27-Aug-21: What we said to Secretary of State Blinken about our child's murder and how he replied

State Department Building via Wikipedia

It has been a miserable experience trying for years to convey serious, passionately-held, respectful views to a whole array of officials and politicians in our own country and beyond it. 

The process, not a political one in our view, has involved calling them to action where that action is to fulfill a duty they clearly would have even if the call had not been made. 

Sure, this shouldn't be a miserable experience. But it most certainly has been and continues to be for us. We and our views have been demeaned and ignored through three US administrations though they are all about the doing of justice, unrelated to advancing a political agenda of any kind, and unmarred by any personal benefit to us.

In political terms, it's an ongoing bi-partisan failure. To be clear as we can - the failure is thoroughly deserved by both major parties. Neither one, and only a small handful of their law-makers, comes out of this with even the smallest amount of honor. 

For some insight into how that has affected us, see "16-Dec-19: Like talking to the wall". Also "19-Oct-19: House Speaker Pelosi led an official visit today to the chief protector of our child's killer". And also "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?" As for the Jordanians in this story, there's little we care to say about them. This five year old blog post still represents our views: "29-May-16: An ally in the fight against terror and the questions that don't get asked". 

Right now, our focus is on the US. 

Ahlam Tamimi, 2021: Openly admits she bombed Sbarro

We emailed the letter below to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 15, 2021 with courtesy copies emailed to three of his key advisers. We received two separate acknowledgements from Blinken staffers to say the letter was received. We then responded with several follow-up emails asking that a substantive response be sent to what were clearly substantive comments and requests.

We have gotten none. We think it's time we shared some of the shabby background. 

State Department officials up and down the seniority chain have egregiously ignored us since long-sealed US federal charges were finally unveiled on March 14, 2017 against Ahlam Tamimi (they had been sealed, without our knowledge, since the summer of 2013.)

The Jordanian woman, a prominent Islamist, openly admits she bombed the Sbarro pizzeria causing the deaths of many innocents including our daughter Malki who was 15. Yet Tamimi lives free today in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a US ally that has had an active extradition treaty with the US since the Clinton era.

Jordan began brazenly refusing to honor the treaty six days after the charges were unsealed in Washington. Right up until today, it allows Tamimi to live in the kingdom as a free and unhampered citizen, embraced and honored by Jordanian society and the Arab world's media. 

This is a disgrace.

Frimet and Arnold Roth 

June 15, 2021

Hon. Anthony J. Blinken 
Secretary of State
Washington, D.C. 20520

Dear Secretary Blinken:

According to recent media reports, King Abdullah II of Jordan is coming to Washington, D.C. at the end of June for high-level meetings. We are writing to urge that Jordan’s harboring of FBI Most Wanted Terrorist, Ahlam Aref Ahmad Al-Tamimi, be on the agenda.

More than eight years ago, a federal judge authorized Tamimi’s arrest on federal terrorism charges. Jordan refused U.S. requests to extradite Tamimi, breaching a 1995 bilateral treaty, a matter that was subsequently kept out of State Department briefings, virtually unmentioned in the media and for all practical purposes swept under the rug of the Obama and Trump administrations.

We are in a new era. President Biden has spoken of conducting diplomacy inspired by America’s most cherished democratic values: defending freedom, upholding universal rights, respecting the rule of law, treating every person with dignity. We are inspired by this very welcome approach.

Our daughter, Malki, a 15 year old U.S. national, was murdered in a mass-casualty terror attack on a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001 that specifically targeted children. Tamimi, as we believe you are aware, boasts of her principal role in the attack. After her release by Israel in an extortionate prisoner exchange in 2011, she received a hero’s welcome in her native Jordan. In March 2017, the U.S. made public its request that Jordan extradite her. Just six days later, Jordan’s Court of Cassation ruled that the 1995 extradition treaty between the U.S. and Jordan is a nullity, applying a juridical veneer to the kingdom’s determination to stand by the fugitive bomber.

Beyond losing Malki, a talented and vivacious teenager deeply immersed in helping others and especially children with disabilities, the curse of our lives is that the admitted murderer is a hero in Jordan where she is seemingly immune from justice. For reasons better understood by politicians than by us, there appears to be support in the State Department and other parts of the U.S. government for the idea that when it comes to Tamimi, Jordan and its ruler must be protected from demands for justice.

This is more than merely a personal nightmare for a pair of grieving parents. With the active connivance of the Hashemite royal palace and the government of one of the U.S.’ most trusted and financially dependent allies, Tamimi remains a lightning rod for hateful, even genocidal, sentiments that fester in Jordan and other parts of the Arab and Muslim world. Her freedom and celebrity validate the notion that if Jordanians will only push back hard enough against U.S. pressure, the legitimacy of extreme violence in the service of the Palestinian Arab cause will prevail.

As much as we have been able, we have reached out to Washington seeking to elicit support and action. The details are rich and dismaying. We get routinely told that people sympathize with us and with Tamimi’s other American victims. High-ranking officials reassure us that efforts – real, serious efforts – are ongoing and that seeing justice done is a major priority. We have heard this for years. But in more candid, moments, we are also told that if Jordan extradites Tamimi, the king will lose his throne, Jordan will fall to unspecified dark forces, and the Middle East will erupt in worse turmoil than there is already.

This cannot be the end of the matter. We have concrete suggestions for pressing Jordan to comply with U.S. law and policy, not to mention fundamental decency:

One: Congress adopted funding cutoffs as potential sanctions directed at Jordan in the 2020 and 2021 appropriations measures. Even as unrealized threats, they garnered serious attention in the Jordanian press and have perhaps had some salutary effect. But there are additional, less draconian steps that can adopted to send the essential message without upsetting strategic interests. We quietly shared several ideas with the previous administration to no obvious avail. We profess no special expertise or monopoly on ideas for finessing this aspect. But we will be pleased to share them with you. 

Two: In terms of how the U.S. responds to Jordan’s position, this cannot be a simple matter of “the court has spoken.” Not until Tamimi had been very briefly taken into custody in Jordan in 2017, some 25 years after the extradition treaty took effect, was its Court of Cassation called upon to find that the treaty is a dead letter on the grounds that its parliament never ratified it. Yet, in its ruling, the court failed to address the documented reality that on at least three earlier occasions Jordan complied with US requests to extradite fugitive Jordanian terrorists.

Three: Jordan explained neither before nor after the 2017 ruling why it has not solved the Tamimi problem by simply having its parliament ratify the treaty with its close ally and far-and-away most important benefactor. This failure is even more striking in view of how Jordan has entered numerous extradition treaties with other countries since 1995, including as recently as last month (Ukraine). If the parliament has not been called to fix the problem yet, that would seem to mean the king does not want the problem fixed. It is time to change that approach.

Four: The Court of Cassation’s 2017 ruling makes no mention of what we know to be true - that Jordan’s revered King Hussein did in fact ratify the treaty in 1995. Jordan formally communicated this to the United States in 1995 and we now possess the actual documents, recently obtained via FOIA. The bitter reality is Jordan abrogates King Hussein’s (literally) sacred pledge to the U.S. to abide by the treaty and pretends not to notice. What message does King Abdullah II’s government send by this? And why has the United States failed to speak out publicly? For their part, the media have failed to investigate or challenge the egregious thwarting of justice. It is time all the secrecy was ended. It is time for King Abdullah to hear the truth.

Our battle to see justice done has played out against a background where values and principles have been overwhelmed by classic realpolitik. We are compelled to ask how it can be that Jordan’s perceived weakness and vulnerability render the U.S. powerless in the face of Jordan's intransigence? Do Jordan’s perceived vulnerabilities truly mean America must stand by as Jordan educates its people to believe the murder of children because they are Jewish – and even if American - is acceptable?

There needs to be a will, and the way will follow. King Abdullah II should be made to understand that. With the greatest of respect and with utmost sincerity, we ask that these matters be raised in the upcoming meetings and pursued vigorously.

Respectfully,
Frimet and Arnold Roth

cc: Hon. Jake Sullivan
Hon. Barbara A. Leaf
Hon. Brett H. McGurk

So to reiterate, none of the recipients have so far seen fit to respond. 

The two brief and formal acknowledgements of receipt - and no one needs to tell us to be grateful for getting those since our emails to politicians mostly get no acknowledgement of receipt at all - came from assistants.

King Abdullah's week in Washington, which started with an official reception in the White House on Monday July 19, 2021, was packed with meetings, discussions, mutual praise. But was the Tamimi-Jordan-extradition-justice issue on the agenda at any of them? 

The answer to that simple question is absurdly complicated and requires an explanation which we are ready to give. 

But here is what the public record shows:

July 20, 2021 

Department Press Briefing – July 20, 2021 [Online here and archived here]

Ned Price, Department Spokesperson

QUESTION: Let me follow on that a little bit real quick. Can I ask you very quickly about Jordan, the meeting with the king this morning and the Secretary? I just want to know if the Tamimi extradition issue came up. As you’re aware, last year the then-ambassador nominee but now the ambassador told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that withholding aid or aid could be used as leverage to secure her extradition to the States to face murder charges.

MR PRICE: Well, I expect we’ll have a readout of the Secretary’s meeting with His Majesty the King later today. When it comes to Ms. al-Tamimi, she is on the FBI’s most wanted list for her role in the 2001 Hamas attack in Jerusalem. We continue to seek her extradition. We’ll continue to work to ensure that she faces justice.

QUESTION: Yeah. Well, did it come up?

MR PRICE: I’m not in a position to speak to the meeting, but we’ll have a readout —

QUESTION: Well, are you – I mean, are you – has this administration yet raised it with – raised the matter with Jordanian authorities, the King or not? Or is this something that would have just come up for the first time today?

MR PRICE: This issue has been raised with our Jordanian partners.

Clear?

We will lay out what we know in a separate blog post that we plan to post in the next few days.

23-Aug-21: Turbulent dimensions, years of pushing: Seeking justice with the help of StandWithUs

From an April 2021 Stand With Us announcement headed Bringing Our Child's Murderer To Justice:

In 2001, Malki Roth was murdered in the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing in Jerusalem along with 15 other people. Now, Interpol has dropped the international arrest warrant for the mastermind behind this heinous terrorist attack, Ahlam Tamimi. Tamimi, who now lives in Jordan, has shown no remorse for her despicable crimes.

On this week’s episode of StandWithUs TV Live, Malki’s father, Arnold Roth will join us in conversation with Roz Rothstein, StandWithUs Co-founder and CEO, about terrorism, the impact Malki’s tragic death had on his family and the battle to have Tamimi extradited to the US to face charges.

Join us live on Facebook: Sunday, April 11, 11:00AM Pacific time.

Our great and sincere thanks to Roz Rothstein and her indefatigable team of professionals and activists for their many years of fine work.

Here's the video:

22-Aug-21: Hosted by CAMERA, Arnold Roth explains a fight for justice

Arnold Roth was interviewed six months ago on behalf of Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, better known as CAMERA, by Andrea Levin, its Executive Director and President. 

Andrea writes and lectures widely on media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its impact on public opinion.

This interview, under the title "Terrorism: Seeking justice for its victims" went to air live on February 11, 2021.  

In terms of interviews and media appearances, the past few months - and especially July - have been unusually busy for us. From conversations with supporters and friends, we realize it's hard to keep track of those media appearances, interviews, background reports and so on. 

Many of our most loyal allies haven't seen or aren't even aware of some of the still small but growing volume of media coverage of our campaign for justice.  

So we plan to post here on our blog - in most cases months after their original publication - at least some of those media events. 

Please stand by as we work through the backlog. 

21-Jul-21: After Jordan's king visited the State Department yesterday

From a State Department tweet of yesterday's meeting

Here's an observation the mainstream media probably won't share with their consumers about the very long royal visit to the US currently being undertaken by Jordan's king, queen and crown prince. [For some of the background, "21-Jul-21: In welcoming Jordan's king to Washington, we wanted him to be reminded of the ongoing Tamimi extradition scandal"]

His Majesty King Abdullah II spent some of yesterday in the company of senior figures in the State Department including the Secretary of State and, since we see him in the photos, the current US ambassador to Jordan, Henry Wooster. It was a working visit, with an official agenda and many participants. 

What did they discuss? 

Oddly, at a time when almost everything leaks and gets discussed in the world's public forums - which means on the Internet - it's hard to say. 

Our principal focus, as everyone coming to this blog knows, is with Jordan's harboring of the bomber who blew up the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem twenty years ago. Jordan has a treaty with the US, and the US has issued criminal proceedings against the bomber who has repeatedly confessed in public that she did it. Fifteen innocents were murdered in the explosion, two of them US nationals, and one of those was our daughter Malki.

Since the day those US charges against Ahlam Ahmad Al-Tamimi were announced in March 2017 right up until today, there has been a deliberate fog of ambiguity and opacity over US efforts to get Jordan to hand her over for trial as required by the 1995 Extradition Treaty. 

The result has been that the boastful killer's spectacular career and freedom have continued practically without pause. She's free today, not living in hiding, not silenced by Jordan's notoriously manipulative government and not on the margins of Jordanian society.

Quite the opposite.

At the end of yesterday's well-publicized meeting between the Jordanian delegation and the State Department people, there was a press briefing, presided over by State's spokesperson, Ned Price. 

As important as the Tamimi case is, and as much as we have tried to create media and pubic awareness of the open deception by two governments over what is and is not being done to bring Tamimi to her long overdue appointment with a federal court, here is the only official public comment made by the American side. It comes from the official transcript of the State Department Press Briefing (July 20, 2021)

NED PRICE, DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON
JULY 20, 2021

QUESTION: Can I ask you very quickly about Jordan, the meeting with the king this morning and the Secretary? I just want to know if the Tamimi extradition issue came up. As you’re aware, last year the then-ambassador nominee but now the ambassador told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that withholding aid or aid could be used as leverage to secure her extradition to the States to face murder charges.

MR PRICE: Well, I expect we’ll have a readout of the Secretary’s meeting with His Majesty the King later today. When it comes to Ms. al-Tamimi, she is on the FBI’s most wanted list for her role in the 2001 Hamas attack in Jerusalem. We continue to seek her extradition. We’ll continue to work to ensure that she faces justice.

QUESTION: Yeah. Well, did it come up?

MR PRICE: I’m not in a position to speak to the meeting, but we’ll have a readout —

QUESTION: Well, are you – I mean, are you – has this administration yet raised it with – raised the matter with Jordanian authorities, the King or not? Or is this something that would have just come up for the first time today?

MR PRICE: This issue has been raised with our Jordanian partners.

What did the Jordanians say when it was raised? How did the US respond to King Abdullah's response? Does he know about the Tamimi case? Does he know about the 1995 Extradition Treaty proudly signed by his father?

Imagine getting answers like this from your doctor, your lawyer, your spouse, your child, your work colleague. We all have some sense of when we're being treated like idiots. This was one of those moments for us.

The people at Fox News where we were interviewed for two different programs earlier this week turned to State for some comment, too. This is what they got.

A State Department spokesperson told Fox News Friday the department won't preview any diplomatic discussions with the Jordan delegation and won't discuss private correspondence with the Roths. But the State Department said it's committed to bringing Al-Tamimi to the United States for prosecution. 

"Al-Tamimi is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list for her role in a 2001 Hamas terrorist attack in Jerusalem," the State Department told Fox News. "The United States continues to seek her extradition and will continue to work to ensure she faces justice."  

Source: "Family of 15-year-old terrorist attack victim asks Biden to bring justice for daughter", Marisa Schultz, Fox News, July 18, 2021 

You could understand that the day to day of government decision making is not something that gets discussed very much out on the open. And nor should it.

But the Jordan/Tamimi/extradition case is different. Tamimi was charged on March 14, 2017. Those charges were signed off by a federal judge nearly four years before that, in the summer of 2013, eight full years ago. 

Jordan's highest court, the Court of Cassation, ruled six days later that - whether she's guilty or not guilty as charged - Jordan will not hand her over to the justice system of the United States as the treaty requires because the treaty is not valid.

The treaty is valid. What's not valid is the claim by Jordan that there is a legal impediment, just one, a very technical one easily fixed. The US says, though in the quietest of voices, that the treaty is valid. Has the US ever raised its voice? Has it threatened? Has it done anything at all to fix this standoff with a kingdom whose existence is underwritten by massive US financial aid and by American military resources?

No one on the US side, not under Obama, not under Trump and till now at least not under Biden, is willing to speak clearly on this. The Jordanians have avoided all comment to people outside their kingdom though Jordanian domestic audiences have been told in Arabic ["13-Nov-19: Thank you, Mr Foreign Minister"] by their deputy prime minister and (his other role) foreign minister that Jordan does not have to hand the bomber over to the Americans. Jordan respects and abides by the law, Mr Ayman H. Safadi said, and the law does not allow it.

He is in the photo above and is in Washington with his king today. How valuable it would be if some enterprising speaking-truth-to-power reporter grabbed the opportunity to ask him to state Jordan's Tamimi policy to an American audience.

Being given the silent treatment isn't a new experience for us in this long pursuit of justice after the murder of our beloved Malki. But our message now to anyone who cares to listen is that it doesn't serve any good purpose and it needs to be stopped. American vagueness on the matter of getting justice done and bringing a committed terrorist to trial for the killing-by-terror of US nationals has serious consequences. 

We have almost no power in standing up to the cruel suppression of our voices by elected and unelected public officials. The only power we do have is to move public opinion and as much as we can, and with the help of others, we will. 

Because what's being done by government figures in this scandal is an ongoing disgrace.

16-May-20: The friends of Jordanian fugitive Ahlam Tamimi, including her lawyers, are speaking up. But not all of them.

This appeared on Instagram today. We explain it below.

There's a serious degree of interest and concern in Jordan over the letter that seven US Congressional lawmakers sent to Jordan's ambassador to Washington three weeks ago.

As far as we know, the embassy hasn't responded so far.

The text of that letter and some examples of the rising anxiety demonstrated by Jordan's news industry are both in this long post we put up on Thursday: "14-May-20: In Jordan, they're standing with confessed bomber Tamimi but worried".

In tonight's update, there's an Arabic report (machine translated to English) from a Jordanian news site, Addustour, that was published this afternoon (Saturday):

Quote

Amman: The Legal Defense Committee formed by the Jordanian lawyers for the liberated prisoner and Jordanian citizen, Ahlam Al-Tamimi, followed the news that circulated about Republican Party representatives in the American Congress who sent a message to the Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Washington, its content a threat to impose sanctions on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to hand over Jordanian citizenship. 

The freed prisoner, Ahlam Al-Tamimi... is considering a case brought by a group of Zionist Jews against Ahlam's citizenship. In this regard, the defense establishment asserts the following:

1. This request comes in the context of the movement of the American Zionist lobby to pressure the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the context of the deal of the century.
2. This request is not separate from the US administration's support for the Zionist entity that seeks to annex the settlements of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.
3. [Tamimi's] legal defence team confirms that the Jordanian judiciary previously said its clear and unequivocal speech in rejecting the request to extradite [Tamimi] via criminal case number 16685/2016 which was appealed and dismissed by the highest judicial body in Jordan on the basis of lack of fulfillment of extradition conditions, the most important of which is the absence of an approved extradition agreement under law from the National Assembly [Jordan's parliament] and compliance with its constitutional requirements.
4. The defence team confirms that the Jordanian judiciary will address this Zionist pressure with its known patriotism to prevent any step towards handing over Jordanian citizen Ahlam Tamimi which affects Jordanian national sovereignty. It affirm its previous decisions not to surrender in line with the directives of the Jordanian state, leadership, government and people.
5. The defense team confirms that it trusts Jordan's leadership, government and people to not accept the extradition of its citizens, to not accept abuse of Jordanian national sovereignty, to not become subject to blackmail or coercive policies, that the dignity of its children is not subject to bargaining, that the Jordanian state will not do anything contrary to what was decided by the Jordanian judiciary and represented by Jordan's highest judicial authority.
6. The defense team confirms that it stands behind Ahlam Tamimi in defending her and will spare no effort in taking all legal measures to prevent any step in this direction.

Head of defence

Advocate Hikmat Al-Rawashada

Unquote

The same defence lawyer is quoted in an outrageous (even by their standards) Aljazeera profile of Tamimi. You might want to read our analysis of it: "24-Mar-17: Our daughter's grinning killer is shocked the US is pursuing her and for no obvious reason"

Also today (Saturday):

Dima Tahboub, is quoted in Albosala, another Jordanian news platform. She's a Jordanian lawmaker who happens to block us on Twitter (we're not offended) and who serves as spokesperson for the Islamic Action Front, the political wing of Jordan's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and closely aligned with the terrorists of Hamas.

She reacts in that article to what she terms American threats to Jordan By threats she evidently means the April 30 letter to Ambassador Dina Kawar from the GOP Congressmen. Plainly identifying with the unrepentant bomber and killer of children, Tahboub praises Tamimi for having moved from victim to initiator, from defence to attack, and to becoming a person who continues the struggle, advancing the role of Palestinian women martyrs.

Neither the clever lawyers nor the Islamist spokesperson bother to address what Tamimi happily confesses to doing at Sbarro. They have nothing to say about the people murdered there that day, our daughter Malki among them. Or about any of the simple, well-framed questions that Jordan's ambassador in Washington has not yet mannaged to answer.

In Tahboub's case, that's not so surprising given that three years ago [link] she took the opportunity of an interview (in English - she has a doctorate from a British university) on Germany’s international Deutsche Welle platform to express her support for Ahmad Daqamseh, the Jordanian soldier who in 1997 opened fire across the border at a group of Israeli teenage girls from Bet Shemesh (or "human trach" as she referred to them in the media) on a school excursion, killing seven of them. We assume her support comes from the same dark place that brings her to stand up for Tamimi. Daqamseh, like Tamimi is free and living a charmed life in Jordan.

She told Tim Sebastian, formerly a BBC luminary, in that DW interview that many Jordanians “still see him [Daqamseh] as a hero. So if you are incriminating my viewpoint, you are also incriminating the viewpoint of the Jordanian people”. This is true. We see the same adoration at work with the Sbarro massacre fugitive, except that it's the US that wants her in custody now.

And also today, it's instructive to see who's not yet speaking up. Tamimi, who is adept at, and depends on, social media, is currently operating yet another Instagram account. Her previous accounts there as well as on Twitter and Facebook have been shut down one after the other. This one - which we prefer not identify at this stage - is still going and we have asked for it to be taken down too.

She posted a video clip there this afternoon (that's a screen shot at the top of this post with the identifying particulars blurred out) from the Turkish government's official TRT media platform - a totally-supportive video message that starts with the question "Will Jordan hand Tamimi over?"

Then she added the Arabic text on the right:

"We are still awaiting the Jordanian official response to the latest escalation"

And to round out this review, there is this manifesto (below) issued in the name of something called "the family of the freed prisoner, Ahlam Al-Tamimi" and published in Arabic here (machine translation):

Quote

Image Source: http://www.rmix.ps/archives/269277

Based on what has been circulated recently of the Kingdom being requested to hand over Jordanian citizen Ahlam Al-Tamimi to the United States of America, we clarify the following:

1. On April 30, 2020, seven lawmakers from the Republican Party in the US Congress sent a letter to the Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Washington threatening to impose sanctions on the Kingdom if it refused to hand over our daughter Ahlam Al-Tamimi.
2. This message comes within the framework of the continuous American endeavor to pressure the Kingdom to surrender which the kingdom, its king, government and people, categorically reject. And this is what it clearly expressed in the past and at this time in line with its steadfast national position to protect its sovereignty and preserve the dignity of its citizens, and its persistent political and legal positions that are not subject to prejudice or derogation by any country.
3. This latest endeavor on the part of some American bodies with a legislative role - even if it intersects with the efforts of all other American and Zionist parties that seek to fulfill the demand for extradition - carries a great danger of exploiting the law to achieve political interests. In exchange for [the US] continuing to provide financial aid to countries [Jordan], it is considered a political pressure card to compel these countries [Jordan] to accept, which raises great concern and many fears among the family despite its belief that Jordan will not be subject to extortion or coercion policies, and that the dignity of its citizens is not compromised.
4. We, as a family, are confident that the response to the message of the Republican representatives will not deviate an inch from this national constant... Despite all the pressing efforts in this matter, money will not be accepted to be politicized in order to waste the dignity of the nation.
5. Ahlam Al-Tamimi is Jordanian by birth, origin and citizenship, and Palestinian by origin, the daughter of this sacred Jordanian soil and its patriotic clans whose authentic roots lie deep in this pure land from its north to its south and from its east to its west. She is the ambassador of her country, Jordan, and her conscience in the struggle to regain the usurped right.
6. Ahlam Al-Tamimi is not responsible for any statement attributed to her from some websites, news agencies, and many pages on social media bearing her name and states are attributed to her are statements she never uttered and are exploited by the abusers.
7. Ahlam Al-Tamimi does not have any social media accounts.
8. This platform will be the only expression of the position on the issue of Ahlam Al-Tamimi, and only through it can the correct information be reached.
9. Your rallying around the just cause of Ahlam Tamimi and your support and support for it is the real immunity, and the sure guarantee that she remains safe from and unreachable by foreign hands.

As long as you and as long as your tireless struggle for the elevation of the nation and the victory of its children...

The Tamimi family
Wednesday May 13, 2020

Unquote

Points 6, 7 and 8 pretty clearly indicate that people looking out for the murdering fugitive's interests realize she has been too free with her public opinions, particularly those that insult or offend Hashemite King Abdullah II of Jordan. So to those whom it may concern, the message is simple: she didn't say it even if you think she did, and she couldn't have said it because (among other reasons) she doesn't have any social media accounts. 

This is patent nonsense.

Evidently with all the media activity going on in her support, Tamimi is still waiting for the people who count, those in Jordan's royal palace a short distance from her home, to step up. And as we point out here, she gives the impression of someone who's running out of patience.

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.

31-Jan-18: There's now a $5 million reward for bringing the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi to justice

The English version of yesterday's announcement. It also appears in
Arabic here.

Established in 1984, Rewards for Justice, a program of the US State Department has the goal of bringing

international terrorists to justice and prevent acts of international terrorism against U.S. persons or property... Since the inception of the Rewards for Justice program in 1984, the United States Government has paid more than $145 million to over 90 people who provided actionable information that put terrorists behind bars or prevented acts of international terrorism worldwide. [The program's website]

Federal criminal charges were announced last March against Ahlam Tamimi, the mastermind of the 2001 Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria massacre. Our daughter Malki, 15, was one of the people, mostly children, killed in that Hamas-driven terror outrage. Tamimi described herself as Hamas' first woman agent.

If you follow our blog, it won't be news to you that Tamimi has been living a celebrity's life in Amman, Jordan since her extorted release from an Israeli prison cell in the 2011 Shalit Deal. She was the only one of the 1,027 terrorists freed in that catastrophic transaction who was sent into "exile" in Jordan. Since she was born in Jordan in 1980 and lived in Jordan, getting her education there until a couple of years before executing the Sbarro attack and went back to living in Jordan today with a cousin who is now her husband, it's not really exile and never was.

There is one practical result of the decision to send her to Jordan that's worth noting: as we wrote earlier this week:

No fewer than 420 of the 1,027 let loose in the Shalit Deal are again engaged in the satanic work of doing more terror. 210 of the 1,027 have already been re-arrested by the IDF. Some 100 are currently back in the Israeli prison system...  ["29-Jan-18: Freeing unrepentant terrorists and the horrors it has brought"]

Tamimi is as active as ever representing Hamas and inciting to more terror. On any view, she is an active terrorist again and therefore is in breach of the terms of the condition that attached to her commutation of sentence and everyone else's in the Shalit Deal: go back to terror and your sentence is reinstated. But unlike almost all the other Shalit Deal beneficiaries she lives in Jordan where the Hashemite Kingdom identifies with her and shields her. Bottom line: Israel cannot touch her.

We have campaigned to have the US step up its efforts, first announced in Washington on March 14, 2017, to have Jordan hand her over to the US authorities so that she can be brought before a judge in Washington to face trial.

It's beyond doubt that Jordan has had an extradition treaty with the United States since 1995 ["26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions"] and that Jordanian citizens have in fact been extradited to the US within its framework.

Jordan now formally denies that the signed treaty is valid and in effect ["20-Mar-17: The Hashemite Kingdom's courts have spoken: The murdering FBI fugitive will not be handed over"].

The full-size Arabic language reward poster
can be downloaded from here

The US does not agree with Jordan on this, and says the treaty is in effect, that it is perfectly valid and that Jordan should just hand her over.

Tamimi was named to the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list that same day last March. There are currently 28 terrorists on the list. None of them was added to it later than 2013 except for Tamimi. (About this, we're not drawing any conclusions.) And none of those wanted terrorists is hiding in Jordan. For that matter, neither is Tamimi though it's where she lives and principally operates when she's not traveling around the Arab world on celebrity visits and pro-terror rallies.

Which brings us to yesterday's important and welcome announcement ["Information that brings to justice | Ahlam Ahmad al-Tamimi | Up to $5 Million Reward"] made in Washington:

The Rewards for Justice Program is offering up to $5 million for information leading to al-Tamimi’s arrest or conviction for her role in this [Jerusalem Sbarro] attack, as part of the 1993 Violence in Opposition to the Middle East Peace Negotiations reward offer... Hamas has been designated by the Department of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under the Immigration and Nationality Act and as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity under E.O. 13224. [Source]

So how hard will it be to track down this confessed murderer?

Not as hard as you might imagine. Within Jordan, for reasons worth pondering, she's not thought of as a jihadist felon at all but more as a national hero of "resistance". To illustrate: she shared a prominent speaking platform just a few weeks ago in Amman with no less than a former Jordanian prime minister and several current and former national level politicians. [The details are in our post: "05-Jan-18: In Jordan, the FBI fugitive Ahlam Tamimi (among others) pays tribute to her slapping/taunting/kicking Tamimi cousin"].

Note that this occurred nine months after the United States called on Jordan to comply with its long-established treaty obligations going back to the Clinton Administration, and to hand her over to them for prosecution on some of the most serious charges that ever arise.

To some people, it will seem like a pungent message, even an insult, to the US from its heavily-dependent Jordanian client and partner in the battle against terrorists that Jordan said - and has stuck to saying - "no".

What might the Rewards for Justice development now do? Well, the Amman bureau chief of Associated Press had no difficulty arranging an interview in Tamimi's Amman home last March, filming a video clip (to our fury, we are in it too) that was then posted to YouTube. Many additional media organizations, among them Aljazeera, have managed to somehow find her and give her coverage and publicity in the past 9 months without struggling to locate her home. She might even be listed in the phone directory. Our understanding is she has not been in hiding at any stage since re-establishing herself in her Jordanian homeland in October 2011. And still is not.

We have questions about how the new reward works, including how it's going to be advertised. We have shared some of our concerns with the US authorities about aspects of the hard road to here and what's ahead. But we will save those matters for another time.

09-Jan-18: Money, deception and terror: Israel is taking some concrete steps

Image Source: "The Palestinian Dream"

Over at the Jerusalem Post this afternoon, there's an important summary of information placed before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this afternoon ["Palestinian Authority paid terrorists nearly $350 million in 2017", Lahav Harkov, January 9, 2018].

If you're not already familiar with them, the data are simply eye-popping. In a society where the average income is about US$580 per month, the PA regime headed by Mahmoud Abbas gives that sort of money to anyone sentenced by the Israeli court system to three to five years in prison.

But since serious terrorist offences often come with sentences stiffer than 3-5, it's worth understanding what those offenders get paid by their perennially-broke government and what other benefits they can expect to get.

• A terrorist sentenced to 20 years or more in prison is paid five times the average salary. It starts to flow while he or she is still in prison. And it then keeps coming - for the rest of the recipient's life. Does anyone think there might be some subtle message here about where the PA and Abbas are placing the emphasis in the vision they offer their citizens?
• Then the fine print: If the imprisoned terrorist holds Israeli citizenship (there were about 1.8 million such Arabs in 2017 according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, meaning they represent 20.8% of Israel's total population), then they qualify for a US$145 bonus.
• The sum paid each month by the PA for what the article calls "the most severe crimes" exceeds US$2,900 which is larger than the average Israeli income (currently about US$2,700 per month according to the article and about US$2,955 according to another source). 
• Being married gets a terrorist a further increment, and there are add-ons for each child parented by the convicted terrorist.
• There are also specific pay increases for (a) being married and (b) each child a terrorist parents.
• If and when the terrorist beneficiary of all this largess gets out of prison, the PA law entitles him or her to a prestigious civil service post in its government

And as we observed not long ago ["25-Jul-17: The scale of the PA's terror-funding scheme keeps growing"], it's all getting worse, not better. 

At various times, advocates for the Palestinian Arabs contend that this is nothing more than social welfare and the Israelis are making a big deal out of nothing. But that's not so: the fact that you get more money according to the severity of the crime and/or the length of the sentence means that the payments are there to encourage serious crime - the more serious the better. And as Palestinian Media Watch has pointed out, the PA defines the entitlement to these payments in terms that ensure PA salaries do not go to Palestinian Arabs convicted of crimes such as theft - who may very well be social welfare cases - but do go to terrorist murderers in the service of Hamas and Fatah. Further elaboration is really not needed: anyone taking a dispassionate look at the realities knows the PA scheme has one clear purpose, and it's not the alleviation of poverty.

From a recent US summary of the scheme's impact:

The PA spent an estimated $300 million last year, roughly seven percent of its total budget, on these payments to more than 30,000 terrorists and their families. It does so at the direct expense of helping provide a better future for its own citizens, and despite its heavy dependence on foreign aid for income. Much of that aid comes from the United States - an average of $335 million annually over the last five years. The lion’s share, roughly $280 million per year in that span, is economic assistance to cover the PA’s significant debts, freeing up funds for their “pay-to-slay” system. The issue has not gone unnoticed by Congress. ["Passing the Taylor Force Act will mark a vital step in the War on Terror", TheHill.com, November 15, 2017]

We also noticed. See "08-Jul-16: Violence, terror, cash and the PA Rewards for Terror Scheme: Congress takes a look". And before that, we had posted dozens of reports and analyses [click here for more of them.)

The report delivered today to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, is part of the current efforts to create a new law that will deduct the total of what the PA pays its terrorists and their families from the taxes Israel collects and until now has handed across to the PA. There's more money at stake there than most people would guess. A July 2016 Reuters report estimated the scale of Israel-to-PA transfers at between US$130 and US$155 million per month. Translating this to annual figures, it's something between US$1.5 and US$1.9 billion.

The new Israeli bill, says the Jerusalem Post, "will likely go to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation in three weeks, with a first reading in the Knesset in the ensuing days". It's said to be largely inspired by the Taylor Force Act, a United States law that will stop all US aid to the Palestinian Arabs as long as the PA keeps paying salaries to terrorists and their families. (Our take:
"11-Jul-17: Incitement to terror: Sometimes it really is all about the money") The House of Representatives passed the bill in December 2017. It's now awaiting Senate approval.

The US is of course not the only state giving aid to the Abbas regime. Others include [according to this source] UNRWA and the EU through the European Commission [see "02-Jun-15: The obvious, petty lies that keep European money flowing into the hands of the PA's terrorists"], Japan, Canada, Norway [see "02-May-16: Norway's polite and cautious funding of Palestinian Arab terror"], Germany, Sweden, Spain, France and the United Kingdom [see "14-Jun-16: In the UK, law-makers (some) worry over the bloodshed funded by their taxpayers"].

The deep and corrosive damage on Arab lives and on ours depends on the unquestioning passivity of ordinary tax-payers of (mainly) Europe and North America, leading us to ask some years ago: "20-May-11: Rewarding the Palestinian Arab terrorists: is this being done in your name?" 

It also depends on much less innocent, faceless government bureaucrats who silently and with little-to-no publicity (especially to their own citizens) sign the wire transfers behind closed doors and pay next to no attention to how those funds are spent or what's done with them. Darkness, secrecy and deception [see "6-Oct-06: Crying poor: The terror-laden rise and rise of the Palestinian national payroll and the men who allow it to happen"] have been part of the whole story pretty much from the outset.

10-Sep-17: Chasing the killer of my child

Mishpacha originally published this interview
in Hebrew

An interview of Frimet Roth by the Israeli journalist Michal Ish Shalom originally appeared in the Hebrew weekly Mishpacha, August 24, 2017. An English translation, the work of Rochel Sylvetsky whose contribution we gratefully acknowledge, was published today on the Israel National News website under the title "The non-extradition of our daughter's murderer". Our thanks go to Mishpacha for their permission to use their Hebrew article in this way. (The cross-post that follows has some minor editing changes and we have inserted hyperlinks.)

Malki Roth was murdered in what is called the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing 16 years ago. 

Her parents hope that her terrorist murderer, against whom the US has issued an extradition request, will be brought to justice. The family hopes the US presses for extradition, is disappointed that Jordan does not honor its legal obligations to the US, and blames Netanyahu for not caring about families of terror victims.

Arnold and Frimet Roth, the parents of Malki Hy"D, murdered in the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing attack 16 years ago, were carefully optimistic on the day after the Purim holiday this year.

A delegation from the US Department of Justice came to Jerusalem to inform them that the United States was about to make an announcement later that day: a request for extradition had been presented to the Jordanian government. Jordan, which signed an extradition treaty with the United States in 1995, was being requested to extradite Ahlam al-Tamimi, the terrorist who planned and executed the suicide bombing in which their daughter was murdered. Tamimi was being added that day to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list.

The Roths had initiated this process by meeting with US officials in Washington five years earlier – in February 2012. The Jordanians had been served with the extradition request months earlier, right before the High Holidays, and Interpol was involved. But now in mid-March 2017, the US were going to publicize the extradition request, leading the Roths to believe that justice was going to be done at last.

Frimet with our daughter Malki, April 2001

Malki, born in Melbourne Australia, came to Israel as a young child. Her mother is an American citizen, and as such, could obtain American citizenship for her daughter. That was not a significant part of Malki's too-short life, all of it lived in Israel. She grew up in Jerusalem, a happy, kindhearted teen, especially attuned to special needs chidren – her youngest sister Haya Elisheva suffered serious neurological impairment when she was a year old, a fact which caused Malki to volunteer with such children unstintingly.

On that unforgettable, bitter day, the 20th of Av (August 9, 2001), Malki went over to a friend's house.

"See you later, have a good time," said her mother Frimet, whose eyes were shut due to a severe migraine; she couldn’t even open them before her daughter left the house. "How I regret not looking at her that morning because the last time I saw her was the day before it happened," she says painfully. The loss of her daughter is palpable throughout our conversation; it gets harder to bear as the years pass.

Malki called from her friend's house to say that she was going to a get-together in the Talpiyot neighborhood and received her mother's permission to go. "I love you," the conversation ended - three words fated to become the last ones Frimet and her beloved daughter would exchange with one another.

And then – suddenly the terrible news - a major terrorist suicide bombing in the middle of downtown Jerusalem. Frimet’s thoughts were instantly with locating her children.

"I worried about them, because they left without taking a mobile phone. Malki had one with her, so I was less worried, " recalls Frimet. "Besides, she said she was going to Talpiyot and I knew that she would only be in town for as long as it took to switch buses."

Malki's siblings were located quickly – they were safe. Malki did not answer her mobile phone.

Anyone who remembers the chilling "routine" of the period in which suicide bomber attacks took place with horrendous frequency, knows that the cellular phone connections were always down, for security reasons, in an area in which an attack occurred. Since everyone had become used to that happening, they urged Frimet not to worry.

But a good deal of time passed, and then it turned out that Malki had never reached the get–together she planned to attend, nor did her friend Michal – who also could not be found.

"I still didn't get it. She was not even supposed to be in Sbarro," says Frimet. She and Michal's mother, along with Frimet's soldier son, a newly-enlisted hesdernik (in the 5 year yeshiva-army program) who had returned home to help, decided to go to Shaarei Zedek Hospital to look for their daughters.

On the way there, corroboration came in: Malki had been at Sbarro, she had sent a text message to someone to meet her there - a meeting that never took place.

"I began to scream," recalls Frimet. "I realized it was all over. At the hospital, we separated and each one of us searched for her own daughter. Michal's mother found her daughter still alive, but we did not find our Malki. In the office into which I was taken, they had me speak to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute so I could describe her, and for some reason they said there was no one who fitted my description."

This unbearable day continued, with family and friends searching other hospitals. Much later that night, on the advice of social workers in another of Jerusalem’s hospitals, two of Malki’s older brothers went there with a national insurance social worker.

"At 2 a.m. they called to tell us they had identified her."

Malki and her friend Michal were
always inseparable. Now they are
buried side by side.

Her friend Michal had been found barely alive, but she didn't make it and those were her last moments in this world. 

Malki and Michal, "beloved and pleasant during their lifetimes”, (as King David said of King Saul and his son) were buried side by side in Jerusalem's Har Hamenuchot cemetery.

That day marked the start of the Roth family's struggle. To memorialize Malki, they soon created the Malki Foundation which helps fund treatments for seriously disabled children who live at home and are cared for by their parents. Parents can choose among occupational therapy, therapeutic horseback riding, speech therapy, physiotherapy and hydrotherapy with 85% of the costs covered by the fund. It also lends special equipment to those children via a partnership with the Yad Sarah organization.

But along with the generous deeds associated with Malki's memory, the Roth family is engaged in fighting to have the terrorists brought to justice. This struggle is focused on Tamimi, the daughter of an infamous riot-inciting Arab family ["11-Sep-15: How devoted to non-violence are the villagers of Nabi Saleh really?"]. Tamimi was a communications student at Bir Zeit University who was born and raised in Jordan and had come to Israel to do her post-high school studies. She became Hamas’ first female terrorist.

Some days before the Sbarro attack, Tamimi tried to carry out an attack on a smaller scale, which failed because there were not enough explosives in the bomb she used. That made her prepare the Sbarro attack more carefully. Her press card (she did part-time work for a TV station in Ramallah) gave her free and easy access to Jerusalem ["5-May-13: Self-confessed jihadist murderer: "With my media card, I was able to enter back and forth, undetected..."].

In recent years she has described with chilling lack of emotion how she looked for a place where she could murder as many… women and children as possible. She found it in one of the fast food places at one of the most congested intersections in Jerusalem.

Malki, the talented classical flautist

Tamimi hid the bomb inside a guitar case, passing right through the IDF checkpoint on Jerusalem’s northern edge and along Jaffa Road with her lethal weapon – the suicide bomber. The two were dressed like ordinary English-speaking tourists and succeeded in looking completely harmless. She brought the suicide bomber to the Sbarro entrance and told him to wait until she got far enough away. She wanted to live.

"My daughter played guitar and flute. She played the classical flute beautifully and was in Jerusalem’s youth orchestra," Frimet said sadly. Malki was right next to the terrorist when he blew himself up. She probably stood near him, thinking: “Here is another music lover like me with a guitar on his back.”

Tamimi worked as a TV news-reader and in that evening’s bulletin impassively reported the terrorist attack - the attack she herself had just perpetrated.

There seems to be no limit to the evil with which the Roth family has to deal. Ahlam Tamimi, who continues to this day to boast of her crimes, was arrested about a month after the bombing and sentenced to 16 life sentences. Officially, 15 human beings were murdered in the attack, but in reality, there are 16 dead, Frimet emphasizes. One critically wounded victim, a young mother, has never came out of a coma.

Those 16 life sentences came to an end very quickly: Tamimi was freed six years ago as part of the Shalit deal ["19-Oct-11: Haaretz: Shalit prisoner swap marks 'colossal failure' for mother of Israeli bombing victim"].

"Even after Tamimi was freed, we did not get a response from anyone in the government, certainly not from the prime minister or his office," Frimet says, visibly upset. "Binyamin Netanyahu said publicly when announcing the Shalit deal: 'I sent letters to the families who were hit by terror'. That never happened. It is an utter lie. After his declaration, we took the initiative and called his office multiple times to ask which letters he meant, since we had never received one and neither had any of the many victim families we asked. The officials lied to us, making up stories about how the PM’s letters were in the mail. When I asked them how many letters were sent, and how come none of the terror stricken families I knew had received one, I heard someone in the background saying 'Tell her there were hundreds.' They simply fabricated an answer. No bereft family ever received a letter."

"We also never heard a word from the Shalit family telling us that they understand our sorrow and pain," she adds.

This, however, does not end the inexcusable behavior of the Netanyahu government towards terror-stricken families. After Tamimi was expelled to Jordan as part of the conditions for her release, she announced that she had become engaged to her cousin, another Shalit deal freed murderer-terrorist, another Tamimi. The conditions under which he was freed stipulated his remaining on the "West Bank" and not leaving the region. The conditions of her release were that she could never go there. The terrorist couple had the nerve to declare that the "cruel Israeli government" is the only factor preventing their marriage.

"We began to hear rumors that the government was about to allow him to cross into Jordan and we hired a lawyer to stop the government via an injunction. Wait a bit, the prime minister's office told us, don't take it in front of a High Court judge yet. We had the fleeting thought that the government was actually going to do something. While we were politely waiting, someone ensured the groom quickly crossed over the Allenby Bridge into Jordan. That's Netanyahu," she says. "They could not have allowed him to cross into Jordan without Netanyahu's authorization.”

Tamimi's wedding took place the following week ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"]. They flaunted it. It was a highly-publicized victory for them, covered live via several Jordanian TV stations and the social media.

And what about us? How do we look? Victory after victory. Netanyahu will never do anything about our ludicrous justice system.

Perhaps the next prime minister will be able to do something, she says with faint hopes. "I hope he is coming close to the end of his stint as prime minister, because the things he did are unbelievable."

Chilling. Ahlam Tamimi, the murderer, recounts with heated enthusiasm
the circumstances of her ride from the scene of the bombing to her
work place, a TV studio in Ramallah

“Now that the terrorist who murdered our daughter is a married woman and evidently the mother of a young child - although that has never been publicized - she continues to make fun of us. She is a popular speaker, tells the story of her atrocity with obvious pride, is a broadcaster and used her own globally-broadcast TV show ["27-Apr-17: Satellite TV and other basic rights of terrorist life behind Israeli bars"] to allow incarcerated terrorists to make contact with their families. Officially, terrorists in Israeli prisons are not permitted to view the Hamas channel that broadcasts her program, but we learned via our own sources that mobile phones have been smuggled into their cells enabling them to watch the programs.”

Giving up hope on Israeli justice, the family turned to the US government.

Malki Hy"d was not the first American terror victim. Another young American woman, her parents' only child and pregnant with her first baby, was also murdered in Sbarro. The woman in a coma since the Sbarro massacre is also an American citizen. The Roth family turned to the American Department of Justice in the name of the three US terror victims, requesting that Tamimi be charged under US Federal law and brought to the US to stand trial for her crimes. American law expressly permits this.

Roth says that since they initiated this in 2012, various Justice Department lawyers, investigators and FBI agents have met with them several times.

There are people who really care there, she says, in contrast to the way we were treated by Israeli officialdom.

Meanwhile the Roths have won several battles against Tamimi, small but significant ones. Twitter shut down her account twice so she was prevented from tweeting her evil thoughts to the world ["12-Apr-17: A modest step toward justice: Twitter today suspended the account of our daughter's murderer" and "25-Jun-17: A voice of lethal, bigoted hatred is silenced... for a while"].

Last Purim's joy at having the request for extradition in Jordan's hands lasted just two days, after which it became clear that Jordan does not intend to extradite Tamimi for various evidently-bogus reasons despite an extradition treaty dating from 1995 which was used several times in order to extradite terrorists to the US ["20-Mar-17: The Hashemite Kingdom's courts have spoken: The murdering FBI fugitive will not be handed over"]. The Roths feel that Tamimi is being used as a propaganda tool vis a vis the Palestinian Arab majority in Jordan, who consider her a heroine.

Political interests that have no connection with justice at all, such as the gas deal, are what the Israeli government worries about. They need King Abdullah as a regional power and will not pressure him to make the decision to extradite, one which only he can make. No pressure and she is still free.

March 21, 2017: Lead story in Al Jazeera [here]

The ball is now in the hands of the US State Department, says Roth. "The State Department has a great deal of power, more than the president does in certain areas. There are things they could do, things they should not have done and we are still awaiting answers about certain actions that we can still not talk about. However, it is clear they are not trying to extradite at this point.”

"Until Tamimi is extradited," Frimet declares, "we will not stop what we are doing. It is of utmost importance to us. The present situation only exacerbates our endless pain."

The pain, it must be said, along with the feeling of helplessness in the face of the Israeli government's behavior, the long wait for justice from the US – all have taken their toll. Frimet suffered a heart attack a few months ago at a relatively young age.

Question: If the extradition does take place, will Tamimi spend the rest of her life in an American prison? What will that accomplish?

Frimet: That will not erase the pain of losing our daughter, of missing her constantly. But it will take away the outer layer of that pain caused by the injustice done to us. Malki is so lacking in our home, our pure and sweet natured talented daughter would be 32 today. I see her with a husband and children, spending her free time doing good deeds. She used to help people and come home with her face shining with joy, and she was really close to Haya Elisheva, her sister, and with the girls in the mainstreaming class at school. In fact, the very summer in which she was murdered, she worked as a counselor in a summer camp called Etgarim, Challenges, for disabled youngsters.

She has left such an empty hole in our hearts.