truly miraculously nobody was hurt. There was a one year old baby lying at the site where it fell! A miracle! A person from Karmei Tzur was killed on his way home, a father of small children... We had a talk about Kever Rachel [Rachel’s Tomb]... then communal singing. I cried a bit and it was hard for me to start singing so Shira and I just hugged and that really helped me. At the end we had a talk by Rav Elisha Aviner. He was simply amazing! He encouraged us so much about the situation in Israel.”

I wish Malki were here to encourage me.

15-May-20: The hunt so far [VIDEO]

Most readers of our blog know we have been campaigning for the extradition to Washington of the Sbarro bomber Ahlam Tamimi for years - since she was freed in the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Deal. In fact, years before she was released. Our daughter's life ended in the massive explosion, along with many other lives.

What's happened since then as we confront roadblocks in Jordan, the United States and Israel is a complex story. Actually a work in progress.

And progress there certainly is, especially in these past six months. And this past fortnight.

Our appreciation to the Australian Jewish Association who hosted a ZOOM session on Thursday around a talk by Arnold Roth. It was a wide presentation rather than a deep one, but with plenty of surprises and hitherto unreported details.

Here's the video:

12-Nov-19: On Jordan, the US and the children killed in a pizzeria

Image Source

Nine days ago, the US State Department made an announcement that has a significant impact on our ongoing efforts to have our child's killer brought to justice in the United States.

We wrote about it here: "03-Nov-19: In Washington, a step towards bringing the Sbarro bomber to justice".

Shortly afterwards, the Washington editor at Haaretz, Amir Tibon, did what we think is a fine job of giving the State Department statement some context. It appeared online (text below) on November 3, and in the paper edition. (Click for the PDF)

U.S. Rejects Jordan's Refusal to Extradite Hamas Terrorist Wanted for Trial

Development could lead to further American pressure on Amman to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, who played a major role in organizing the Sbarro attack in Jerusalem in 2001

Haaretz - Amir Tibon, Washington, DC | November 7, 2019

WASHINGTON — The White House is rejecting claims by its Middle Eastern ally Jordan that a Palestinian-Jordanian terrorist who was involved in the murder of U.S. citizens cannot be extradited to face trial in the United States.

A new report published this week by the State Department says explicitly that the U.S. considers its extradition treaty with Jordan to be valid, despite a Jordanian court ruling from 2017 that said the opposite.

This development could lead to further American pressure on Jordan to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who played a major role in organizing the “Sbarro attack” in Jerusalem in August 2001, a suicide bombing which led to the deaths of 15 people, including two American citizens.

Tamimi currently lives in Jordan with her family. She was arrested by Israel in September 2001, convicted for her role in the attack in 2003, and sentenced to 16 life terms in prison; however, in 2011 she was released from prison as part of the “Shalit deal,” in which Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in return for the release of one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from captivity in Gaza.

After her release Tamimi moved to Jordan, where she was born and where most of her family currently resides. Ever since 2012, she has been living and working in Amman. Over the years, she has given many interviews, made public speeches, and has also hosted her own television show on a network affiliated with Hamas.

Ever since Tamimi’s release from prison, families who lost their loved ones in the Sbarro attack have been fighting to bring her to justice in the United States, where the justice system is obliged by law to pursue terrorists who killed American citizens abroad. Tamimi also appears on FBI’s most wanted terrorists list.

In 2017, progress was made toward bringing her to stand trial in the U.S., when the U.S. Department of Justice unveiled terror charges against her. Just days after that happened, however, Jordan’s highest court ruled that Jordanian law prohibited her extradition to the United States.

Jordan has since claimed that Tamimi cannot be extradited and that the extradition agreement that the Kingdom had signed with the U.S. in 1995 was invalid. No progress on her extradition has been made since.

Two months ago, Haaretz reported that two senior members of Congress were pressing the Trump administration to act on the subject. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the committee’s ranking member, sent a joint letter to the Department of Justice, seeking answers on the subject.

The two lawmakers noted in their letter that despite previous indications that legal action against Tamimi would move forward in the United States, no progress has been made for the past two years. The main obstacle, they wrote, has been the Jordanian government’s refusal to cooperate with U.S. authorities in bringing her to trial, based on a false claim that Jordan was unable to do anything to comply with U.S. authorities on this subject.

Nadler and Collins asked the department to provide “information regarding the current status” of the efforts to “overcome these objections.”

This week, for the first time since the Jordanian court ruling two years ago, the U.S. government officially stated that it rejects Jordan’s position on the subject.

This new development appeared in the department’s annual report on terrorism around the world. While it praised Jordan and its security forces for their actions against terror organizations, it also mentioned the country's harboring of Tamimi.

“A U.S. criminal complaint was unsealed in 2017 charging Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, a Jordanian national in her mid-30s, with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against U.S. nationals outside the United States resulting in death,” the report states.

The report further notes that “in 2018, Jordan continued to cite a court ruling that its constitution forbids the extradition of Jordanian nationals. The United States regards the extradition treaty as valid.”

Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki, 15, was one of the U.S. citizens murdered in the Sbarro attack, told Haaretz that “what has just happened at the State Department is a welcome step in the direction of overdue justice. It will reverberate, though we realize many steps still lie ahead before we see Malki's killer in chains and handcuffs.”

Roth added, however, that he and his wife, who is also a U.S. citizen, have “knocked on a long list of U.S. government doors since Jordan's highest court blocked American efforts to bring Ahlam Tamimi to trial in Washington.

He said that "Being ignored by senior public figures, members of Congress, their staffers, officials, diplomats - that's been startling for us. We've learned it's easier for them to pretend we're not there, to just not take our calls, to leave our emails unanswered. Who wants to bump heads with the bereaved parents of a murdered child?”

Roth explained that since the Department of Justice has pursued the criminal complaint against Tamimi, the biggest question was how the U.S. could get Jordan to extradite her, despite the Hashemite Kingdom’s refusal to do so thus far.

“My impression is that the Justice Department made an important step in 2017 by deciding to prosecute Tamimi and committing to bring her to trial in the U.S., but they have reached the limit of their jurisdiction,” Roth said in a phone call from Jerusalem, adding that the State Department’s handling of the case has been disappointing and frustrating for the most part.

“In the past few weeks and for the first time, a senior U.S. government figure has entered the picture and indicated to my wife and me that there are quiet moves to press Jordan to comply with the extradition treaty,” Roth said. “Though the years of inaction have been hugely frustrating, it has been good to hear they do indeed want to see Tamimi brought to trial in Washington. They say it’s a matter of how and when.”

Roth noted that Jordan’s King Abdullah regularly visits Washington and meets with senior U.S. officials, and that the Tamimi case has never been publicly raised in the context of those meetings. Just in recent months, the King had met with senior Trump administration officials while visiting the U.S. in September, and then hosted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when she visited Amman two weeks ago.

“Our family is completely not political,. We are not asking for anything except to see this person, who participated in the murder of our daughter, stand trial,” Roth said. “For us this is not about politics, it’s about justice.”

Image Source

No mainstream newspaper anywhere has taken up the Haaretz article or the development that it reports. Not even the Hebrew edition of Haaretz.

But starting this past weekend, there has been a wave of responses in the Arabic media. We have seen dozens of them already, all taking an essentially identical line.

That's reflected in the article we reproduce below, from an Arab source but in English.

MP calls for Jordan not to extradite freed Palestinian prisoner to US

Middle East  Monitor - November 11, 2019

Yahya Al-Saud, Jordanian MP and chairman of Palestine Committee in Jordanian Parliament, has called for Amman not to accept a US request to extradite freed female Palestinian prisoner Ahlam Al-Tamimi, Al-Resalah newspaper reported yesterday .

This call came in the wake of reports about tension between the US administration and Amman over the latter’s rejection of requests to extradite Al-Tamimi, who holds a Jordanian passport.

“The Jordanian government must protect its citizens and America cannot take on the role of international police officer,” Al-Saud said. “[America] has to take the side of the peace camp, not oppression camp,” he added.

“I think that I am representing the view of the Jordanian public in saying that the US is a partner in the occupation [of Palestine] through several measures it has taken in this regard.”

Al-Saud added: “Ahlam was sentenced and released. It is not acceptable to be sentenced twice. However, she did not commit a crime, but defended her country.”

In March 2017, the Jordanian Court of Cassation upheld a ruling of a lower court that Amman must not extradite Ahlam to the US as she is a Jordanian citizen.

Al-Tamimi was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces in 2001, sentenced and spent ten years in jail before she was released to Jordan in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap reached between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.

In 2017 she was included in the FBI’s most wanted list.

(For the record, Middle East Monitor routinely comes in for bitter criticism from well-informed observers (quoted in Wikipedia) who see it as "strongly pro-Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Hamas', a "conspiracy theory-peddling anti-Israel organisation" and "antisemitic".)

Image Source

We have not yet seen a single published comment or report in the Arabic language - not from a Jordanian source, not from any other part of the Arab world - responding to these developments by calling for Jordan to comply with its treaty obligations to its extremely generous foreign aid provider and critically important strategic partner, the US.

We find no Arab call demanding that this moral stain besmirching Jordan's place in the international community be removed. No expression of embarrassment by Jordanian thought leaders distancing themselves from the disgraceful enthusiasm for a self-avowed killer of Jewish children who has lived the live of a celebrity in the Hashemite Kingdom since returning to live there and raise her family, starting in 2011.

The massacre at central Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria took the lives of fifteen people, eight of them children including our Malki. A sixteenth victim, a young mother who was there with her two year old child, has remained in a vegetative state in all the years since then.

The government of Jordan in its customary fashion has stayed stoney silent about what the US has now said publicly about the treaty that Jordan disavows (i.e. that the US regards it as perfectly valid and enforceable). Jordan remains utterly silent as well about the appalling views expressed in its parliament about Tamimi and the US request to extradite her.

Jordan's years'-long public silence on every aspect of its illicit sheltering of confessed bomber and FBI Most Wanted Terrorist Ahlam Tamimi stands in shabby contrast to its many bold, principled and public declarations about its determination to fight terrorism. 

For instance, this news report below from a September 2019 oration by King Abdullah II. Notice its odd but characteristic use of the word "holistic" (see "03-Dec-17: Understanding Jordan's king and his "holistic" approach to terror"). 

"...Jordan launched the Aqaba Process in 2015. Our initiatives have aimed at building a strong global platform, enabling multiple stakeholders to share expertise and focus resources in the fight against terror," the King said. The holistic approach is a major feature of the Aqaba Process and the partnerships that it led to, His Majesty added. "It goes beyond security cooperation, to recognise the wide range of relevant efforts: law enforcement; education; inclusive, sustainable development, that gives people especially young people opportunity and hope; and conflict resolution, to achieve peaceful political solutions to the crises that terrorists exploit," the King said. His Majesty called for countering the extremist narrative, on-line and off-line. "This means fighting the ideological battle on behalf of core values humanity depends on: mutual respect, understanding, and coexistence," the King added. His Majesty urged more leaders to engage in this process. Speakers at the high-level meeting commended Jordan’s efforts in launching the Aqaba Process to bring stakeholders together with the goal of countering terrorism within a holistic approach. [From a Jordanian Foreign Ministry report on Leaders Dialogue: Strategic Responses to Terrorist and Violent Extremist Narratives (Source).]

Coming from the autocrat who keeps our child's killer, who confesses for the record to the bombing, safe and out of the clutches of the US Justice Department, the FBI and the Federal courts of the United States, the hypocrisy and sheer dishonesty on display here is disturbing.

30-May-19: Paris, Amman, Washington: Extradition and what it can reveal about governments and terror

The landmark Jewish restaurant in Paris whose patrons were targeted in 1982

by Palestinian Arab jihadists and their machine guns and hand grenades.

In this post, we explain why an important court decision handed down in Jordan this week by its highest court throws a sharply negative light on Jordan's controversial 2017 claim that the kingdom's 1995 Extradition Treaty with the US in invalid and non-binding.

That earlier ruling, concerning Ahlam Tamimi, now looks contrived and unconvincing. And though the United States isn't saying much about it, we think people ought to know.

Terror and the Hashemite Kingdom

Jordan's creativity with the definition of terror is not new and hardly a secret.

But in polite circles, especially circles which view King Abdullah II as a valuable friend of the West and a strategic ally in the battle against "the terrorists", discussion of the matter is largely confined to whispers.

That's an insight we keep re-acquiring as we pursue Ahlam Tamimi, the confessed Jordanian killer of our daughter [24-Mar-17: Our daughter's smiling killer: "Shocked" that US "decided to go after her for no obvious reason"]. The Hashemite Kingdom's role in that process, and few know this as well as we do, has been obstructive, deceptive and dangerous.

Ahlam Tamimi, now a fugitive from US justice with her own "Most Wanted" poster (in English and Arabic versions), is a Jordanian woman of 39 who faces serious US Federal terrorism-related charges that were announced in Washington on March 14, 2017.

Ahlam Tamimi the fugitive

The brief version: At the age of 21 and as Hamas' first female terrorist, Tamimi masterminded the bombing of the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria massacre and the many Jewish children inside. (She has proudly admitted for the record that it was Jewish children she sought to kill. And why.) She carefully chose the site, scouted out the access path, brought the bomb (a human bomb - a young religious fanatic also in the service of Hamas) and then fled back to Ramallah moments before the explosion where she read the evening TV news bulletin for Istiqlal TV.

One of her many innocent victims, as regular visitors to this blog know, was our daughter Malki, 15. She was an American citizen.

In October 2011, Tamimi was released prematurely to our horror from a prison sentence of 16-life-terms in Israel in the Shalit Deal. Israel sent her off to Jordan where she came from ["19-Oct-11: Haaretz: Shalit prisoner swap marks 'colossal failure' for mother of Israeli bombing victim"]. She quickly set about developing an enhanced career in terror and terror-incitement under Jordanian protection.

Some weeks later, in early 2012, we went to Washington and asked the US Department of Justice to prosecute Tamimi. Under a Federal law, the US can go after terrorists who kill US citizens on foreign soil. Its jurisdiction is world-wide.

And indeed, this eventually happened. The background is here: "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?"

The details of how terrorism charges were finally announced against Tamimi are not well known. For instance, the fact that the judge who signed off on the charges actually did so in 2014, three years earlier. There's a reason for those lost three years; not such a good reason.

And this:

All three of the DOJ officials quoted in the 2017 announcement have moved on to other positions during these past two years. We wrote a letter last week [i.e. in March 2019], addressed to them and to the three officials who filled their places in the DOJ. Among other things, we asked them whether the DOJ is going to address certain serious problems that we described for them. At this stage, we do not plan to publish the letter; we continue to hope that we will get a meaningful DOJ response that deals with the important issues we raised. However we do want people to know (which is why we are posting this now to our blog) that we sent that letter and that it respectfully requests the DOJ to take specific steps... [Our March 14, 2019 post]

It's distressing to report that the Justice Department has still not responded to our letter. But our concern here and now is with other aspects of the Tamimi case.

The 1982 Paris killings

Let's turn now to a murderous Palestinian Arab terror attack on one of France's best-known Jewish landmarks, a Paris restaurant called Chez Jo Goldenberg. It happened on the same date as the Sbarro atrocity, but 19 years earlier - on August 9, 1982.

In a 2016 post (13-Feb-16: Three decades after a terror attack on a Paris restaurant, some things remain just as they were"), we made some pungent observations about Jordan and the poorly understood, even surprising, way it approaches terrorism in general and ultra-violent antisemitic attacks in particular.

In November 2018, Mr and Mrs Tamimi, unrepentant murderers both,

were paid generous tribute on Jordan's most-watched TV channel.

Not one word about the Israelis they killed.

We wrote this:

We wish there was much wider awareness of how Jordan has provided a friendly environment since 2011 for the woman who masterminded the murder of our daughter, allowing her to operate freely from within Jordan's borders; to speak as an honored guest at its universities, professional guilds, law courts and other venues; to record her television program "Naseem Al Ahrar" (translation: “Breezes of the Free”) week after week for beaming out to the Arabic-speaking world throughout the past 4 years; and to emerge as a genuine pan-Arab celebrity.

In a Jordanian courthouse

So now to the events of this week. Ben Cohen's fine report today ["Jordanian Refusal to Extradite Paris Kosher Restaurant Killer to France Renews Concern Over Amman’s Terrorism Policy"] on The Algemeiner website sets the stage:

The Kingdom of Jordan’s highest court has rejected a French appeal for the extradition of a suspect in a deadly attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris more than 30 years ago — raising further concerns that the stalwart ally of the West continues to offer safe haven to terrorists wanted by the courts of other countries, including the United States.
On Tuesday, Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruled against the extradition of 57-year-old Nizar Tawfiq Mussa Hamada, one of the alleged participants in the Aug. 9, 1982 attack at Chez Jo Goldenberg, a kosher restaurant in the traditionally Jewish Marais district of Paris.
After exploding a grenade inside the packed restaurant during its lunchtime service, two terrorists then opened fire on the diners with machine guns. Six people died and 22 more were wounded in the assault.
The atrocity was carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization — a radical Palestinian terrorist group that was active during the 1970s and 1980s, when it carried out attacks in over 20 countries. Named after the nom de guerre of its founder, Sabri al-Banna, the Abu Nidal group was backed at different times by the Iraqi, Syrian and Libyan regimes.
Speaking after Tuesday’s decision in favor of his client, Hamada’s lawyer, Mazan al-Tawil, praised the Jordanian judges for “categorically refusing” the French extradition request. Al-Tawil referred to the court’s decision to reject an earlier extradition request for Hamada in Feb. 2016 for the same reason — that a period of more than 30 years had elapsed since the atrocity, exceeding Jordan’s “limitation period” for extradition.
Al-Tawil’s co-conspirators in the attack on the restaurant have similarly escaped French justice because of the intervention of Jordanian courts.
The suspects in the Chez Jo Goldenberg attack were not formally identified until 2014, when two anonymous informants associated with Abu Nidal’s group supplied the French authorities with the missing information.
The following year, France’s top magistrate tasked with combating terrorism, Marc Trévidic, issued arrest warrants for several suspects, including Hamada and fellow Jordanian citizen Souhair Mouhamed Hassan Khalid al-Abassi — aka Amjad Atta — reputedly the mastermind behind the attack.
A French request to the Jordanian courts for al-Abassi’s extradition was similarly rejected in Oct. 2015 — just three months after the Hashemite Kingdom signed an extradition treaty with the French government.
But France is not the only country to have been turned down by Jordan after submitting an extradition request in connection with terrorism... [The Algemeiner today]

The Tamimi extradition

Ben Cohen is of course right.

That very same Jordanian tribunal, the Court of Cassation in Amman (the equivalent of a Supreme Court), handed down a highly problematic ruling in an unrelated extradition case two years ago. That 2017 case is about Mrs Tamimi. Its larger importance is that it considers the legality of an extradition treaty between Jordan and the United States that the US considers - without any doubt - in effect and binding.

The US had made a formal request years earlier (we think in 2013 but can't be sure) for Jordan to hand Tamimi over to them for bringing her to the US as required in their treaty. Jordan had persisted for the following three-plus years in its refusal.

The Jordanian court was asked, in effect, to rule on whether Jordan could, should or had to extradite Tamimi to face US terror charges.

It decided within the same week as the announcement of Federal charges against Tamimi, in fact just days later. In a somewhat bizarre ruling it first confirmed what everyone already knew, that there is indeed an extradition treaty with the US and has been since 1995. The Clinton Administration had signed it with King Hussein's government when it wanted to get its hands - and did get its hands - on Eyad Ismoil, one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plotters.

But, said the court, embarking on a Save Tamimi strategy, a constitutional flaw in the process meant that the treaty with the US could not be used to send the confessed killer to a Washington courthouse. Moreover, the treaty was not only invalid now. It had been invalid since the day it was signed.

This is an astounding thing for a US ally to claim. But it gets worse. 

Jordan has in reality happily extradited other Jordanian terrorists after 1995, The most recent was sentenced in the US just last year. None of them, as it happens, targeted Jews. (Could that be the missing key? And in case any reporters are reading this, feel free to ask us for the details - which are a matter of public record but remain ignored in the Tamimi scandal nonetheless.)

The flaw, said the court, was in the fact that the treaty needed to get the approval of Jordan's rubber-stamp parliament. But it somehow never did. And it continues not to get it. Never getting it meant, the court implies, that Jordan's constitution prohibits the treaty from going into effect. And so Ahlam Tamimi could not be handed over to the US for prosecution. Case closed.

The US government reward

In its March 14, 2017 announcement, the DOJ did more than just unveil charges against Tamimi. It also added her to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list where she still is today. A $5 Million reward for "information that leads to [her] arrest or conviction" was announced nine months later by the Rewards for Justice Unit (RFJ) of the Department of State.

Never in hiding: The Tamimis in their Amman apartment

in March 2017 where Associated Press reporters and

video people visited them [link including video]

That reward, which we pressed for is a curious thing. Why?

Because Tamimi has never been in hiding. She lives free-as-a-bird in Jordan today in a pleasant, well-equipped apartment with her family in Amman. Her husband, who is her cousin and also a convicted murderer was also released in the Shalit Deal. News crews, among them Associated Press visit regularly and interview her there.

The DOJ and the State Department's RFJ clearly know this.

Jordan's legal stance

Consider now what Jordan's Court of Cassation did in the Jo Goldenberg Massacre decision on Tuesday. It said (our words, not theirs):

We would simply love to do the right thing and extradite these evil shooters back to Paris. But - such rotten luck - the 2015 France/Jordan extradition treaty doesn't help since the statute of limitations has expired. Yes, it's too late. Our judicial hands are tied.

To which a pair of grieving parents in far-away Jerusalem say: So which one is it, Your Honors?

In your French decision, you treated that 2015 extradition treaty as legal and binding but you discovered an unrelated problem that meant the alleged perpetrator of the Paris massacre didn't have to be handed over to the French prosecutors. But in your American decision, you found the US treaty was invalid; some additional signature was needed, you said, and 22 years later Jordan's rulers still hadn't found the pen (except when it was needed for that French treaty). So Tamimi is saved the trouble of being prosecuted in Washington.

What a farce.

Did the 2015 France/Jordan extradition treaty get approved by the Jordanian rubber stamps that, according to the 2017 Tamimi decision, had to approve it? Apparently yes. Jordan's most senior judges aren't claiming the agreement with France is tainted constitutionally (as the 1995 US/Jordan one is, they say). If the French treaty was flawed, they would have said it. And they didn't.

We say: So then let that same Jordanian rubber stamp come now, this afternoon, right this hour, and at the king's command fix Jordan's allegedly invalid US Extradition Treaty. Isn't that how rubber stamps are supposed to work?

Or take the opposite view. Let's say the French treaty was never rubber stamped by Jordan's parliament. Yet the judges, who are silent on this point, treat it as being perfectly effective. No constitutional flaw. No need for it to be rubber stamped because, well, you know. But, oops, sadly there's this statute of limitations.

Taken together, the two Jordanian Court of Cassation decisions, one from 2017, one from this month, underscore the very high likelihood that the Jordan/US Treaty is in reality perfectly valid. That is precisely what the US says though it has not yet said it in public for reasons that bother us a great deal. (We have it in writing from multiple US government sources).

Without being excessively blunt on this, let's just say there's much room to be deeply cynical about Jordan's claims and its highest court's decision to refuse the US extradition request in the specific case of Tamimi. (Jordan's government itself, as distinct from its Court of Cassation, has never said a word in public about their refusal to extradite Tamimi.)

"Stop bothering Jordan"

Respected observers have noted that the kingdom of Jordan is going through a rocky period. There seems to be a sense that its dear friends in the West need to cut it some slack, not press too hard and do what needs to be done so its widely admired anti-terrorism monarch, King Abdullah II, can get on with the job of fixing the economy and building a stable, prosperous Western-facing state.

The man speaking is the Palestinian Arab father of the human bomb who

was brought to the Sbarro site by Ahlam Tamimi.
(Tim Palmer, the Middle East bureau chief of Australia's national

broadcaster, ABC, at the time of the Sbarro 

massacre tried to persuade usto be interviewed with because
he's so opposed to violence and so pro-peace.) She fled to the
safety of Ramallah after instructing him to explode a
few minutes later. Which he did.

We don't agree.

Jordan, entirely unreported by the news industry, has turned the Sbarro savage, Tamimi, into a pan-Arab hero from her safe, government-guaranteed perch in Amman, Jordan's capital.

Since 2011 via TV, social media and Internet-streamed video all over the Arabic speaking world and even into Israel's security prisons, she has become an inspiration to the powerful and very large forces inside the kingdom (and far beyond it) who want more bloodshed and conflict, more killing of Israelis and Jews, more "dignity" for the 80+ percent of Jordanians who call themselves Palestinians.

Tamimi no longer takes part in the weekly terror-promoting TV program we mentioned earlier. (Leaving it was not her choice - another story.) But she continues to play a key role in Jordan's fascination with Arab-on-Israeli terror. For a good example, see "24-Nov-18: How Jordan's mainstream media showcase a couple of role-model jihadist murderers".

Justice

The thwarted Jo Goldenberg extradition underscores what we already learned as we have tried (and continue to try) to bring our child's killer to justice since 2012:

You can have healthy bilateral relations based on justice, openness and honesty. Or you can pander to the powerful pro-terror forces operating inside Jordan. No one and certainly not a government that aligns itself strategically with the US can expect to have both.

It's a message we still hope (and fully expect) to hear articulated by officials of the US government.

21-Mar-19: The Sbarro Massacre mastermind worries she isn't getting enough sympathy

The Moroccan interview [Source]

Some far-off day, we may write a book about how it feels to grieve for the lost life of a beloved child murdered at the age of 15 by a violent religious fanatic - and to see other people place the mastermind of her killing on a hero's pedestal.

That's been our fate since Ahlam Tamimi, a Jordanian woman who was Hamas' first-ever female terror agent, returned in 2011 to her homeland  and began living the life of her dreams.

Jordan is where she was born and raised. It's where most of her family live. Jordan is also the kingdom whose rulers have taken what seem to us to be huge foreign relations risks by sticking a finger in the eye of their most important ally, the United States.

How they did this is something about which we have written and spoken publicly a lot. Jordan has an extradition agreement with the United States. It's been in place since Bill Clinton was president. Several Jordanians were extradited to the US and convicted and imprisoned.

But there's evidently something about a Jordanian woman who identifies as a Palestinian Arab and whose targets were not only Israelis but also mainly children that somehow changes the degree to which Jordan respects its bilateral obligations.

The bottom line: Jordan's highest court ruled in March 2017 that Tamimi cannot be extradited to Washington because (this takes genuine hutzpah, given the realities of power in Jordan) that treaty is not only unconstitutional now but has been since the day it was signed by the two governments. We won't go into details but the problem on which Jordan's Court of Cassation based its finding is a highly technical, narrow and trivial one that Jordan could have easily fixed and still can. It chooses not to.

And so instead of standing trial in Washington and facing life imprisonment, this FBI Most Wanted Terrorist who confesses to killing 15 people now appears - more and more often - in public Jordanian forums, in Jordan's mass media and in the newspapers and websites and television  programs of Arabic media outlets throughout the world. (For more about the events of the past two years since the US charges against Tamimi were unveiled, see "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?")

If you're a regular visitor to our blog, you may know how distressed we are by the sense that the US government could do, but is not doing, more to press Jordan and bring this loathsome and very dangerous woman to justice.

You might also know that we have been campaigning for the US to take more active measures. This has entailed more and more overtures to public officials and members of Congress [see "03-Feb-16: In Washington DC, victims of terror and the search for justice"] and a lot of behind the scenes activity. There has been meaningful progress but still not enough.

Out of the blue, in the midst of yet another official King Abdullah II visit to Washington nine days ago, one of the US president's senior advisers took up the Extradite Tamimi cause publicly. He did this via Twitter ["12-Mar-19: Yes, Americans surely ought to know that Ahlam Tamimi lives free today"], tweeting

Americans ought to know that Ahlam Ahmad al-Tamini [sic], a convicted Hamas terrorist who, together with others, murdered in cold blood 15 people including 7 children, lives free today. See details here: https://rewardsforjustice.net/english/ahlam_al_tamimi.html

Two days ago, Tamimi took advantage of an interview with a Moroccan newspaper, to push back.

The interview was of course published in Arabic. What follows is a fisked English version (and it's not machine translated) in which the fugitive engages in a mixture - by now familiar to us - of outright lies, self-aggrandizing exaggerations and a small handful of intriguing revelations.

I am not a terrorist but a girl who defended her land and America does not frighten me: Interview | 2019-03-19 | Yusuf Bannasiriya in AlYawm24

Last Tuesday, the American president’s delegate to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt attacked the Jordanian journalist of Palestinian origin, the freed prisoner in the Wafaa al-Ahrar (Gilad Shalit) deal, Ahlam Tamimi. He said via a tweet on Twitter that Tamimi “killed more than 15 people and is living free today” while demanding information on her whereabouts in exchange for a financial reward.

This Ongoing War says: Actually Mr Greenblatt isn't demanding anything other than that Americans ought to know. Why they surely should. The link he includes in the tweet explains - in English but unfortunately not in Arabic - that the Rewards for Justice unit at the US State Department has for more than a year now been offering a $5M prize for information leading to her capture and conviction in the United States. (The far more important Arabic version of that State Department poster is online here.) Tamimi and her Moroccan interviewer are probably not familiar with the reward for the sad reason that no physical posters have actually been posted anywhere. That's an issue for another time.

In this context, the Al-Yawm 24 website interviewed this young Palestinian woman who is wanted by Washington, Ahlam Tamimi, and who was arrested by the Occupation after her involvement in a martyrdom operation in 2001 after which she was sentenced to 1,600 years of imprisonment, before being released in the prisoner exchange deal in 2011.

This Ongoing War says: They call her a Palestinian but the record shows she was born in Jordan, was educated there right up until the point where she decided to cross the Jordan River and pursue journalism studies at a Palestinian Arab university, and lives there today with the man she married there seven years ago ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"]. Calling the massacre of Jewish customers (Tamimi says she went looking for Jews) "a martyrdom operation" is a cognitive warfare strategy. Tamimi is no martyr and has made clear repeatedly that her goal was murder - the murder of Israeli children. The weapon she planted at Sbarro to achieve her hideous aim was a human bomb - a young religious fanatic with an explosive-laden guitar case on his back; at the critical moment, he blew up the guitar case, himself, the Sbarro pizzeria and many unarmed, unsuspecting humans. She brought him from Ramallah, accompanying him through the Israeli security checkpoint and along the streets of central Jerusalem. Neither he nor she sought to commit suicide but to kill people. The reference to "1,600 years of imprisonment" is inaccurate: she was serving 16 concurrent terms of life imprisonment with a strong judicial recommendation that she never be paroled or otherwise released. In the event, she was in prison for barely 8 years after being sentenced.

Q. What is this all about and what is the story behind the American demand of handing you over to Washington?

Tamimi: Mine is an old story that goes back to September 2016 when Interpol circulated the red memo all over the world in an attempt to capture me and hand me over to America due to two cases having been opened against me by the families of the dead Israelis who had dual American citizenship and who died in the Jihadi operations which I waged in Jerusalem. These were successful and from that day on, the statements kept coming, the most recent one of which is Greenblatt’s statement claiming that I am living free and that there is an American reward site which is offering 5 million dollars to whoever provides information on me.

This Ongoing War says: The FBI and the US Department of Justice sought and got an Interpol Red Notice some time before September 2016 while the US Federal criminal complaint against Tamimi was still under seal i.e. secret. Interpol doesn't have its own officers. Interpol says the Red Notice is "a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action... A Red Notice is an international wanted persons notice, but it is not an arrest warrant." The Jordanian police were obliged to act on it and did. (They have since made clear the case is closed from their standpoint, and they don't plan to bother her again.) She was taken into custody for a single night and then released in the morning. She was then, we believe, told by Jordanian government officials to maintain a low profile, as a result of which she stopped presenting the inciting-to-terror, Hamas-produced TV show ["Breezes of the Free"] she had recorded every week in Amman for nearly five years.

Q. Who issued the previous statements?

Tamimi: Among these were official statements issued by the US Attorney General who said that I was a terrorist and a criminal, and she demanded from Trump, at the beginning of his presidency, that he arrest me. She said: “Go and practise your duty as president and arrest this terrorist who is currently living freely in Jordan”, in addition to statements issued by the Jewish society which laid two cases against me in the Washington court.

This Ongoing War says: To see what three of the highest-ranking law enforcement officials in the US, including Mary B. McCord, the then Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security,  actually did say, go to the Department of Justice Media Release dated March 14, 2017 and headed "Individual Charged in Connection With 2001 Terrorist Attack in Jerusalem That Resulted in Death of Americans". Prof. McCord called Tamimi "an unrepentant terrorist who admitted to her role in a deadly terrorist bombing that injured and killed numerous innocent victims... When terrorists target Americans anywhere in the world, we will never forget – and we will continue to seek to ensure that they are held accountable."

Q. What is your response to the latest statements of the US delegate to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt?

Tamimi: Firstly, this person is the consultant to the American president Donald Trump, so he is not a nobody. In addition, as I indicated before, he is the US peace delegate to the Middle East. His mission therefore is as someone who is supposedly working towards peace and who is speaking from this starting point, while his statements conflict with the expected mannerisms of this role. How can we speak about peace and complete calm while he leaves the terrorists of ISIS and the terrorist citizens within America to shoot at schools and kill civilians, and then he comes to speak against a Palestinian having Jordanian citizenship and whose role it was only to defend her homeland in a resistance against the longest invasion in the world, as the Palestinian people have done.

This Ongoing War says: Tamimi, a highly-ideological savage who grins right into the camera when asked about the children she bombed to pieces, assumes the mantel of striver for peace. A defender of her homeland. A resistance fighter. She assumes (and she may be right) that she's addressing an audience for whom war crimes, the cold-blooded, calculated murder of innocents and the deliberate hunting down of children all come with no moral stain. That what she did is perfectly understandable. The question for the rest of is do we want to live in a world like that; or allow her to live free in our world and promote those ugly ideas.

I say to Greenblatt after his very racist statements that I am not a terrorist. I am a girl who defended her land and country and who based on this was falsely sentenced by the Zionist entity. I spent 10 and a half years in prison and then left according to an internationally recognized deal.

This Ongoing War says: We're all racists in Tamimi's view of the world. She's feted, celebrated, given public podiums to make her hate-filled, ultra-violent speeches but we need to understand, she says, that she's a girl (actually 39 now, and 21 when she masterminded the massacre) and that having confessed to the Israeli court that sent her to sixteen life terms, she was "falsely sentenced". She implies that an "internationally recognized deal", presumably the release of 1,027 terrorists in a Hamas-directed extortion of Israel in the 2011 Shalit Deal, means she's off the hook. But of course she's not. We have a copy of the legal papers she was given prior to being released that say she and the others are having their sentences conditionally commuted subject to them not re-offending. Tamimi herself, in every public appearance she makes, reminds us how central the idea of murdering Israelis is to her existence and values. She incites to terror as easily as most of us breathe. The terms of her commutation mean she became immediately subject to re-imprisonment in Israel as soon as she landed in Jordan. Separate and independently from that, she faces serious terrorism charges in Washington.

I consider these statements to be very racist and unjust Nazi-like statements. They are illogical and indicate that this person, Jason Greenblatt, is working in favour of Zionism as he is using the same rhetoric as the Zionists, at a time when he supposed to speaking about peace as he is the peace delegate.

This Ongoing War says: As a communicator, Tamimi is no idiot. She knows her audiences. Slinging accusations that the guy giving you a hard time is a Nazi and/or a racist evidently works in her circle. She doesn't need to explain; hurling the insults is a goal in itself. And of course peace is very dear to her ice-cold heart.

So your accusations against me are false, and I shall continue to defend my rights until my last breath. Neither Greenblatt nor others scare me. I am going on with my life. I live as a free citizen in Jordan, I am completing my studies, and I have not done anything against Americans as they are claiming.

This Ongoing War says: She's not defending her rights. She's not deflecting any accusations. She's not denying any actual charges. None of this is surprising; she has admitted them for years. She doesn't have to defend, deflect or deny because the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is already shielding her, doing an effective job of keeping the Feds away. As for "I have not done anything against Americans", she had a different version two years ago ["24-Mar-17: Our daughter's smiling killer: "Shocked" that US "decided to go after her for no obvious reason""].

Q. How do you consider the timing of these latest statements? What is the motive behind them?

Tamimi: I consider the timing to have been calculated and intentional because it coincides with the visit of the King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Washington, and with the meeting held between King Abdullah and Greenblatt, the US foreign secretary and the White House consultant. So what happened? And what was said behind the scenes in this meeting for Greenblatt to come out with these statements? This is the question that I pose. I have Jordanian citizenship, and these statements coincide with King Abdullah’s meeting with them, and with the nature of the discussions held by these three people. They spoke of the deal of the century and consolidating Jordanian American bilateral relations in combating terrorism – two lines under the word terrorism – and then these statements were made. I shall leave the readers to do their own analyses, and for the analysts to analyse the timing of these two events.

This Ongoing War says: This is revealing. Tamimi is solidly aligned with Hamas. At the same time, she claims to be grateful to King Abdullah II and his "steadfast" law courts for keeping her safe from the DOJ. But there's been considerable friction between the Islamists and the Hashemites, sometimes more, sometimes less, since he became king. Saying "I shall leave the readers to do their own analyses", Tamimi is inviting criticism of the king that, if it came out of her own mouth, would cause her problems with Jordan's government - the members of which the king appoints and removes at will. Important note: Tamimi would probably hate for people to start commenting on how ungrateful she actually seems to be to the king.

Q. How is your daily life going in light of this situation?

Tamimi: I am banned from travelling to any country in the world because my name has been registered at all the airports since 2016. I am banned from making Umrah. I used to work in Lebanon after I was freed from prison but unfortunately my travel ban has caused my source of income there to come to a halt. In addition, my freedom of movement within Jordan itself is limited. My life as a freed prisoner is now restricted. It has placed limitations on my life and it is frustrating. In other words, I have not benefited anything from this freedom with these American demands hovering over me. As for my life becoming unstable, there are many continuous threats that make you live cautiously with your eyes open. There is no comfort and quiet.

This Ongoing War says: Life's a bitch. She's a mass murderer and wanted by Interpol but really, all she wants is comfort and quiet, to visit Saudi Arabia, to go about her jihad-focused business. And they just won't let her. She's a victim of American demands. What did she ever do to deserve all these restrictions?

After the financial reward was offered this week, I have had to beware of any person I see in the street whom I do not know. He could be a bounty hunter or someone who was hired to take me. At any moment, I could be forced into a car and taken to America, due to the American embassy being located in Jordan. These are some of many dangers which unfortunately have been revived in my life.

This Ongoing War says: The State Department reward was announced more than a year ago ["31-Jan-18: There's now a $5 million reward for bringing the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi to justice"]    and not, as Tamimi says, "this week". She blew eight children to pieces but asks for sympathy because of "dangers which unfortunately have been revived" in her pampered life of fame and influence. You could choke from reading this kind of thing. We could. We do.

Q. In March 2017, Jordan, through the Court of Cassation, rejected the American administration’s decision that you be handed over to Washington. What do you expect now from the Kingdom of Jordan?

Tamimi: My story has become a political one, and it therefore needs to come to an end through the strong American-Jordanian alliance in a one minute joint session, through understandings taken between King Abdullah and President Donald Trump, so that this issue can be laid to rest and so that the two cases are withdrawn from the Washington court.

Jordan has naturally taken a very important first step when it provided me with a judicial decision and submitted it to America. They told them that they cannot and will not hand over Ahlam Al-Tamimi to you. But in the wake of the financial reward being offered, this subject needs to be brought to an end from its political roots, by the King and the Jordanian government.

I therefore direct a message to them that it is necessary to bring this case to an end so that I can live freely and calmly, and so that I can go travel to perform Hajj and Umrah, and also so that I can find job opportunities.

It is important to me that I not remain restricted because humanitarianism dictates that I should not live in this manner.

This Ongoing War says: We literally stay awake at night worrying that the self-serving, immoral trash-talk that this barbarian articulates here is going to move people outside the Arab world to reach deep inside themselves and stand up for Tamimi's "rights". Jordan's King Abdullah has never spoken publicly about Tamimi, at least not for the record. But people in his entourage have been in touch with Tamimi's handlers and as a result she's confident enough to say to a newspaper interviewer that the king "needs to bring" the American pursuit of her "to an end" because she's entitled to "live freely and calmly". The tragedy is that she lives in a region where people actually do think like that. 

Q. The anniversary of the killing of American Rachel Corrie, who was mowed down by a military bulldozer belonging to the Israeli army in March 2003, was observed two days ago. How do you interpret the American administration’s overlooking of her murder?

Tamimi: Rachel Corrie is not the only American who was killed the Zionist occupation without the American administration lifting a finger to hold the Zionist entity accountable for what it had done. There are other activists who had American nationality who come to Palestine for the sake of peace, who join the popular resistance and who believe that it is the right of Palestinians to live. A large number of them have been shot in the legs and have been sometimes arrested due to their support of the Palestinian people.

What we notice in the case of Rachel Corrie is that her case has passed without any accountability for those who killed her, or even condemnation of the crime. If this proves anything, it proves that the Zionist entity is in control of the American system. We all know that biggest lobby in the American congress is the Zionist lobby which controls all the decisions. We also know that the Deep State within America is the Zionists who are the capitalists. No decision is made and no president elected without their prior approval. 

If we were to comment as well, then let us comment on all the events that have taken place in America, such as when Americans shoot up schools, university students and when such people are condemned, they are labelled as mentally unstable. This is terrorism which kills citizens in your country, Oh America. As for me, I am defending my country and my land. You want to hold me accountable while you do not hold the Zionist occupation accountable for murdering Rachel Corrie, nor for their shooting at American activists. You do not hold those who intentionally kill innocent people in your country accountable.

This Ongoing War says: Tamimi, a TV reporter and far from stupid, has a solid grasp of what Hitler and Goebbels meant by the Big Lie and how to use it. She's drunk deeply at the well of classic antisemitic tropes and "knows" that in America, it's the Zionists who are in charge and as a consequence Americans don't know how to deal with terrorists who set out to murder large numbers of innocents. If America ever wants to take advice from an Islamist zealot who brings a deep familiarity with murder and lethal bigotry, Mrs Tamimi will be a leading candidate.

Q. How do you evaluate the Moroccan position, be it the official or popular position towards the Palestinian resistance?

I always look to the popular position in any country. When speaking about Morocco, it is a valuable position and we truly appreciate it...

The article goes on but from this point Tamimi devotes herself, speaking to a Moroccan news site, to praising Morocco. She appreciates their support of the "resistance" in Gaza (this means Hamas) and of Khaled Mashal (who used to run Hamas). But for all her high regard for them, she doesn't support Morocco's relatively constructive ties with "the Zionist entity".

The real take-away here is her toxic influence. This dedicated murderer, now living free as a bird, not in hiding, not on the run, in the capital of an Arab kingdom reckoned to be a US ally, has standing, celebrity and access to the media. What Tamimi says in her explosive region of the world has the potent and quickly-out-of-control flammable impact of a lit match in a field of tinder-dry brush.

And even though much of what she has to say is plainly distorted, dishonest and provocative, we have not yet seen even a single instance where her appearance in the Arabic-language media includes criticism or even any serious analysis of the woman, her narrative or her views.

We wish this would disturb other people as much as it disturbs us.