25-Jun-17: A voice of lethal, bigoted hatred is silenced... for a while

We're pleased to see that Twitter last night (Saturday) shut down the hateful account of the FBI fugitive who masterminded the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Our daughter Malki, 15, was one of her many victims.

Our very sincere thanks to all the good people who helped us in publicizing the existence of the account and in bringing it to the attention of Twitter.

The background is here: "23-Jun-17: Murder by social media (is anyone at Twitter reading this?)"

The woman will certainly open up additional Twitter and other social media accounts (if she has not already) in this unpleasant cat-and-mouse game.

That's because, beyond being a confessed, proud and unrepentant murderer, she appears to be deeply committed ideologically to inciting others to emulate what she did and to kill Jews. She has been engaged in this since even before her unwarranted and deeply ill-conceived and regrettable release from an Israeli prison cell in October 2011 as part of the catastrophic Shalit Deal.

And since being released and returning to Jordan where she was born and has lived almost all of her non-prison life, she has operated a very well-funded, self-focused propaganda machine. She uses it to whip up support for more violence, more deaths, more Islamist ideological purity. She has a global following.

And - not so incidentally - in Jordan she enjoys protection from the US Department of Justice and the FBI which, since March, have been anxious to arrest her and put her on trial in a US Federal Court. She has expressed heartfelt gratitude to His Majesty King Abdullah II and his family and his law courts for what they have done to keep her safe and far away from her day in court. (Did you know Jordan and the US signed a two-way extradition treaty in 1995? The US says it's fully and completely in effect. The Jordanians have a new and somewhat different view. Read about that here.)

The world is a far better place for however long her messages of savage intolerance are silenced.

23-Jun-17: Murder by social media (is anyone at Twitter reading this?)

In January 2015, Tamimi addressed the students at the Al Islah Islamic High School in Tripoli, Lebanon. Bringing her message of hatred and extreme violence to children throughout the Arabic-speaking world has been central to her self-imposed mission since even before she walked free from her Israeli prison cell in October 2011. She is a propaganda machine for Islamist jihad.

Ahlam Tamimi, our daughter Malki's confessed murderer, has a Twitter account.

She has had one for years. Actually more than one. The latest Tamimi Twitter account replaces the one about which we - and many other people responding to a campaign we spearheaded in April 2017 - complained to Twitter. After an intense effort, that Twitter account was shut down. So too was her Facebook page.

As we wrote in a blog post here about ten weeks ago:

We think this means the many requests we and our followers... filed with Twitter were heard. Whatever the case, the world is a better and safer place with Ahlam Tamimi's voice lowered by several notches... ["12-Apr-17: A modest step toward justice: Twitter today suspended the account of our daughter's murderer"]

But now, as we said a moment ago, she has another Twitter account. For now, we're not publicizing its address. We don't want to contribute to her gaining any more followers; not even one more. She created it in May.

We found it just yesterday and within a few minutes we filed a complaint using Twitter's standard forms and on-line procedure. It works in a frustrating way because it doesn't easily allow for any background or explanation or commentary. And once having filed it, we received this ambivalent, somewhat anaemic and entirely unsatisfying response:

If we take further action? And what if you don't?

In the past hour, we filed a fresh complaint. This time, though, we answered one of the questions accurately (of course) but differently. As a result, we were then presented with a form we hadn't seen before. It allowed us to enter some free text instead of just clicking on fixed-option buttons. 

Here's what we wrote:

This is the latest account of Ahlam Tamimi, a convicted Hamas terrorist who was added to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list in March 2017, and is currently living in Jordan and on the run from the FBI and from US Federal charges. She is a notorious inciter of violence, a booster of murderous terrorism and the confessed murderer of our fifteen year old daughter and 15 other people.
After complaints from us as well as many others who responded to our Twitter campaign, her previous Twitter account [https://twitter.com/dreamsnnn] was suspended by Twitter in April 2017. By Twitter's own rules, the mere fact of her opening a replacement Twitter account ought to be enough for you to shut the new one down right away.
Her Twitter tweets are replete with expressions of solidarity with other terrorists and with hatred, lethal bigotry and calls for physical attacks against Israel, Zionists and Jews. She favours murder and encourages people - especially school-children - to follow her example and kill certain kinds of people in order to receive blessings from above.
I am puzzled at the slow response to my complaint. Are there any doubts on your part that Twitter needs to steer as far away as possible from this kind of abuse of social media?
I reported this account yesterday - about 18 hours ago - and received a formal acknowledgement. But no action.
The killer's Twitter account is still operating as of 2 minutes ago. It is now 12 noon Friday here in Jerusalem.

There has been no response in the half hour since we sent that off.

Some may ask why we find it so important to shut down this dangerous and hateful woman's social media output. The question has many answers but for the moment we offer an answer that the Islamist murderer herself wrote. In one of her tweets of the past two weeks, she said

which translates to

"We live at a time when the media are stronger than guns"

Given how jihad-minded killers have been emerging, ready for murderous action, in practically every corner of the world in the past handful of years, how can anyone doubt that this cold-blooded savage is right?

Meanwhile her Twitter account is alive and active.

Is anyone at Twitter paying any attention?

UPDATE Saturday night, June 24, 2017 at 11:30 pm: We have just now gotten notified by Twitter Support, after another round of complaints filed by us and emailed to Twitter's senior management, that the murderer's account has been shut down.  Thank you for all who have been supporting our efforts.

12-Apr-17: A modest step toward justice: Twitter today suspended the account of our daughter's murderer

Two of our daughters are in this family snapshot.
One is Malki who was murdered in August 2001. She's
cuddling her very disabled, and much loved, youngest sister

Readers of this blog know that Ahlam Tamimi, the mastermind of the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria massacre lives freely as a cherished and very public celebrity in Amman, the capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

From there, she has had access since October 2011 to the kind of mass-media platforms that aspiring cigarette manufacturers can only dream of: Facebook, Twitter, her own weekly television program, frequent invitations to speak in front of public gatherings of university and high school students, trade unionists and professional guilds not only in Jordan but in other Arab world destinations including Algeria (December 2011), the Gaza Strip (via live video link, addressing a mass rally in January 2012); Kuwait (July 2012 and again March 2014); Lebanon (April 2012 and again January 2015); Qatar (April 2012, again December 2013); Tunisia (April 2012 and again November 2015); and Yemen (April 2014).

Her message is sharp and focused: encouragement for the fighting spirit of the Palestinian Arab terrorists behind bars in Israel, and of their families; encouragement for more frequent and more deadly terror attacks on Israelis and those who stand with them; encouragement of a pro-Hamas, pro-Moslem Brotherhood absolutist message of rejection and destruction directed at anything and everything Jewish and Israeli.

Two weeks ago, she posted a rare English-language message via her Twitter account (her communications are almost exclusively in Arabic):

[Source: Archive]

Hate messages don't really come much clearer than that. No beating around bushes with talk of two states, compromise or peace. For Tamimi and the many who stand with her, the war is ongoing and even one "Israeli enemy" means more fighting.

And no one should be in doubt about Tamimi's sense of where "in Palestine" is located; her sustaining vision is of a Middle East free of Jews. As the convicted, but currently free, murderer of fifteen of them - our beloved daughter Malki Z"L included - Ahlam Tamimi is a full-fledged member in good standing of the savage ranks of Islamist terrorist barbarians.

When the FBI added her to their "Most Wanted Terrorists" list a month ago (after a five year campaign waged by our lawyers and us), we turned to Twitter and asked that they shut down her Twitter account. Facebook had already shut her down some months ago, and she stopped presenting the weekly TV program "Breezes of the Free" in September 2016 when her high profile caused some specific problems. But she kept busy on Twitter.

Until today.

This morning, something happened and that Tweet above was her last, at least for now. All we can say with confidence is based on what we see at her Twitter page:

Thank you @Jack @Support @anthonynoto @vijaya and thank you @Twitter

We think this means the many requests we and our followers and people seeing a similar request at MEMRI filed with Twitter were heard. Whatever the case, the world is a better and safer place with Ahlam Tamimi's voice lowered by several notches.

Next step: Tamimi's extradition to the United States to face federal criminal charges. The obstacle preventing that for the moment is that Jordan is refusing to honor its 1995 extradition treaty agreement with the United States.

09-Aug-15: Who's actually disabled in this affair?

The child with a hospital clown at

Tel Hashomer [Image Source]

Winston Churchill once famously said

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

Since his long life ended before the emergence of today's social media, Churchill might have expressed it differently if he had seen how distortions and outright falsehoods have the ability to go to sleep for a while after being exposed, and then emerge via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and the others to get recycled, reinvigorated and relaunched. They can then do a great deal more damage while those of us concerned with old fashioned notions - like truth - are still struggling with our closets.

This morning, looking for a specific article that throws light on the terrorist attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem carried out by Hamas exactly 14 years ago, we stumbled across this:

#DemandJustice for Pal children left disabled by Israel's bombs in #Gaza #NoMoreImpunity #ForTheChildrenOfPalestine pic.twitter.com/OvKGPNhwyG

— Mirna Miranda (@MirandaMirna) August 8, 2015

It's a Tweet that went live just yesterday. And it exemplifies the point made by Churchill, updated to the age of the Tweetstream.

There's no doubt that vast numbers of Palestinian Arab children living under the ghastly Hamas regime suffer terribly. Sometimes, that suffering gets much worse when open warfare breaks out, which happens more or less as often as Gaza's Islamist overlords want it to happen. Last summer, for instance, when the constant fire of hundreds of Gazan rockets into Israel and at anything Israeli finally got too much for the Israeli side, there was a great deal of suffering. We understand perhaps better than many where to lay the blame for the suffering and how truly barbaric are the people who hold the destinies of Gazans in their corrupt and violent hands.

But war has additional dimensions. And whoever is the person behind the Twitter account above (sometimes there's no actual person) is also at war.

The image, tearing at the heart of most people, stops you in your tracks. The message it conveys doesn't really need to be articulated: if you can do this to a defenseless child, you're a savage. It's the kind of message we hear a great deal from Gaza and from the apologists who defend its institutionalized, imposed-by-relentless-force barbarism. It's hypocrisy incarnate.

But far more than the effect it has on people like us - and we know how to look behind the scenes, get to the facts, scrape away the exaggerations and the lies - a Tweet like this and the photo it drags along with it fills the heads of many, many, many people living far from the scene, people who know relatively little beyond what is beamed at them by people with messages to market. And for soldiers like the Twitterer we just mentioned, the picture is the whole narrative.

As for the facts, who cares?

So here are the facts behind the image above, despatched from a Twitter account yesterday, and circulating the globe at this very moment, drilling into people's opinions, minds and prejudices.

First, it's not new. Here is how it was exploited last year:

Source: Falastin News, September 23, 2014

The real source is an Associated Press syndicated report by Diaa Hadid, datelined May 3, 2013. You can see both the text and the accompanying photo online even now via Huffington Post. It's a story that got wide circulation via many AP licensees including Times of Israel ["Disabled Gaza toddler lives at Israeli hospital", May 3, 2013],

The image that went out with it has this unmistakable caption:

In this Monday, April 29, 2013 photo, Palestinian child Mohammed Al-Farra is seen in the Tel Hashomer Hospital near Ramat Gan, central Israel. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

Then the dramatic photo, but not the Diaa Hadid article, got a flurry of attention two years after that when a different propagandist for the Palestinian Arab cause, a journalist, brazenly recycled it as depicting a child victim of the fighting in and around Gaza the previous summer. Here's his Twitter post, since removed:

The owner of the Twitter account in question (@mogaza) has an interesting bio. He's Mohammed Omer and he calls himself "Award winning journalist... Gaza-New York-Amsterdam". 

Over at an alert Israeli news site, they expanded on this in a May 10, 2015 article, revealing that Omer

started the Rafah Today blog and has written for numerous major news outlets including Al Jazeera, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the New Statesman, Aftonbladet and others [and] received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2008. The Prize is granted to journalists who "tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts." [Israel National News]

Prize-winning Mohammad Omer 

in hisTwitter portrait

The good people at Honest Reporting added some wording from the Gellhorn Prize

We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda.

In announcing the Gellhorn Prize, the judges said of Omer that he

was honoured as "literally the voice of the voiceless" and his dispatches were described as a "humane record of the injustice imposed on a community forgotten by much of the world".

We have gotten fairly used to hearing about voiceless and humane and justice from people who lack basic integrity, Let's say that, in this particular case, we're not convinced. Anyone with Google can search to see the provenance of almost any published image. It's fairly plain that Mr Omer didn't care to know. Or knew and didn't care to be honest. And there's this additional detail that we have not seen reported elsewhere: his Twitter account shows that he follows Diaa Hadid, the New York Times reporter who wrote the article about the little Gazan boy.

(If we're wrong about any of this, Mr Omer, we would be glad to hear from you: email us at thisongoingwar@gmail.com)

If the little boy in the photos has any sort of future, it will be despite - and certainly not because of - his Gazan, Palestinian, Arab peoplehood and heritage. To be more blunt about it, it will be because here in Israel, a child's life is a precious thing, and not a chip to be coldly bargained with or tossed away.

Are we sounding offensive? That's not our intention but this is a searing tale. In our words, summarizing the AP report, which is our only source for the facts, here's the story behind the photo:

Mohammed al-Farra was born in Gaza with a rare genetic disease and has spent most of his life living in the children’s ward of the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital, part of the Tel Hashomer hospital complex, Ramat Gan, Israel. It's one of the finest pediatric centers anywhere, and certainly in the Middle East (here's an impressive CNN video from 2012 that highlights their work among Arabs and Israelis in medical need). "Complications" set in and his limbs "had to be" amputated and were. The article implies the parents are cousins, a major factor in birth defects that come with the Arab world's devotion to consanguinity. They abandoned him - the father threatened to take a second wife if the mother didn’t leave him in hospital and come back home to Khan Yunis. She complied. Somehow (not so clear exactly how from the article, but we are personally familiar with such rescue operations), the afflicted little newborn was rushed to Israel for emergency treatment. His grandfather is with him in Tel Aviv, and cares for him in the hospital. The child's Israeli doctors are attached to him, and fund-raise to cover his bills. The child and his grandfather live in the sunny pediatric ward. He has been fitted with prosthetic limbs, funded by donors, but his future is unknown. And now a direct quote: "Dr. Raz Somech, the senior physician in the Tel Hashomer pediatric immunology department, attributes Mohammed’s genetic disorder to the several generations of cousin marriages in his family... a third of patients in his department are Palestinians and most have genetic diseases that were the result of close-relation marriages... 10.8 percent of {Gazan Arabs] suffer some kind of disability that affects their mental health, eyesight, hearing or mobility..." The article ends with the Gazan grandfather saying of Mohammed: "He needs a home."

The reporter could have added, but did not, that he might find it among the Jews. As for his own people, the Gazans, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Very little in life is black and white. There are good people on their side. There are bad people on ours. But the value systems that lie at the heart of the lives we live over here are world's apart - for whatever reason - from theirs. 

Glossing over this serves no one.