19-Oct-19: House Speaker Pelosi led an official visit today to the chief protector of our child's killer

Ms Pelosi in conference today with Jordan's king
and his son the Crown Prince [Image Source]

The official media mouthpiece of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan reports this evening (Saturday) on US politicians visiting, and paying generous homage to, King Abdullah II. At this hour, there is no other media source for this.

But there's much, all of it relevant, that the Jordanian media don't say.

Jordan harbors Ahlam Tamimi, the confessed Jordanian bomber of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem whose 2013 indictment by the US Department of Justice was unveiled (after a long period of secrecy) more than two and a half years ago ["14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?"] But she remains free, living in Jordan's capital.

Without the smallest reference to Ahlam Tamimi, or to Jordan's flat-out refusal to comply with an extradition request from its US ally, and of course with no hint of how phenomenally popular Tamimi is in Jordan's public opinion (enough to persuade the king to block the US request), here's the mouthpiece's Saturday night report in full:

Amman, Oct.19 (Petra)-- His Majesty King Abdullah, accompanied by His Royal Highness Crown Prince Al Hussein bin Abdullah II, met on Saturday with a delegation from the US Congress, headed by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The meeting, held as part of ongoing outreach with the US Congress’ Senate and House of Representatives, covered the cooperation and strategic partnership between Jordan and the United States, as well as regional developments.
Speaking at the meeting, attended by His Royal Highness Prince Feisal bin Al Hussein, King Abdullah expressed appreciation for the United States’ continuing support for Jordan in a number of fields, commending the US Congress’ position towards the Kingdom.
Discussing regional issues, foremost of which is the Palestinian cause, His Majesty stressed the need to reach just, lasting and comprehensive peace on the basis of the two-state solution, which guarantees the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 4 June 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Turning to the Syrian crisis, the King urged a political solution that safeguards Syria’s territorial integrity and the unity of its people, while guaranteeing the safe and voluntary return of refugees.
The meeting also covered regional and international efforts to counter terrorism within a comprehensive approach.
For their part, the US lawmakers commended Jordan’s efforts, led by His Majesty, in pursuit of peace and stability in the region, praising the King’s wisdom.
They expressed keenness to hear the King’s perspective on regional and global developments, adding that they are pleased to be present in Jordan as the Kingdom marks 20 years since His Majesty assumed his constitutional powers.
Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, Adviser to His Majesty for Communication and Coordination Bisher Khasawneh, and Adviser to His Majesty for Policies and Media Kemal Al Nasser attended the meeting.

[Source: "King meets with US Congress delegation", PETRA (Jordan Government Media Office), October 19, 2019]

Side by side, Arabic and English versions of
Ahlam Tamimi's FBI Most Wanted poster [Image Source]

This latest high-level US visit comes on the heels of another Congressional delegation visit a mere eleven days earlier ["08-Oct-19: Again: Jordan's inscrutable US relationship"]. Our efforts to get the leader of that earlier delegation, Representative Jason Crow, to speak with us have been ignored by him and his staff.

Speaker Pelosi has had multiple meetings with the Jordanian king in the past year and a half including (at least) in April 2018 [here], March 2019 [here] and April 2019 [here]. Clearly, if she were so inclined, she's had plenty of opportunity to express concern about US justice thwarted.

Her silence is troubling.

We're going to make efforts to see what Ms Pelosi says she said to Jordan's absolute ruler today about why he demeans the extradition treaty his father King Hussein signed with the Clinton administration in 1995. Our track record in getting members of Congress to respond to questions like this is not very good but we're not giving up.

Meanwhile we're wondering:

• Do Congressional delegations to Jordan get briefed by the State Department before they take off? 
• Do the State Department or the Justice Department inform Amman-bound Cogressional visitors about the years-long pursuit of Tamimi, a jihadist in the service of Hamas who is astoundingly a free-as-a-bird celebrity living openly, not in hiding, in Jordan's capital, and the presenter for five years (starting February 2012) of a pro-terrorism TV show broadcast from Amman throughout the world?
• Does Ms Pelosi know who Malki Roth was, and what was done to her  by the Jordanian terrorist when she was 15 years old? 
• Does she know who Ahlam Tamimi is, what she stands for and where she lives? 
• Does she, and do the other members of her delegation, know why the FBI has her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list?
• Assuming the answer is no, will Attorney-General Barr and Ambassador Nathan Sales (the State Department's Counterterrorism Coordinator) please brief them now? And ensure future Congressional visitors to Jordan get the same briefing before they leave Washington?

And this.

Why are you learning about the Congressional visit from the blog of a pair of bereaved parents seeking justice for the on-the-run killer of their child, and not from the mainstream news?

UPDATE October 20, 2019 at 7:00 am

Along with broader news coverage (but not a single mention of Tamimi or how Jordan undermines Justice Department efforts to extradite her), Speaker Pelosi's website now names the Congress members in her delegation:

• Ranking Member Mac Thornberry, House Armed Services Committee
• Chairman Eliot Engel, House Foreign Affairs Committee
• Chairman Bennie Thompson, Homeland Security Committee
• Chairman Adam Schiff, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
• Congressman Ron Kind, House Ways and Means Committee
• Congresswoman Susan Davis, House Armed Services Committee
• Congressman Stephen Lynch, Chairman, House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on National Security
• Congresswoman Elaine Luria, House Armed Services Committee
• Speaker Nancy Pelosi

(Source: "Pelosi Leads High-Level Bipartisan Delegation to Jordan", October 19, 2019)

But no one from the House Judiciary Committee. That's relevant because of what's in this recent news report: "Parents of US Girl Killed in 2001 Jerusalem Bombing Call for Congressional Investigation Into Fugitive Hamas Terrorist Living Freely in Jordan" [Ben Cohen in Algemeiner, July 17, 2019]

UPDATE October 21, 2019 at 10:30 pm

We have just tweeted every one of the Congressional members of the Pelosi delegation to Jordan's king. We asked them these questions:

1. Did the subject of Jordan illicitly harboring one of America's most wanted fugitive jihadists, #AhlamTamimi, get mentioned by any @TeamPelosi delegation members on Saturday in Jordan?
2. Did the king raise it? 
3. Did he respond to questions about it?

We sent the same tweet to the US Embassy in Jordan's capital.

We're conditioned to expect that not one of them will see fit to reply to us. Perhaps if we were political figures... but we're not.

Here is what we are: simply the parents of a US citizen, a child of 15, murdered by a fugitive terrorist who is kept safe by the man who hosted them so royally on Saturday. A man who claims to be at the forefront of the war against terror but who tramples the extradition treaty his father signed with the US government 24 years ago.

Tamimi and Jordan's calculated and illicit thwarting of her extradition to Washington, overseen by King Abdullah II who appoints all of his country's judges, go entirely unmentioned in the Pelosi media release.

Why are we not surprised?

12-Aug-19: The pain of a child's murder: A burden of grief and injustice

Malki Z"L was deeply devoted to her blind and profoundly
disabled youngest sister

It appears that the pain of a child's murder is so inconceivable in our society that it is down-played. Swept under the carpet.

Frimet Roth | This op ed was originally published on the Israel National News website, August 8, 2019

I don't mention my murdered child, Malki, often.

Over the eighteen years since the terror bombing at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria, I have learned that most people are bored, disconcerted or annoyed by my dredging up that "ancient incident".

Closure, moving on, forgiving are the trendiest notions circulating in the world of grief.

A few years back, my husband, who had just delivered a talk about terrorism in his hometown, Melbourne, overheard an old acquaintance gripe about him. "Hasn’t gotten over that yet?"

I recall a CNN journalist reporting about a tragic mass shooting in the US involving children, commenting "The families of the victims certainly have several tough weeks ahead of them."

Weeks? Make that lives.

It appears that the pain of a child's murder is so inconceivable in our society that it is down-played. Swept under the carpet.

I vividly recall the silky feel of my Malki's hair, the way we swam the crawl together holding hands, the way we always walked up the ramp to our car arm in arm, the tears of pride I would shed whenever I heard her play the flute in a concert.

Her smile as she walked through our front door was infectious.

Her concern for anyone with disabilities was incomparable and unique for a teen. It was expressed not by vacuous words of compassion but rather active involvement with them.

Malki sought out places to volunteer as a caregiver even to the most profoundly affected children.

That included her youngest sibling Chaya who suffers from a rare genetic illness that includes severe epilepsy and blindness. Malki’s tenderness and devotion to her were incomparable.

And I remember the last time I heard her voice; she phoned me an hour before her life ended and we closed always, with the words “I love you.”

For the past eight years, our grief has been exacerbated by anger over injustice. The mastermind of that terror bombing, a Jordanian terrorist called Ahlam Tamimi, sentenced to 16 life terms in an Israeli court, was freed in the 2001 Shalit Deal.

She was “exiled” to her home – Amman – where she was reunited with her family. Some exile.

On March 14, 2017, the US Department of Justice unsealed charges against Tamimi and said it was requiring the Jordanian regime to extradite her to Washington. This was due to Malki and two other victims of that attack being US citizens.

But Jordan’s King Abdullah II has provided Tamimi with refuge, refusing to abide by his kingdom’s 1995 extradition treaty with the US.

My husband and I have asked that US officials pressure the king to hand over the monster he is protecting. Instead, the current US administration fetes him and his family, receives him in the White House as an honored guest, lavishes his shaky kingdom with massive cash gifts and other support.

The terror attack on Sbarro was unique in several ways.

One family was nearly decimated: a mother, father and three of their eight children perished.

Another couple lost their one and only child along with the baby she was carrying who would have been their first grandchild. I visit that bereft mother regularly as she now faces myriad health crises, confined to a wheelchair.

Sbarro is also unique in that Tamimi boasts to this day of “her operation". She has described in televised interviews how she scoured Jerusalem's city center for the perfect target - one that would be filled with women and children.

For years she hosted a weekly program beamed from Amman to viewers throughout the Arab world on Hamas' Al Quds TV station.

She smiled joyfully when she learned that her 15 victims included 8 children, not the mere three she claimed to believe.

She has been a constant presence on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter where she incites her fans to follow her example. She is undeniably the incarnation of evil.

And yet she is safe, free and raising a family. Every day of this reality is another stab in our hearts.

This week, grieving Americans were assured by Federal authorities that the El Paso shooter who murdered 22 innocent victims would be deemed a terrorist. He would receive “swift and certain justice.”

The victims of terrorist Tamimi are still waiting for that.

Frimet Roth's daughter, Malki, was murdered in the Sbarro terrorist attack at the age of fifteen. She had gone to enjoy a summer vacation pizza with her friend Michal Raziel, who was killed with her. Frimet is a freelance writer. She and her husband live in Jerusalem with their family. More from the author ►

02-Apr-19: Setting facts, ethics, context aside, Al Jazeera salutes a couple of murderers

Mr and Mrs Tamimi at home in Jordan's capital Amman,
in a video segment embedded in the Al Jazeera homage

In Arabic only (so far), Aljazeera published a paean this past week to a pair of convicted and unrepentant terrorists sentenced by Israel to life-term prison sentences for killing many Israelis.

The two are not merely out of prison but, from what we can tell, live a highly public and comfortable life replete with exposure, celebrity, adulation and valuable political connections that seem to help smooth their way.

Al Jazeera Media Network whose chairman Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani served as a minister in Qatar's government in the eighties and nineties and who is a member of the ruling family of Qatar, the House of Thani, is a formidable communications conglomerate owned by the government of Qatar. It has some 80 bureaux and more than 100,000 employees distributed around the world.

This particular piece was published on the AlJazeera.net site last Thursday and so far has appeared only in Arabic. While the group publishes in multiple languages including English, Turkish, Indonesian, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, the AlJazeera.net platform is specifically dedicated to Arabic speakers.

Because we think it shines some much-needed light on how Arab-on-Israeli terror is viewed in much of the Arabic-speaking world, we arranged a professional translation. The text appears below. 

A word for those uncomfortable with violence and bloodshed: Rest assured. Though this is all about a couple of unrepentant convicted felons, people who murdered other people and have never expressed regret for their deeds, and while one might expect some unpleasant discussion about killings and deaths - actually there isn't that much. Hardly any.

In fact, what violence there is happens to be about Israelis threatening (they say) and killing other people (they allege). We'll come back to that counter-intuitive aspect at the end.

Political News
Nizar and Ahlam: A couple pursued by “chains” despite their release from occupation imprisonment

March 28, 2019 | Aljazeera.net | From Mahmoud Al-Shar’aan in Amman 

They became engaged in the prisons of Israeli occupation. They were released in the prisoner exchange deal of 2011 known as the “Wafaa’ Al-Ahrar deal” between the Palestinian Resistance Movement (HAMAS) and the occupation. [TOW: In the West, it's better known as the Gilad Shalit Deal]  

Their relationship led to marriage and the establishment of a Palestinian house of “resistance” in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

They are the freed prisoners Nizar Al-Tamimi (45) and his wife Ahlam Al-Tamimi (38) who was born in Jordan. 

The bond of marriage was not the only thing they shared. They were also brought together by the defence of Palestine and the sacrifice they gave towards the struggle through the years they spent in prison.

Nizar, who belongs to the Palestinian Liberation Movement (Fatah) was sentenced to life in prison after he participated in the killing of an Israeli citizen in the nineties of which he served 20 years before he was released. 

Ahlam on the other hand was the first woman to have joined the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. She was sentenced to 16 life sentences after she participated in a martyrdom operation against the occupation of Jerusalem in 2001, of which she served 10 years before she was released.

A new life

Their many years spent in prison have not killed the normal life of these freed prisoners as they both are pursuing their education, each in his own field. 

The husband is preparing for his Masters thesis [sic] in political science with the title “The law of Jewish nationalism and its effect on the reality and future of the Palestinian cause”, while the wife is preparing to study towards her Masters thesis [sic] in Journalism and Media under the title “A theoretical etymology of the concept of prisoner media”.

Nizar tells Aljazeera.net that freedom was like a new birth for them both after having spent many tough years in jail. “We were able to come out of prison strong, and more importantly we are still bearers of the message of truth when it comes to our just cause, and we have begun a new life”.

But the lives of the couple were thrown into disarray after they received messages threatening to pursue them and to lay cases against them in the United States.

The last case of these threats came in the words of the American peace process delegate to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, who wrote on his official Twitter account that “Americans must know that Ahlam Al-Tamimi who is a Hamas terrorist convicted of killing 15 people, seven of whom were children killed in cold blood, is living free today”.

Greenblatt announced a reward of the equivalent of 5 million dollars to anyone who can provide information on Ahlam Al-Tamimi and the Hamas leader, Saleh Al Aruri.

Continuous threats

Greenblatt’s threats were not new. They are a part of a long chain of threats received by Ahlam and her husband. It was revealed to Aljazeera.net that Jewish organizations paid to lay cases against them in American courts of law.

Ahlam identifies herself as a Jordanian citizen of Palestinian origin who is a freedom fighter for a just cause. “I refuse to allow my cause and the cause of my nation to be labelled as terrorism or that the door be opened to some representatives trying to make political gains to pass whatever they want under the cover of their mission”.

The freed prisoner regards her being in Jordan to be a point of strength as there is no agreement between Amman and Washington that states that wanted people need to be handed over. In addition, the Jordanian judicial authorities refused a previous American demand for her to be handed over.

She is asking the Kingdom to protect her from American hegemony and the continuing threats against her, and to solve her crisis with the United States “politically”.

Ahlam does not deny her fears of the financial reward offered by Greenblatt, because the involvement of money in this case might facilitate passing information on her or that the matter might even reach assassination, as she says.

At the same time, her husband is of the view that once a prisoner is released from prison, he remains a target of Israel, and he can therefore never really feel total calm as other prisoners have been killed after they were released from prison, as he says.

A house of resistance

Between four walls, the couple spend time telling stories and reliving the memories of prison life, of Palestine and of comrades in struggle. The best years of their lives were taken from them by Israeli courts and prison bars. This however did not prevent them from trying to live normally and defend their rights in a clear message that is not open for discussion, the summary of which says that there is no conceding the entirety of Palestine.

Nizar, the son of Fatah, and Ahlam, the daughter of Hamas, are the embodiment of the reality of a unified Palestinian people, in the wake of division which they described as an exception to the rule. They have spent their lives together with many ideas, some of which were conflicting, but they both always agree in the end that there is no way to liberate Palestine except through resistance and that it is the only way to achieve it.

Source: Aljazeera (Arabic) online here. In case it somehow disappears, we arranged for it to be  archived here.

A few observations.

• The only violence mentioned in this brazen homage is violence they claim is directed at - not by - the Tamimis, a pair of unrepentant murderers. As journalism goes, this is exceedingly shabby. Are there ethical standards in the Al Jazeera media empire? What are they?
• Seriously, is it true as they claim here that "there is no agreement between Amman and Washington that states that wanted people need to be handed over"? No, not really. We explained that here: "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?" Bottom line: Jordan and the US signed an extradition treaty 24 years ago; the US absolutely considers it still valid and in full effect and Jordan has never complained to its American treaty partners that there is a problem with it. In fact, Jordan has cheerfully handed over Jordanian felons to the US at the request of the US. But it refuses to hand over Ahlam Tamimi. It justifies this on the contentious footing that there is now a Jordanian constitutional law issue to consider. They don't say, but we think they should, that Tamimi is different from the others already extradited because she killed Israelis. Note that none of this seems to be known to the Al Jazeera editors and their reporter. Or perhaps they simply have no interest in conveying what they know to their news consumers. So it's either shameful pretense or it's professional incompetence.
• The reporter claims that "the lives of the couple were thrown into disarray after they received messages threatening to pursue them and to lay cases against them in the United States." This is pure invention. Ahlam Tamimi is wanted on US Federal charges that were unsealed in Washington on March 14, 2017 (see the previous para). There are no charges pending against her husband, but it adds an element of extra drama to the story. A great pity, seriously, that it's bunk.
• Did Ahlam Tamimi hurt anyone? Hard to know from this piece of shameless advocacy and terror promotion. All that the Al Jazeera journalist and his editors want their Arabic-language readers to know is that this Jordanian woman was locked away for a tremendously long prison term because "she participated in a martyrdom operation against the occupation of Jerusalem". Is it even worth mentioning that 16 people were murdered in that "operation"? That Tamimi picked the spot because it attracted so many children and brought the bomb to it at the busiest time of the day? That this savage boasts openly and happily about it in front of cameras and live audiences? That the panel of judges who sentenced her recommended that Israel never consider letting her out under any circumstances or deals? And that they were ignored when the Shalit Deal was done? We guess not.
• Did she reveal that she's now pursuing a masters degree in journalism and media? We think (and we're checking so that we can be sure) that only a couple of Jordanian institutions offer such programs. One happens to be a school about which we have written in the past, and which has an extremely shabby connection to Tamimi herself: See "By their role models shall ye know them" [Times of Israel, December 2014]. 
• The Tamimis claim to have "received messages threatening to pursue them and to lay cases against them in the United States". Other than as another invented dramatic device, this notion of threats doesn't make much sense. The reporter could have mentioned that the US Department of Justice unveiled those serious criminal charges against Ahlam Tamimi more than two years ago ["14-Mar-17: Sbarro massacre mastermind is now formally charged and extradition is sought"]. He could have pointed out she was arrested in Jordan by Jordanian police on the basis of an Interpol Red Notice in September 2016 (with absolutely no publicity), but he doesn't. She was released the following morning but that says more about Jordan and its legal and power system than about the criminality of Ahlam Tamimi. Maybe he doesn't know. Maybe he already forgot. Maybe this isn't really about facts and news but about fantasies and delusions of Tamimi victimhood. But how is this journalism?
• The reporter and his editors are under the mistaken impression that Trump envoy Jason "Greenblatt announced a reward of the equivalent of 5 million dollars to anyone who can provide information on Ahlam Al-Tamimi". No, he didn't. The reward, which certainly does exist, was issued more than a year before Greenblatt mentioned it in his Tweet. And it doesn't come from Greenblatt but from a unit of the US State Department called Rewards for Justice. The year-and-a-half-old details for the Al Jazeera news-hounds are here (you're welcome): "31-Jan-18: There's now a $5 million reward for bringing the terrorist Ahlam Tamimi to justice". Can we now expect a correction? Or do Al Jazeera's people claim ownership of their own version of reality?
• It's quite moving to read that "The best years of [the Tamimi couple's] lives were taken from them by Israeli courts and prison bars". Taken from them? Why? But it's chilling that the editors of this Al Jazeera group outlet manage to tell the story of two unusually cruel murderers without even a passing reference to the many lives they extinguished by their acts of depraved savagery. They give the impression that they identify with the killers and the killings. Is this fair of us? But if we're right (of course we are), do their pay-masters in the government of Qatar know this? Perhaps they will now. Perhaps they will even want to know about the life and lost "best years" of our desperately missed daughter Malki who was 15 when Ahlam Tamimi delivered her exploding guitar case on the back of her human bomb to Sbarro. (Full disclosure: Malki was not the only person murdered there that day. It was a massacre. In a pizzeria. Children were the target; they ended up being more than half the casualties. Tamimi's sickening, satanic plan worked. She hasn't stopped smiling and boasting about it.)  
• When Al Jazeera quotes Nizar Tamimi asserting that "other [Palestinian Arab] prisoners have been killed after they were released from prison", did they check? Can they bring cases? As a news agency, did they think of listing the names of the many mass murderers [some named here along with their crimes] who walked free in that catastrophic transaction? Did they think of referring to the Israelis murdered after the Shalit Deal [some of them named here] by unrepentant terrorists who were let loose?
• The Al Jazeera editors, aware of the endless enmity among the Hamas, Fatah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad factions, must have seen the almost humorous irony in their reporter claiming the Tamimis as "the embodiment of the reality of a unified Palestinian people". Unified? They must have already decided this scurrilous piece of reporting-as-incitement needed to serve a higher purpose than the objective reporting of news. So what the heck - go for broke. 
• Will the major news organizations and global content aggregators who partner with Al Jazeera (like Google, Bloomberg, TechLive, Snapchat) be interested to know how the party they're consorting with acts as an active and effective promoter of terrorism that publishes sentiments like Ahlam Tamimi's "there is no way to liberate Palestine except through resistance"? Probably not. The rest of us surely should.

This reward poster in Arabic was issued by the US State
Department in January 2018 but has never been physically
posted anywhere in Jordan or the Arab world.

In the interests of seeming balanced, and having regard for the monumental media footprint the Al Jazeera empire has managed to create, here's what the public relations professionals working at Al Jazeera said about their employer a year ago:

We, at Al Jazeera, renew our commitment to global audiences with news coverage and programs which provide in depth analysis of news and current affairs. We will continue celebrating the achievements brought by our diversity of staff who hail from almost 100 different countries. It is this diversity of values and cultures that enriches our work and provides our audiences with the award-winning content on all our platform. We urge democratic forces all over the world, especially in United States, to stand with free media institutions to promote and protect the values of democracy, liberty, human rights, freedom of media and the right to free speech. Don’t shoot the messenger, journalism is not a crime.

Maybe they don't mean their Arabic output. And when the subject is this thing they call "resistance", perhaps different rules apply.

UPDATE Monday April 2, 2019 at 7:00 pm: The Al Jazeera piece includes a substantial video interview which is of course not in English. We have just been told by friends (thank you, friends!) that MEMRI has posted a translation. Please go and read, watch and share - it's here.

21-Mar-19: The Secretary of State is in Jerusalem

Malki z"l

Frimet Roth writes:

Even on Purim, our most joyous holiday, our murdered daughter Malki is in our thoughts and our hearts ache with longing for her.

Perhaps this photo of her dressed up as a farmer girl for Purim when she was about ten, her gentleness and innocence radiating forth, will reach U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who is only several kilometers away from us as I type this in Jerusalem.

While he is not scheduled to meet with Jordan's King Abdullah on this Middle East tour (as far as we know), he has officially done so already several times, most recently just ten days ago in Washington. 

But never once has Pompeo raised the fact that the king refuses to extradite Ahlam Tamimi, the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist who has on her hands the blood of fifteen innocent Jews, including Malki. 

Never once has he demanded that King Abdullah cease affording refuge (as he has since 2011) and adulation to that self-confessed Hamas mass murderer.

Never once has he publicly mentioned the US Federal criminal indictment of Tamimi and the demand for her extradition by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017. 

And never once has he made continued U.S. support for the King's precarious regime contingent on Jordan's compliance with its signed 1995 extradition treaty with the U.S.

We implore Secretary Pompeo to secure justice for the three American victims of Tamimi's evil. We have waited far too long for that meager comfort.

#JusticeForMalki

23-Oct-18: She admits she planned the Sbarro massacre. But for parts of the media, Ahlam Tamimi remains 'an accomplice'

In a piece about FBI Most Wanted fugitive terrorist Ahlam Tamimi published yesterday, the Washington Post breezily describes our daughter's murderer this way:

For Israelis, the Tamimis are a group of provocateurs intent on manipulating the media to hurt the country’s image. One cousin [of Ahed], Ahlam Tamimi, was an accomplice to a suicide bombing. "

At this point, we know a lot about Ahlam Tamimi. Here's how she herself details the central role she took in the 2001 Sbarro pizzeria massacre:

Interviewer: "Who chose Sbarro [restaurant, as the target of the attack]?"  

Ahlam Tamimi: "I did. For nine days I examined the place very carefully and chose it after seeing the large number of patrons at the Sbarro restaurant. My mission was just to choose the place and to bring the martyrdom-seeker (i.e. the human bomb, a young man called Al-Masri). [I made] the general plan of the operation but carrying it out was entrusted to the martyrdom-seeker."

Ahlam Tamimi: "I told him to enter the restaurant, eat a meal, and then after 15 minutes carry out the martyrdom-seeking operation. My job was to realize, for this martyrdom-seeker, the happy life that he wanted." 

Interviewer: "Didn't you think about the people who were in the restaurant? The children? The families?" 

Ahlam Tamimi: "No."  

Interviewer: "Do you know how many children were killed in the restaurant?" 

Ahlam Tamimi: "Three children were killed in the operation, I think." 

Interviewer: "Eight."

Ahlam Tamimi (smiling): "Eight? Eight!"

[Source]

This is the monster that Jordan's King Abdullah refuses to extradite to the United States despite the US Department of Justice's request under a valid extradition treaty that has existed between those two countries since 1995 and under which multiple Jordanian felons have been extradited to face trial in US courts.

Other than that Ahlam Tamimi is an acclaimed hero among Palestinian Arabs and in Jordanian society in general (which is overwhelmingly composed of Palestinian Arabs); that she has been provided with support, protection, privilege and exposure that arguably no mass murderer in history has enjoyed at the hands of any government; and that the victims of her malevolence were mainly Jewish children (unlike every other Jordanian extradited to the US); and that she has publicly and for the record admitted, indeed boasted, about her central role in the bombing and the resulting deaths... just how different is Ahlam Tamimi from the other Jordanians extradited in past years to the United States?

And no, we're not asking for a friend.

31-Aug-18: Lessons learned from the world's moral-arbiter-in-chief

Prince Zeid in his official "exit" speech [Video grab from this source]

Owing to specific circumstances in our personal lives, we have a larger-than-usual sensitivity to the double-talk of self-important public officials.

Still, we try to stay polite, considerate and respectful. Sometimes we keep silent even when struggling with the overwhelming urge to speak a little bluntly and try to take those figures down a notch.

We're suspending the silence today to speak out about the man who has just ended a term as "the world's moral-arbiter-in-chief" (according to this US report at the time of his appointment) and one of the most powerful operators in the United Nations civil service.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein's previous roles have included being Jordan's ambassador to the UN for seven years, and then Jordan's ambassador to the US and Jordan's ambassador to Mexico. And by the way, he's a cousin of Jordan's present ruler, King Abdullah II.

(It will surprise many to know he is also the next in line to the throne of Iraq which doesn't currently have a king and probably never will again. The Hashemite clan of which Zeid is a member was granted royal domain over what we know today as Syria, Jordan and Iraq by the British in the 1920's. It hasn't worked out all that well for them: the last ruling Hashemite king of Iraq, Faisal II, was executed in 1958. A USAToday commentary pointed out "the prince's lifelong ties to the Jordanian regime headed by his cousin... Zeid has not commented on Jordan's abuses, and some have questioned his suitability for the human-rights post". Is all of this relevant? It might be. Judge for yourself.)

Looking back at his four-year term as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Jordanian prince went on the record a few weeks ago saying he will give his UNCHR successor the same advice his own predecessor, Navi Pillay, gave him — “be fair and don’t discriminate against any country” and “just come out swinging”.

Here's the encounter we had with him. We're not sure he's quite the swinger he thinks he is.

But first a word about us. We are the parents of Malki, a child murdered at 15 in an especially savage Hamas terror attack on a pizzeria filled with children. For close to seven years and counting, we have been campaigning to have the mastermind of the massacre arrested where she now lives as a free citizen - in Jordan - and extradited to the United States. Why the US? Because our daughter held American citizenship and under American law the perpetrator of an act of terror in which a US citizen is killed can be brought to justice in a US federal court. The mastermind's name is Ahlam Tamimi; she has been on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list since March 2017.

Jordan, whose citizenship Tamimi (a close blood relative in multiple ways to the current Palestinian Arab "icon" Ahed Tamimi) holds, though she calls herself a Palestinian, refuses to extradite her even though it signed an extradition agreement with the US in 1995. The US says the treaty is in full force and effect and there's no real doubt that's true.

On April 4, 2017, we emailed a personal letter to Mr Zeid in New York via three senior staffers each of whom who acts as his spokesperson and each of whom was separately addressed.

Re: Extraditing Ahlam Tamimi 

We were pleased to see the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, speak forthrightly [link] four days ago about how states must (a) honor their treaty obligations, (b) act on legitimate arrest warrants and (c) respect the great importance of the global struggle for justice and against impunity.  

Prince Zeid was addressing the failure of his own homeland, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in relation to a notorious fugitive from justice, the president of Sudan, who ought to have been arrested when he came to Jordan. 

We are the parents of Malki Roth who was murdered in 2001 in the horrific Hamas attack on women and children in a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. Malki was 15. Fourteen other people were killed and 130 terribly injured. 

The mastermind of the attack is a Jordanian woman. She was eventually arrested and confessed to all the charges. She was convicted on 15 counts of murder and was sentenced to multiple life terms. Her sentence was drastically commuted eight years later in the 2011 deal Israel made with the Hamas terrorist organization to secure the release of an Israeli captive. She has lived free in Jordan since then, proudly taking "credit" for the murders and basking in the status of celebrity. 

Our daughter was a US citizen. Under US law relating to acts of terror, her killer must face justice in the US. The US formally requested some time ago that she be extradited by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But Jordan has refused. The woman, Ahlam Tamimi, is subject to a US arrest warrant and appears on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. 

We are respectfully asking that the High Commissioner speak as clearly and forcefully to the King and government of his homeland, Jordan, about Tamimi as he did four days ago in that other matter. We ask him to tell Jordan that, in relation to Tamimi, it must (a) honor its treaty obligations, (b) act on legitimate arrest warrants and (c) respect the great importance of the global struggle for justice and against impunity.  

We appreciate you conveying this to the High Commissioner.  

Sincerely
Frimet and Arnold Roth
Jerusalem, Israel

We expected the silent treatment from the spokespersons (yes, the irony of their job-titles versus their actual performance is not lost on us). And that's what we got. Instead an OHCHR staffer responded to one of our follow-up notes with these kind sentiments:

Thank you for your message and sorry for the delay in acknowledgement - I can assure you that all messages received by this office are taken seriously, with only one problem being that there are too many of them from across the world, with many serious crisis and violations still ongoing, and too few people and resources to handle all of them. Your message is of course well received, including by the Executive Office of the High Commissioner (where I belong) and the MENA section of the Office. It will be given proper attention - I can assure in this - and you will receive a response upon due consideration. With full understanding and sincere sympathy for your loss. 

We wrote again briefly, several more times with little to show for it. When our wait had stretched to three months, we sent this:

UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland

July 17, 2017

Sir,

The chain of correspondence below, initiated by my wife and me on April 4, 2017 and addressed to your office ended in silence.

Not silence from us, since we are vociferous in attempting to fight the apathy of international bodies who by their passivity and passive resistance contribute to injustice.

Silence from your High Commission.

Today being International Criminal Justice Day and having just read some lofty and inspiring words [here] issued on the occasion by your office, I am making this additional attempt at trying to penetrate the barrier.

I am not optimistic that this time, more than three months after our first letter, you will respond. But I feel the need to try once again. As the parents of a child murdered by a Jordanian woman who is, and is treated as, a national Jordanian hero and given safe harbor by the Jordanian government despite its valid 1995 extradition treaty with the United States, we are outraged by the injustice and even more by the silence of those who ought to be speaking out and joining with us.

Sincerely,
Arnold Roth
Jerusalem

cc Joaquín Alexander Maza Martelli
President, United Nations Human Rights Council
[email protected]

Eventually, on August 30, 2017, we got this response to our request for a small dose of human rights and justice from the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights. It came from Prince Zeid's Chief of Office - Executive Direction and Management, in Geneva.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Roth,

I wish to acknowledge receipt of your various communications below to the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Most of all we wish to express our most sincere condolences on the death of your beloved daughter Malki Roth in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem in 2001.

Please accept our apologies for the time it has taken to respond to your request that the High Commissioner take action regarding extraditing Ahlam Tamimi to the United States. The Office’s legal department has reviewed this matter in detail. While we understand and appreciate your request for assistance, please be advised that the United Nations High Commissioner’s Office nor the High Commissioner himself do not have the mandate or jurisdiction to address the complex legal issues involving extradition between States and the extra-territorial application of US criminal statutes involved in your request. As such, the Office is most regrettably not in a position to intervene in the matter as requested.

It is our sincere hope that your persistent advocacy and commitment to the cause of justice, accountability and human rights will lead to a successful fight against impunity globally, and specifically in memory of your beloved daughter.

But we hadn't asked him to intervene. What we did request was that he "speak as clearly and forcefully to the King and government of his homeland, Jordan, about Tamimi" as he had done just a few days before our first letter. We understood that we were flogging a dead horse.

We then had time to reflect. How, we asked ourselves, does a seasoned diplomat who declines to get involved in international treaty matters that happen to put his own cousin in an unpleasant light use his exalted platform? What kind of apparently non-complex legal issues is he ready to address?

Well, how about these human rights issues for instance? Each of them is a case from the past few weeks and months where Prince Zeid did find it possible to speak out:

• Reminding "all states" to "abide by their treaty obligations" or else face "weakening the global struggle against impunity, and for justice" [source] - almost exactly what he refused to do for  our cause.
• Warning Israel not to use "excessive force, following the many deaths and injuries sustained by Palestinians, including children, in Gaza";  over the past month. For the record, the prince and his office have consistently ignored the central and critical role of Hamas in whipping up the rioters and their violence, physically bringing them to the Israeli border, encouraging women, children and infants to serve as human shields, using live weapons including incendiary devices and guns and bombs. 
• Sharing his deep concern over proposed Israeli legislation that would "violate international law" and "have far-reaching consequences" that would "seriously damage the reputation of Israel around the world” [source]. Nothing too complex there, right?
• Calling [here] for an "independent investigation" into the death, allegedly at the hands of Israeli forces of a Gazan Islamist amputee, Ibrahim Abu Thuraya. On any fair-minded view, the role of the terrorists in Thuraya's demise - as outlined in this CAMERA report - raises questions that ought to have been reflected in the UN official's efforts to seek justice but were not.
• Sending out a warning letter on his office's letterhead advising some 130 global and 60 Israels companies that they are "in breach of international law" because of their activities in Israel and liable to be added to a blacklist. The companies include Caterpillar, TripAdvisor, Priceline, Airbnb, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Israel Aircraft Industries and Ahava among many others. It's been called "the latest incarnation of the decades-long Arab boycott and yet another singling out of Israel by the UN... The intent and impact is anti-Semitic,” according to an expert in UN matters and legal advisor for NGO Monitor [here].

This depressing logo decorated the rejection letter
we received months after we made our request

Israel, as others have noted, takes a prominent role in his organization's activities. And not in a good way.

We noticed that the OHCHR letter to us must have been sent in the midst of one of its many self-promotion campaigns; a cheerful-looking logo (on the right) adorned the page.

Seeing it there reinforced the painful reality that, for the global human rights industry, many human rights are clearly worth standing up for. But the human rights of a beautiful Jerusalem girl of 15 to be alive, to live free of the crushing assault of Islamist terrorists like Tamimi and the vicious, nail-enhanced bombs that serve as their sound track, are not among them.

Getting ignored or being fed insulting, offensive and nonsensical responses by public officials is an experience we have come to know from up-close and intimate encounters in the course of our efforts to get Ahlam Tamimi sent to face justice in an American court.

We're not ready to go into details yet (there are efforts underway right now beneath the surface) but we have been exposed to exceedingly shabby treatment by several top-level US diplomats and by multiple officials in the US State Department including the head of an important and highly-relevant unit. On the other hand, we are grateful for the good support we are currently getting from certain other administration officials and offices.

We wish people, including Prince Zeid himself, would ask themselves whether his deliberate silence about Jordan's refusal to extradite Tamimi to the US improve the chances that wall-to-wall support for lethal terrorism in Jordan will diminish? Or has it contributed to terrorism's steady growth in that hotbed of Islamist passions?

We were reluctant to go public with our thoughts on Prince Zeid's politicized non-response. But then he chose to launch a public relations offensive in the last moments of his time in office: 

• He said earlier this month, for instance, that "When we feel we need to speak, we will speak". For us, however, he did not. 
• His exit speech video on the UN WebTV site starts out with some dramatic music and sober-sounding words from Zeid: "If you don't sometimes speak out, if you don't threaten to speak out, you don't grab their attention. I would rather err on the speaking out part than staying silent... Our job is to defend the individual victims..." But we can observe that it's not all the victims.
• A Gulf State paper wrote yesterday that bitter criticism directed against the prince from some states was something he wished "to wear with pride, convinced that there is no honour to be found in silence". We agree: none at all.
• He declared [here] to wide media coverage that the silence of Myanmar's leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi over the oppression of Burma's Rohingya Muslim minority was "deeply regrettable". But so is his unwillingness to pick up the phone and remind his cousin in Jordan's royal capital that sending the mass murder of Jewish children to face trial is not a political issue but a straightforward moral and legal imperative. And in the case of the cousin, it's a decision he can take with the snap of a finger. But doesn't and hasn't.

We regret Prince Zeid doesn't see matters that way. That's why we are writing this today.

23-Aug-18: New data: How the terrorists who bombed the Sbarro pizzeria fared financially

The numbers in the chart below are a dramatically-upward revision of data that were released two weeks ago. They take account of more members of the Hamas gang that carried out the August  9, 2001 atrocity at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria. The bottom line in this new chart - US$843,841 - is almost three times the first calculation.

Our thanks to the good people of Palestinian Media Watch who focus energy, determination and sustained effort on bringing to light the heavily-camouflaged, massively-destructive Rewards for Terror scheming that is at the core of the Palestinian Authority's ethos and actions.

[Since posting this, we compiled some background on which terrorists received generous payments from the PA for their involvement in the Sbarro atrocity. It's here: "24-Aug-18: Nearly $1 million: What aid funds handed to the Abbas regime have done for the savages who kill Jews"]
The Mahmoud Abbas regime's slavish devotion to financially incentivizing ever more terror among its people is highlighted in this news report from ten days ago.

Headlined "Hamdallah: We are continuing to provide all types of support to the prisoners", the report carried by the notoriously pro-terror Ma'an News Agency on August 13, 2018, and reprinted by Palwatch here, says

"[PA] Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah met today (Monday) [Aug. 13, 2018] with a delegation from the [PLO] Commission of Prisoners' Affairs led by Director of the Commission Qadri Abu Bakr in his office in Ramallah... The prime minister again emphasized the firm position of the leadership – led by [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas and the government – and its commitment to pay the allowances (mukhassasat) of the families of the martyrs (shahids) and prisoners, despite the Israeli occupation’s decision and its threats to deduct these allowances from the Palestinian tax money [referring to Israeli law to deduct terror salaries from PA tax money]. Hamdallah emphasized that despite the challenges, the provision of all types of support to the Commission of Prisoners' Affairs in its lofty and patriotic activities for our brave prisoners in the occupation's prisons is continuing. He also emphasized that the prisoners are the spearhead of the Palestinian struggle, and that they are the ones who have sacrificed the years of their lives for our just cause."

Lofty and patriotic: words to keep in mind when thinking about the calculated Arab-on-Israeli murder of children.

30-Jul-18: Neither Ahed's gaze nor her ideas are the problem – it’s what others do with them

Monday's media focus on Ahed Tamimi was wide, attentive - and
spectacularly shallow [Image Source]

A slightly different version of the opinion piece by Arnold Roth, below, was published today [online here] by the Jerusalem Post. It was solicited, we think, to be one of the alternative voices in the context of the wide and largely depressing current news reporting around the release from prison of Ahed Tamimi on July 29, 2018.

More horror than heroism
Arnold Roth

My sweet-natured daughter Malki, brimming with empathy and generosity toward others, always with a smile on her face, was 15 when she was murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria massacre seventeen years ago this week.

The experience of losing her, of trying to rebalance my life and my family’s and of trying to make sense of the reactions of other people has shaped much of what I believe about terrorism.

We know who plotted the Sbarro barbarism. It was not Ahed Tamimi. But when her clan, the Tamimis of Nabi Saleh, get together to celebrate it as we know they do, she is an enthusiastic participant.

In a village where almost everyone is related by blood and (yes, and) marriage, Ahed is a cousin of Ahlam Tamimi in multiple ways. Ahlam now lives free in Jordan. She boasts that she chose the site for the explosion, seeking to kill as many Jewish children as possible, and planted the human bomb. Via social media, public speeches and (for 5 years) her own TV program, she urges others to follow her lead.

When Ahlam married Nizar Tamimi ["22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it"], also a murderer from the village, a few months after both walked free in the Shalit Deal, Ahed was there to dance and gaze adoringly at the bride.

But neither her gaze nor her ideas are the problem. It’s what others do with them.

Ahed’s parents make a living from propagandizing against Israel. They fashioned and groomed Ahed ["24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey"], leveraging her blondeness, pushing her into staged conflicts with Israeli soldiers from when she was 10, deliberately putting her at real risk on a weekly basis for years, long before she had the ability to discern what was being done to her.

Though all they had to go by was mostly-staged images of her thrusting fists at Israeli soldiers, too many reporters and editors responded (and still do) with absurd comparisons to Joan of Arc and Malala.

On the day of the slapping/kicking incident that led to her facing Israeli charges, Ahed’s mother pointed one of her cameras at the girl. She told her to speak to the world. And she did. The girl’s message was angry, urging anti-Israel violence and more conflict.

Though published and promoted by advocates of the Israeli cause, what Ahed said in that clip was largely ignored. As if she had said nothing. Its harsh reality was and still is denied.

The weaponization of Palestinian Arab children by their own society, even by their own families, is so incomprehensible to outsiders that it seems many deny its reality for that reason alone.

They deny what Ahed symbolizes too: identification with the vicious murderers in her own clan, with explosive rage, with a horrifying zealotry that brings people to push their society’s innocent children into the front lines. The Palestinian Arabs have many needs but what this girl stands for – more anger, more bitterness, more failure – delivers nothing of value to them.

They don’t hear this from the news industry - the reporters and editors who have built a podium for Ahed Tamimi and her enablers.

They don’t hear it either from their own utterly failed leadership who exploit Ahed Tamimi as another cheap diversion from the disasters they have brought on their people.

[Arnold Roth brought his family to Jerusalem from Australia 30 years ago. A lawyer and manager in Israel’s emerging technology industries, he now devotes his time to advocacy for special needs children and with his wife Frimet established the Malki Foundation in their murdered daughter’s memory.]

17-Jul-18: Prayers for the dead, prayers for the living

There's going to be a public discussion this evening in London about the events we mention below. What we write in this blog post will, we hope, reach the people gathered at JW3 and be understood as a constructive contribution to a fraught but important dialogue:

Devastation at Sbarro pizzeria, Jerusalem, August 9, 2001

We’re living in morally confused times.

The handful of young British Jews, a few dozen according to reports, who assembled in Parliament Square in mid-May and solemnly said Kaddish for 62 dead Palestinian Arab Gazans, surely didn’t see themselves as compromising any principles or betraying any values.

They likely felt they were on moral high ground by being in solidarity with unfortunate, peaceful, unarmed, aggrieved protesters who clashed with Israeli army bullets on Gaza’s side of the Hamas/Israel border.

Our fifteen year old daughter Malki was murdered in Jerusalem by a woman foot soldier in the Hamas fighting forces. This happened in the Battle of Sbarro Pizzeria. That female terrorist saw herself as unarmed too - as a protestor, as aggrieved.

This she expressed by planting a bomb – a walking, breathing human bomb – in the pizza place.

After the massacre was done, she said she chose that site because at two in the afternoon it attracted children. She needed dead children. Lots of dead Jewish children.

We now know that just a few hours before the London Kaddish, a Hamas insider owned up to how at least 50 of the 62 deceased “protestors” were in reality Hamas fighters. Another Gazan terror group immediately piped up and claimed several more of the dead as their fighters. Most, maybe all, of the Gazans who passed on in that ‘demo’ were there to fight. And - at almost any price - to bring extreme harm to Israelis.

Hamas’s Salah Bardawil acknowledges 50 Hamas fatalities among the
62 killed on Israel-Gaza border, May 16, 2018 (Screenshot) [Source: MEMRI]

It’s unfair to blame the Kaddish-sayers for not knowing the truth about them - those rioting, murder-minded Gazan jihadists. The news professionals at the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian evidently didn’t know either. Some still don’t know it even now.

But we can ask those youngsters, some of whom had had some instruction in the basics of Judaism, if they know what Kaddish means. 

Beyond the fact that it’s said for the dead, do they recognize these words?

May there be abundant peace from heaven. And life for us and for all Israel. And say, Amen. May the Maker of peace in His celestial heights make peace for us and for all Israel and say, Amen.

Kaddish doesn’t mention the dead at all – not even once. It’s a central Jewish prayer for goodness. An expression of gratitude for Heaven’s power to bring peace and beneficence into our lives and into the world.

At the heart of the Kaddish is something that has been at the top of my mind constantly since Malki’s life was stolen from us. It’s not peace. Heaven knows, we haven’t had much of that.

No. It’s the importance of us, of our side: Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu – May He make peace for us. 

Losing a child to triumphant, barbarous murder is an experience – I can tell you from first-hand knowledge – that fiercely concentrates a person’s mind. It forces you to look very closely at what the enemy wants. And then to decide what our side wants. 

I don’t believe we Jews are better than other people. I don’t suggest for a moment that peace is something only we, our side, ought to have. On the contrary.

Malki Z"L, on her way to

a Passover hike when she was 14

Some of us knew before the Hamas thug admitted it that the Gaza mob was there at the fence to do as much harm to us as humanly possible. Those who didn’t know it then must surely know it now, even as the BBC and its ilk conceal this reality. 

The Gazan side want to win, to triumph. And to destroy us. Peace isn’t on their minds at all.

The moral confusion I mentioned just now is what causes some young Jews to lose their sense of us. Feeling part of us doesn’t, mustn’t, mean wishing bad to the other side. But it does mean understanding that if we want good – for us and also for them – we have to protect our own side first: our own homes, our own children, our own lives.

And be vigilant because we face a real, shooting, incinerating, bombing foe who means to wreak the greatest possible harm on us.

If the shocking display of Jews saying Kaddish was meant in the same way we say it for our deceased grandparents and family members, then it signifies a failure by all of us in preparing young Jews for a life that sadly includes unwanted confrontation with an unfathomable evil that targets us – all of us.

But if it was intended as a cry for more peace, then I wish those young people knew, and maybe they do, that on the Israeli side, the passion for peace is real and easy to find.

If we want a passion for peace to take root among the Gazans, we owe it to ourselves to first acknowledge that calls for peace – as opposed to calls for victory, self-sacrifice and triumph – have completely gone from Gaza and not only from Gaza. And for now at least, they don't seem to be coming back soon.

That’s something worth praying for.


Postscript: The families of Malki Roth הי"ד and Michal Raziel  הי"ד invite friends of the two girls, murdered together in the Sbarro massacre on the 20th day of Av, seventeen years ago, to pray with us at their gravesides in Jerusalem's Har Tamir cemetery (part of the Har Menuchot complex) on Wednesday August 1, 2018 starting at 5:30 pm. We will be glad to provide more specific details [click].