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 ►

29-Jan-18: Freeing unrepentant terrorists and the horrors it has brought

New York Times, October 18, 2011

We haven't been shy about expressing the deeply negative feelings we have for the catastrophic 2011 Shalit Deal and for the decision-making and consultation with members of the community of victims of terror (of which there was none) that led Israel's government to enter into it.

Before the October 2011 mass release, we said this:

“This deal is a disaster,” he [Arnold Roth] said of the exchange for the Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, as he sat with his wife, Frimet, on the balcony of their Jerusalem apartment. “Some of these people will go back to murdering. They pose an existential threat to all of us” ... “This is not a political issue for us,” he said. “I am not some raving right-winger. We too share the joy of the Shalit family. But the victims are being marginalized. We object on principle. We see ourselves as agents of the children who will be killed by the graduates of this release.” ["In Israel, Swap Touches Old Wounds", Ethan Broner in the New York Times, October 14, 2011]

and

"...She's got a life [referring to Ahlam Tamimi, mastermind of the Sbarro massacre] that's being handed back to her as a result of this transaction... Many hundreds of convicted murderers are going to be released for no other reason that the Government of Israel saw no alternative. Obviously, everyone in this country is delighted if this is going to produce a healthy and well Gilad Shalit, but that's not the whole deal - and the parts of the deal that involve allowing terrorists back on the streets are a recipe for a terrible outcome." [Arnold Roth interviewed on Lateline/Australia's ABC, October 13, 2011]

and

"With today’s decision to free the terrorists, prime minister Netanyahu, a savvy politician to the core, conveys to us his disdain for the lives of ordinary citizens like my Malki; his disrespect for Israel's justice system; and his lack of regard for the soldiers who faced death in order to apprehend the terrorists about to be freed. Which rational soldier or police officer is going risk his life in the future to defend us from the monsters like Tamimi, sworn to murder still more Jews? The prime minister is quoted this morning saying that his "heart goes out" to Israel’s many terror victims. His actions and those of his cabinet suggest otherwise. How can they sleep at night, knowing the peril they have brought onto their people?" [Frimet Roth - "A mother's statement", October 14, 2011]

and

[The] murderer of our daughter and of 14 other people, the majority of them women and children, is on the release list as we feared for years she would be... Has our government taken into account what the release means to families like us, and we are in the thousands, who have suffered the worst possible loss and now see the perpetrators dancing and prancing in the arms of their supporters? Everyone wants Gilad Shalit home, safe and well. If we were his parents, we might have done what the Shalits did. But this is not the same as deciding, as prime minister or as the cabinet, what is good for the country, for the people of Israel. The jubilation emanating from the two Palestinian Arab governments tonight, the Hamas and the Abu Mazen regimes, should make clear to Israel's friends everywhere that something dreadful has happened tonight. We may come to bitterly regret this transaction for years to come... [From Frimet and Arnold Roth's statement to an Australian newspaper, October 12, 2011]

and many dozens of similar public statements, interviews and op eds.

Nadav Shragai, a respected veteran of Israel's brand-name media, and for years a correspondent at Haaretz, has a lengthy analytical article in the English edition (which is published online only) of the high-circulation Yisrael Hayom daily. (Amos Schocken, the publisher of Haaretz, is quoted on Wikpedia saying that Shragai was a journalist with clear opinions with which he largely disagreed, but "his opinions never influenced his news reporting, which was always professional".) Datelined January 26, 2018, it's entitled "Warning – abductions planned". Not surprisingly to anyone paying attention to terrorist attacks on Israelis these past six years and in light of what he writes, our statements were painfully accurate.

In our words, some of Shragai's revelations (direct quotes from his article are in italics):

• 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.
• "Terrorists freed in the Schalit deal have directly or indirectly been involved in the murder of seven Israelis, including the three teens abducted in Gush Etzion in June 2014, as well as Rabbi Michael Mark and Baruch Mizrahi."
• Shragai, referring to reports from the Palestinian Authority, says Shalit Deal releasees are currently "working to carry out attacks in various parts of the West Bank and their main goal is another abduction of an Israeli". 
• The Gaza operations of Hamas are now led by graduates of the Shalit Deal who are keeping Gaza relatively quiet while they "rebuild themselves [and] hatching plans for terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria, all while continuing to shake up the regime of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas." 
• One of those is Yahya Sinwar of whom we wrote recently ["13-Feb-17: Another Shalit Deal milestone: Four terms of life imprisonment but this murdering jihadist now heads Hamas in Gaza"]. He is aided by Tawfiq Abu Naim [we mentioned him in 2012] and Zuhair Jabarin, another Shalit Deal graduate. Sinwar, while serving a term of four life sentences for planning terrorist attacks and before being freed by Israel, was involved in planning the lethal kidnapping of a young IDF service man, Nahshon Waxman.
• In the areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Shalit Deal beneficiaries play a major terrorist role as well. A Jordanian with close ties to Iran, Maher Obeid was put in charge of Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks in the West Bank in late-2017 [see this Ynet backgrounder] after Saleh al-Arouri, who was freed prior to the Shalit Deal, was promoted in October 2017 to become the deputy head of Hamas. 
• al-Arouri has been the focus of several of our posts. One of the founders of Hamas, he is a veteran of Israel's prison system where he spent 15 (some say 18) years. On release in 2007, he was expelled to Syria. Hamas' offices in Syria were shut down in 2012, at which point he and several terrorist colleagues were welcomed to Turkey. He appears in several of ours posts: "22-Dec-15: Has a Hamas terror insider just been thrown out of Turkey?"; "11-Dec-15: The price of the Shalit Deal and the countries that help it keep rising"; "27-Nov-14: Hamas terrorist ring is busted; Israel says the handlers operate from Turkey; Qatar is involved"; "30-Sep-14: Martyrs and monsters"; "11-Sep-14: Freeing terrorists: The price in human lives lost and in justice perverted keeps getting clearer".
• Three Shalit Deal graduates now report directly to Obeid: Abdel Rahman Ranimat (also written as Abed a-Rahman Ghaminat) [a central figure in this post of ours: "11-Sep-14: Freeing terrorists: The price in human lives lost and in justice perverted keeps getting clearer"] is in charge of the Bethlehem, Hebron and Jericho regions. Abdullah Arar [profiled in "01-Jan-18: Another reason we call it the catastrophic Shalit Deal"] controls Jerusalem and Ramallah. Forsan Khalifa runs what we call Samaria, the northern part of the West Bank.
• Dozens of terrorist attacks, including many that were thwarted, over the past year were initiated by this leadership and by other Shalit Deal releasees.
• They have also been instrumental in so-called smaller Arab-on-Israeli terror attacks in which firebombs (otherwise known as Molotov Cocktails) were the weapons of choice rather than guns, rifles, knives and vehicle rammings. These have risen greatly in number over the past few weeks: 84 in November 2017, but then 249 in December 2017. Shragai notes that another Shalit Deal releasee was the driver of the wave of such attacks in the area of Dura until he was sent back to prison.

Other prominent Shalit Deal releasees mentioned in the Yisrael Hayom article because of their revived active terrorism roles:

• Hussam Badaran who "oversaw an attempt by Hamas operatives from Hebron to commit terrorist kidnappings of Israeli civilians or soldiers". We have much more to say about this terrorist: see "13-Jun-13: Little-known sides to the post-Shalit careers of unjustly released killers"
• Hashem Abdel Kader Ibrahim Hijaz "tried to launch terrorist abductions near Ramallah, using a local Hamas operative." 
• Mazen Fuqaha, another leader of Hamas' West Bank command who was killed in Gaza in March 2017, also devoted his energy to preparing a massive abduction. Fuqha was responsible for the suicide bus bombing at the Meron junction in 2002 that killed nine people. Sentenced to nine terms of life imprisonment, he served only nine years before being freed in the Shalit Deal.
• "The Hamas cell that planned a series of terrorist attacks to be launched at the train station in Binyamina, the central synagogue in Zikhron Yaakov and the bus station in Wadi Ara, was also planning a kidnapping. The cell, which consisted of two residents of the village of Bani Naim near Hebron and an Israeli Arab from Wadi Ara, was funded by a group of terrorists freed in the Schalit deal. They kept in touch via Facebook."
• Ruhi Mushtaha "another senior figure in Hamas who is close to Sinwar, had been assigned seven life sentences for his involvement in the Waxman abduction, was also released in the Schalit deal. Mushtaha was involved in assembling the list of prisoners Hamas wanted to be released. Since Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, he has also been in charge of the Hamas prisoners portfolio."
• Mohammad al-Sharatha, "a member of the terrorist cell that kidnapped and murdered IDF soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Saadon in two separate abductions in 1989."

All of them, back in the same lethal business that long prison sentences ought by rights, and by reason of justice, to have terminated.

Image Source: FBI

Shragai doesn't mention her but Ahlam Tamimi deserves a place in the gallery of monsters. 

We have written frequently about her; she's our child's unrepentant murderer. The Shalit Deal enabled her to walk free, return to Jordan where she was born and where most of her family lives, to marry in a widely-watched celebration - to another Shalit Deal murderer/releasee, to start a family, to host her own TV show and present it to a global audience for nearly five years, to become a celebrity guest at guilds, colleges, schools and universities in several Arab countries and especially in Jordan, and to be a media-smart spokesperson for the deeply bigoted jihadist mission personified by Hamas.

The strikingly undeserved peace and quiet she has found in Jordan despite (full credit to the Hashemite regime and its ruler - "26-Jul-17: We listened carefully to Jordan's foreign minister and we have 10 questions") being on the run from the FBI is one of the many reasons we hold, and will continue to express, strongly critical opinions about the process that handed her freedom back to her and to many hundreds of additional loathsome murderers.

11-Sep-16: Fixing a plaque to a Jerusalem wall

Frimet Roth delivers a speech at the unveiling of the plaque
outside the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria, September 23, 2003

It's September 11, the fifteenth anniversary of an event so evocative of hatred, bigotry and senseless carnage that it has become a by-word for the increasingly terror-infested era in which we live.

Fifteen years ago to the day, on September 11, 2001, a thousand or so residents of the Jerusalem neighbourhood where we live gathered in a public park at nightfall to remember two girls - one sixteen, one fifteen - who were among the victims of another massacre, brazenly carried out in the very center of Jerusalem, the nation's capital, a month earlier. The site of that attack was the local Sbarro pizzeria. Those two victims, among the 15 murdered and 130 maimed and injured on August 9, 2001, were our next-door neighbour's daughter Michal and our own daughter, Malki. The lovely girls had been the closest of friends.

In the year that followed, we fought an unpleasant and mean-spirited battle with the leadership of the Jerusalem municipality. The mayor at the time was Ehud Olmert. His career later brought him to the highest political position in the country and then after that to prison. He's there now.

What we sought to achieve was something simple: a plaque on the outside wall of the pizzeria, memorializing what had happened there at 2 o'clock on a hot summer's afternoon, with the names of the innocents killed in that Hamas massacre.

As with most of the battles we have felt obliged to conduct in Israel over the years, we saw this as a moral issue with deep resonance in Jewish tradition. We also saw it in personal terms; we sought no one's help in taking the fight to the authorities, and we got none. This battle, like most of the others, ended up providing us with mostly-unwanted insights into how power can be used and abused by the people who have their hands on the steering wheel of the city or the country.

At the end of this particular fight, we achieved a sort of pale victory.

One one hand, the mayor's office decided that a plaque would be placed on the outside wall of Sbarro, and a ceremony was scheduled.

But on a closely related matter - we had also requested that Jerusalem, which had already announced it was going to erect a monument to the memory of the 9/11 victims, should put up a memorial to Jerusalem's own, many victims of Arab-on-Israeli terror - we were given a run-around. That run-around actually never came to an end.

In the course of the following year, several bogus announcements were made by the municipality about plans to designate a site for a terror victims memorial. A public committee for making decisions about a Jerusalem memorial was announced. If it ever met, we never heard about it. Another announcement said a site in the Camp Allenby plot near the corner of Hevron Road and Yanovsky Street on Jerusalem's south side had been designated for a memorial to Jerusalem's terror victims and work was underway. Of course, nothing came of that.

Frimet Roth eventually published an angry complaint in a daily newspaper ["No memorial, not even a plaque", Jerusalem Post, July 30, 2003 - it's archived so give it a few seconds to load] in which she mentioned some of the evasions we had heard from city officials. The main argument: that Jerusalem was faced with having to put up some 30 terror memorial plaques, and that doing so would "interfere with the city's character and appeal" and chase away the tourists. No reason for us to comment on the stupidity of what we heard. Also - that the building owner objected, which seemed strange to us.

The simple plaque bears the names of
the fifteen people murdered inside
the Sbarro pizzeria and the
word "To remember"

A few weeks after her article appeared, we were notified that a Sbarro plaque had finally been allowed, and a mid-afternoon ceremony was scheduled. Frimet was invited to be one of the speakers and accepted.

The text below is a translation of what she said in Hebrew. The date was September 23, 2003. The plaque is still there today though Sbarro is long gone.

And the need to remember and not forget continues to be axiomatic - and disputed.

Why We Need This Plaque 

By Frimet Roth
(First published in an article we posted on the Malki Foundation website thirteen years ago)
The path leading to the erection of this memorial plaque was neither short nor smooth. When we faced the obstacles, we asked ourselves whether it was really necessary at all.
There were times when the municipality made clear their feeling that a plaque would actually be detrimental - that it was bound to alter the character of the city of Jerusalem, even chase away tourists.
But we persevered - we, the bereaved families, along with the staff of the Municipality's Protocol Department - and we overcame those obstacles, even managing to have the plaque erected in time for the second "yahrzeit".
But the question, a legitimate one, remains What is the purpose of this memorial? It's safe to presume that we, the relatives of the victims, will not visit it and undoubtedly our pain will not abate, now that it is there. Our intense longing will continue - every day, every hour.
As I see it, the plaque's real significance is for others for those who never knew the victims personally, who never heard of their deaths, who heard but may have already forgotten. When these people pass by and chance upon the names of these martyrs, the collective memory of this horrendous war will be deepened.
And I believe this nation badly needs to work on its capacity to remember. To contend with constant fear, this nation has found it necessary to forget each terror attack and its victims as quickly as it can. Demolished business premises are speedily rebuilt; they're filled with customers looking for a fun time out.
I heard a television correspondent not long ago reporting from the site of a suicide bombing that had claimed six lives. He was speaking early on the following morning. He pointed to the heavy traffic and commented "Apparently the urge for routine is more powerful that everything else."
If he was correct, then the Jewish nation is paying too high a price for its normalcy. Remembering our victims a little more would not indicate weakness. Nor would it empower the enemy, or hinder our ability to cope. Remembering the outrages done to us is simply a normal, sensitive and positive reaction.
Jewish tradition encourages this approach. With the holiday of Rosh Hashana, also known as "Remembrance Day", drawing close, this is a most appropriate moment to emphasize the need to remember these victims. The men, the women and the many children who perished here were righteous, every one of them. Both in life, as we their loved ones can affirm, and in death, having died as martyrs - in sanctifying G-d's name.
Our Sages teach us that the righteous are considered alive even in death. For us, their parents, children, brothers and sisters, they truly live on in our hearts and memories. My hope is that they will now also live on in the thoughts of others, thanks to this plaque. Even if only briefly. And the promise of our Sages be fulfilled, as it says "Just as Yom Kippur atones, so too do the deaths of the righteous."

Earlier today, the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, we saw a featured op ed in the Financial Times which included this striking claim:

The real tragedy of terror is what it makes us do to each other. We start fearing people just because of how they look: the colour of their skin, the way they dress. 

We Tweeted this response:

If terror's "real tragedy" is fear of the other, do the dead, injured and survivors count?

Astoundingly, depressingly, that question still needs to be asked, and for many the answer is likely to be: "Well, it sort of depends."

It's not only in Jerusalem, but also in Jerusalem, that people need constantly to be reminded of the sanctity of human life, of the imperative of remembering and never forgetting the innocent victims, and of fighting the terrorists with total determination in order to defeat them.

09-Aug-16: Fifteen years after the Sbarro massacre

Malki 1985-2001

Frimet Roth shares some personal thoughts at her blog on the anniversary of the day our daughter was murdered: Fifteen years on, there's no relief from the grief

Please read and share.

28-Apr-16: Terror-by-knifing attack foiled at Qalandiya; assailant, again, is a child

The attackers came equipped with these stabbing
implements - two identical kitchen knives
and a switchblade found on the body of the young male
[Image Source: Israel Police]

A violent attack at the Qalandiya security checkpoint yesterday (Wednesday) on Jerusalem's north side has cost a pair of Palestinian Arabs, a young married woman and her teenage brother, their lives.

Times of Israel reports that, while no Israelis from among the security personnel attacked suffered any injuries, the two assailants, armed with knives, were killed after attempting to attack the heavily-armed Israelis.

The attackers are identified as Maram Salih Hassan Abu Ismail, a woman of 23, and her brother Ibrahim Saleh Taha, 16. Both are said to be from Surif, an Arab community located south of Jerusalem and north of Hebron. Ma'an News Agency says the woman is the mother of two children and pregnant with a third.

Surif is familiar to Israelis with a sense of history. It is home to most of the Arab mob who carried out a total massacre of the convoy of Jews (among them Frimet Roth's cousin Eliyahu Herskowitz ז"ל) known as the Lamed Heh. Its 35 members had set out on foot in January 1948 with the goal of relieving the Arab siege on the Gush Etzion communities. Those beleagured communities, numerically overwhelmed by the surrounding enemies, eventually fell to the invading the Arab Legion, the military arm of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on Friday May 14, 1948, some hours before Israel’s independence was declared in Tel Aviv. They remained, judenrein, under Jordanian military occupation for the next 19 years. The massacre and then capture of the Gush was "one of the major episodes of the State of Israel-in-the-making", playing a significant role in Israeli collective memory. Wikipedia reminds us that the post-1967 revival and massive flourishing of the Gush Etzion communities is regarded as deeply symbolic, linked in the Israeli psyche to the massive loss of life in Israel's War of Independence.

Ynet's report of yesterday's terrorist attack says the Arab couple

attempted to walk through a passage intended for vehicle entry and began speeding up in the direction of Border policemen stationed at the scene. The female assailant had her hand in her bag in which there was a knife. The male assailant's hand was held behind his back which aroused the security forces suspicion. The police called upon them to stop several times. However they continued to quickly approach in their direction. The police continued to call upon them to stop and throw down the bag the woman was holding. The woman stopped close to the Border policemen, both of them took several steps backwards and then suddenly they turned towards the forces, the woman took out a knife and threw it straight at the policeman closest to her. The policeman was not injured. The security forces acted quickly and shot them dead. A search of the area revealed that in addition to the woman's knife, the male had a similar knife in his belt, as well as a pocket knife.

As always, there's an air of Rashomon ("alternative, self-serving and contradictory versions of the same incident" embodying "multiple eye-witness testimonies of an event contain conflicting information") already evident in parts of the media.

Arabic-language audiences are getting a sadly-familiar-sounding narrative at considerable odds with the Israel Police and media accounts. An Iranian news source calls yesterday's thwarted terror attack a "massacre". A Gazan source refers to a "child martyr", and martyr-posters are, not surprisingly, online [here] already. Al Safir, a Palestinian Arab news outlet, calls what happened an "execution". So does this Gulf news source. For Aljazeera, it's about the woman's orphaned children, and the death of a younger brother. As far as we can tell, none of those Arabic reports shows the knives that were removed from the clutches of the attackers.

As usual, the events we see as terrorism are described by the Arab and Muslim media to Arab news consumers context-free form, devoid of connection to the ongoing wave of knifings, rammings, shootings, bombings. Forgotten for the moment are the multiple public acts of glorification of women, sub-teen and teenage children enjoying the acclaim of Arabs and Moslems from across the spectrum - and at the highest levels of Palestinian Arab power - for the violence of their usually-pointless murderous assaults on Jews. It's an ongoing tragedy for all concerned.

Haaretz says

Hassan Tahah, another sibling, told Haaretz that he doesn't believe his sister was planning to carry out an attack. "We have no details about what transpired and no one briefed us, but I don't believe this whole terrorist attack story," he said. According to him, his sister was on her way to a doctor's appointment, accompanied by his brother. "She was probably lost, or didn't understand what was going on at the roadblock, and the soldiers shot her and my brother," he said.

We wrote about another terror-minded sixteen year-old from Surif with a knife in the wake of an earlier attack ["23-Oct-15: Scenes from a stabbing/ramming/shooting war of terror"] some months ago. And for a sense of some of the numerous recent Arab-on-Israeli attacks at Qalandiya, click here.

23-Mar-16: Frimet's new blog

Frimet's new blog

This Ongoing War is where Frimet and Arnold Roth write about terrorism and its victims. We have posted more 3,000 times since starting in June 2006.

In January 2016, Frimet began writing at her own blog as well. It's called "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly | Frimet Roth writes from Jerusalem". Here's how she describes its scope:

The Good is outnumbered two-to-one in the title of my blog. So too it is outweighed on this planet by The Evil, The Corrupt and The Seamy. For the most part, I focus here on those negatives - along with a light sprinkling of The Good. When I address The Bad and The Ugly here, it’s mainly in relation to two topics: (a) Terrorism and the current Israeli government’s pathetic handling of it; and (b) Children with disabilities and Israel's pathetic handling of them. (I have blogged about this for some years, but under an assumed name.) Also expect occasional digressions to other Bad and Ugly topics that plague Israel. I hope readers will share their thoughts here too.
The murder of my precious daughter Malki, aged fifteen and a half, in the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem on August 9, 2001, colors this blog intensely. The life and challenges of my youngest daughter Chaya, profoundly disabled physically and cognitively, colors my discussion of disabilities.
In 1988, I moved to Jerusalem from Queens, NY, following a 12-year-stopover in my husband's hometown, Melbourne, Australia. The law degree I earned decades ago has lain mostly unused ever since and portrait sketching is one of my passions, so those sketches are likely to appear in my posts now and then.

We would be glad if you would take a look at today's post. It's called "On Brussels, Sbarro and moral clarity".

27-Nov-15: Our daughter won't be with us today as we remember her birthday

At a friend's birthday party
in Jerusalem on August 8,
2001. Malki was murdered
the following day.

Frimet's blog appears online on the Times of Israel website today. Please consider sharing the link with your friends.

In terror victimhood, all are equal
FRIMET ROTH
Times of Israel | November 27, 2015

Today is my daughter Malki’s birthday. As in each of the past fifteen years, it will be marked with a visit to her grave. The one other time we go there is to mark the anniversary of the day she was murdered.

I have always insisted on using that word, jarring though it is. I never say that Malki died. Or that she was killed or perished or passed away. It is significant to remember that she was snatched from us in that manner. And it is crucial to specify that her murderer was not your garden-variety blood-thirsty psychopath, but rather an Islamist terrorist.

Nowadays, my husband and I feel especially compelled to publicize that last point. We and the rest of the world must be reminded – and in some cases convinced — of how Jewish terror victims are one with terror victims of other nationalities.

Sadly, this is not a given. Many, even some Jews, view our victims as the collateral damage of a territorial conflict only vaguely connected to the terror threat confronting the rest of the world. The inference, of course, is that unlike the victims in Paris last week, my child’s murder had an explanation, a justification. Implying that as Jews residing in Israel, we invited our tragedy upon ourselves.

Unfortunately, the task of rectifying this abominable misconception has fallen to the victims themselves. We cannot rely on our prime minister to spread this message.

It would be hard for him to assert that Israel is suffering from the very same terror plaguing the world. That’s because, on October 18, 2011, he himself underlined the idea that ours is a milder version of terrorism. On that day, he freed hundreds of self-confessed, unrepentant, convicted murderers in a travesty of justice that no other free world leader had previously committed, has committed since or will ever commit in the future.

That day, the chasm between himself and other world leaders confronted by terrorism grew exponentially.

It is left to us, Israel’s terror victim families. We are among those who publicly decried the decision in 2011 to ride roughshod over basic notions of justice.

We need to demonstrate to the world that our children were as precious, as innocent and as randomly targeted as the victims of ISIS terrorism.

We carry the burden of proving that Palestinian terrorists are as indiscriminately barbaric and hateful as the beheaders of journalists and the rapists of Yazidi women.

A mere glance at the video [here] of Malki’s murderer, Ahlam Tamimi, as she rejoices in her prison cell to hear that she murdered not “merely” three, but eight children along with her eight other victims, makes that abundantly clear.

In interviews she gave to Arab journalists after being released in the Shalit Deal, Tamimi gleefully boasts of her accomplishment. Her blood-thirstiness is palpable.

Today, but for the evil of Islamic terrorism, our Malki would have been a thirty year old woman, probably a loving wife and mother and — as always — a dear daughter and sister. Instead, her murderer is free, married, a celebrity with a high-profile television program of her own, freely inciting other Muslims to follow her example.

And she is not the only one of the Shalit Deal releasees who returned to terrorism. While Israeli officials refuse to divulge the precise number, Palestinian sources reported in August 2015 that at least 63 of them had been rearrested by Israel up at that time.

The Shalit Deal is clearly a fiasco that our government is anxious to bury. Instead, we are burying the victims of that deal.

Today on Malki’s birthday, please help us in our quest to educate others about terrorism in Israel. Remember her, remember her purity and kindness and remember Ahlam Tamimi, the Islamic terrorist who murdered her.

The Malki Foundation is a memorial to our daughter's life. It does invaluable, practical good for families in Israel - Jews, Christians, Moslems, Druze, uncommitted - who care at home for a child with severe disabilities and who could benefit from a non-political, non-intrusive helping hand. Thousands of such families have been helped since the foundation was established on September 11, 2001. MORE 

09-Aug-15: Gaza and Jerusalem: Remembering the assault on Sbarro

Trucks en route to Gaza a year ago [Image Source]

(The article below appears today on the website of The Algemeiner, and is reproduced here with their permission.)

New Face of Hamas – Same as the Old
FRIMET ROTH

Each year, we visit our child’s grave on the day of her murder. And with the passing years our grief acquires fresh layers.

In 2011, we grappled with the travesty of justice that befell us via the Shalit Deal. This past week, we gathered at the cemetery with the knowledge that Hamas, the cult that dispatched her killers, has gone through a makeover.

Once considered a dire threat to Israel, Hamas is now overshadowed by the maelstrom of Iran’s nuclear threat and ISIS conquests.

Some experts even suggest that in comparison with the Gaza chapters of ISIS and Al Qaeda, Hamas is a less insidious brand of terrorism. Others don’t even see it as a danger to Israel, while still others embrace it sympathetically.

In recent weeks, to commemorate the 2014 Gaza war, news networks have intensified their quest for the video clip that most compellingly depicts the Gaza situation. Evoking pathos for the Gazans’ plight, their journalists blame Israel for that war, its casualties, its aftermath, the increasingly dismal Gazan economy and the suffering of the Gazan children. Hamas rarely get so much as a slap on the wrist.

To be fair, Israel has itself been turning a blind eye to the Hamas threat. Censured for Operation Protective Edge, launched to eradicate lethal infiltration tunnels and missile attacks from Gaza, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is now trying to curry favor with the West. One of the results is that the embargo imposed by Israel on Gaza in 2009 has effectively been scuttled.

As the numbers below testify, Israel’s blockade of Gaza continues in theory only. De facto, there is bustling two-way traffic of myriad sorts: 115,000 Gazans crossed at the Erez Terminal for medical treatment in Israel and abroad in 2014. Roughly 1,000 Gazans, among them hundreds of merchants, crossed it on any given day during 2015 along with six to eight hundred trucks carrying thousands of tons of humanitarian, construction and consumer goods.

From daily statistics compiled by COGAT, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, we learn that on July 28, 2015 –  a random date – of the 1,525 people traversing the Erez crossing, 95 were foreigners, 208 were humanitarian travelers, 919 were merchants and 302 were designated “others”.  The nearly 600 trucks entering Gaza that day delivered 17,162 tons of goods.

All this occurs while the IDF knows that Hamas terrorists are digging new attack tunnels under the border, its weapons factories continue to churn out rockets and it conducts guerrilla-style combat training drills. All right under Israel’s nose.

According to a source in the IDF’s Southern Command, Hamas has not yet restored its rocket arsenal to pre-August 2014 levels, but it is steadily nearing that goal and will seek to exceed it (sources: Ynet and Times of Israel). Nevertheless, the traffic at the Erez crossing continues. Israel is complacent.

There is an ugly truth absent from the above state of affairs. And this is the perfect time to draw attention to it.

Fourteen years ago, a terrorist squad in the service of Hamas targeted innocent Jews, mainly children, having lunch at the Sbarro pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem. It was the height of the summer school vacation and mothers were out in droves spending time with their children.

One of the terrorists, Ahlam Tamimi, who survived the explosion after telling the human bomb to give her a few minutes to get away, boasted afterwards of how she had conducted several earlier forays into the city scouting for a venue that attracted the greatest number of women and children in the early afternoon hours.

This is a crucial detail. The eight children killed there that day, out of a total of fifteen dead, in the ensuing massacre were not collateral damage. They were not caught in any cross-fire. They were not stuck in some building that housed weapons or fighters. They were targeted.

Their murderer, Tamimi, the chief plotter of the Sbarro attack, has boasted of this repeatedly to Arab interviewers.

The Hamas human bomb, Al Masri, bore 10 kg. of nail-enhanced explosives on his back, concealed within a guitar case. He, along with the explosive components, was transported from east to west Jerusalem by Tamimi, who disguised herself to look like a young Israeli woman. He was eager to kill – not merely Jews; not merely children; but as Tamimi later related, specifically religious ones. She was filmed saying proudly that she assured Al Masri her target would satisfy his blood thirst.

Lest anyone imagine that Hamas is rehabilitated, here are some facts to clear that up that delusion.

Hamas today employs Tamimi as a high-profile inciter to terror. She has her own weekly TV program on Al Quds, a global Hamas television station, broadcasting by satellite to Arabic-language speakers throughout the world. She collects a monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority, for which the funding is predominantly from Europe. Hamas flies Tamimi overseas routinely to address fans, to incite budding terrorists and to receive sundry awards and trophies for her act of “heroism”. Between 2011 and 2014, she visited Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Tunisia and Yemen.

Hamas’ lust for murdering Jewish children is alive and well.  It is being dispersed beyond Gaza’s borders and endangers every Israeli.

Complacency is a chilling stance for Israel to take. It was just such an attitude that enabled the Sbarro massacre to be perpetrated. Several days later, the Minister of Justice revealed that on the morning of August 9, 2001, all the relevant arms of the government were aware that Hamas operatives, armed with explosives, were making their way to the capital intending to bomb and murder as many innocents as possible. They decided not to warn the public. They opted not to empty the streets. They relied on police patrols scouring the summer crowds for suspicious-looking individuals.

Fifteen precious souls perished because of that lame, blasé response – among them my precious Malki.

—

Frimet Roth is a freelance writer in Jerusalem. Her daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in the Sbarro pizzeria bombing on August 9, 2001. With her husband Arnold she founded the Malki Foundation (www.malkifoundation.org) in their daughter’s name. It provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

26-Nov-14: Terrorist deals and the price we’re now paying: A birthday message

Convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists prematurely freed from prison
on August 13, 2013 are greeted by admirers [Image Source]

A version of this article by Frimet Roth appears as an op ed in Times of Israel today.

The latest terror attack struck as I pondered my daughter’s birthday. It falls on on November 27. For the past 13 years, marking that day has been a real challenge for me. The grief it arouses is overshadowed only by that of August 9, the day Malki died in the Sbarro massacre of 2001. Her murderer, AhlamTamimi, a Hamas operative who primed, escorted, instructed and armed her accomplice, a young man called Al-Masri, with ten kilo of explosives, has been free since 2011. Prime Minister Netanyahu released her in the Shalit Deal of 2011.

As in the past, a few reminders about the workings of terrorism, painfully familiar to me, will be my commemoration of Malki’s birthday.

Much has been written about the new religious character that Palestinian terror has supposedly acquired. In an article about the Har Nof synagogue attack, Isabel Kirschner and Jodi Rudoren of the NYTimes wrote:

Others around the world condemned the attack and the rising religious dimension of the spate of violence, which has been attributed mainly to a struggle over the very site the victims were praying toward.

Convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists prematurely freed from prison
on October 18, 2011 are greeted by admirers [Image Source]

The truth is that religious Jews have always been our enemies’ prime targets. Malki’s murderer told journalists that when she met her accomplice, the human bomb, in advance of their joint mission, he told her that he yearned to murder religious Jews. Tamimi said she assured Al-Masri that the target she had selected would satisfy his wishes. For, as she later recounted, she had scouted the city thoroughly and found an eatery frequented almost exclusively by religious Jerusalemites: fourteen of the fifteen men, women and children slaughtered in the Sbarrorestaurant that day were religious.

There is another facet to the current spate of violence that has been overlooked or ignored: Mr. Netanyahu’s contribution to it.

Naturally, he has spoken forcefully about the need for global denunciation of recent terror attacks. He has pointed an accusatory finger at those he believes guilty of incitement. He ordered the demolition of the homes of the latest perpetrators – the Har Nof killers.

According to his office, he also “directed that enforcement against those who incite toward terrorist attacks be significantly increased.” That statement referred to “the series of additional decisions that have been made to strengthen security throughout the country,” whatever they may be. [Boston Globe/New York Times, November 18, 2014]

But all this is too little, too vague and too late. 

Convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists prematurely freed from prison
on August 14, 2013 are greeted by admirers [Image Source]

Mr. Netanyahu has already done irreparable damage during his tenure. His band-aid treatments are futile because terrorism has been on the rise ever since he freed hundreds of murderers in the Shalit Deal. [“Israel and Hamas Agree to Swap Prisoners for Soldier”, NY Times, October 11, 2011]

Until recently most of their attempts at fresh acts of terror were foiled. But we have been descending headlong toward our current predicament ever since the busloads of waving murderers left the prison grounds in October 2011 [photo].

The Shalit Deal and Netanyahu’s subsequent releases last year to “jump-start” talks with Mahmoud Abbas destroyed the most effective deterrent we had. There is no more powerful impetus to terrorism than the assurance that they will not be punished.

The newly enacted law [here] purporting to prevent future releases of terrorist murderers is riddled with loopholes.

• First, it is not retroactive. If Netanyahu wishes, currently imprisoned murderers could well be freed.
• Second, it relates only to “murder under extraordinarily severe circumstances” when the convicting judge categorizes it as such.
• And third, it can be entirely by-passed via a Presidential pardon. (Another law introduced just months ago would strip the president of this power with regard to political deals but has not been enacted.),
• Finally, even these most “extraordinarily severe circumstance” murderers – whoever these may be – will be eligible to appear before the release committee after only 15 years’ imprisonment. That committee can choose to reduce their sentence to 40 years. So a future mass-murdering terrorist, akin to my Malki’s murderer, could conceivably be free, without any swaps or deals, after 40 years!

Convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists prematurely freed from prison
on December 31, 2013 are greeted by admirers [Image Source]
The man with arms raised is Jamal Abu Jamal, a clansman of the two
murdering Abu Jamal axe-men responsible for the slaughter in a Jerusalem
synagogue on November 18, 2014. Freed 10 months ago, this
Abu Jamal was re-arrested for terrorism offences in the first half of
November 2014 [source]

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett was far from accurate when he boasted of this new law: “Terrorists should die in prison, and now that will be the case.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s serial releases have also sent a resounding message to the world: In Israel, terrorists with blood on their hands are not “real” murderers. Here, their sentences are not binding like those of “real” murderers. Here they are not punished as severely as “real” murderers are.

That message, conveyed by Netanyhau’s actions, rings truer and louder than any of his pronouncements in the wake of the latest terror attacks.

No matter how tough and stricken Netanyahu sounds and appears now, these emotions wane fast for him. Soon, no doubt, any accomplices that may be arrested and convicted of involvement in recent terror attacks will become political currency for him. Or they may be traded along with hundreds of others for the release of one Israeli – thanks to those generous loopholes in the new law.

Mr. Netanyahu is confident we have forgotten his misdeeds and their effects. We need to prove him wrong.

15-Oct-14: Things we learned (or should have) during the last 3 years about dealing with terrorists

October 19, 2011: The convicted mass murderer who engineered the bombing
of the Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem arrives in Amman, Jordan, fresh from
her Israeli prison cell and about to embark on the high-profile life (continuing
until this very day) of a 'celebrity' murderer/terrorist [Image Source] 

In the next few days, three years will have passed since the consummation of the Shalit Deal. 

It's a theme to which we have returned often, here on our blog and other websites, on television and radio, in newspapers, via face-to-face meetings in far-away countries and here. We make no bones about it: that transaction, and the price Israel paid then and since, makes it a watershed, a learning moment. Tragically, the learning has been scant, and involves far too few public figures in this country. 

We do feel the Israeli public, which has gone through significant travails in these past three years, has undergone a significant change of heart away from supporting such trades. But clearly there is still much learning to be done.

Frimet Roth has a brief essay on the Times of Israel website, that went up in the last few minutes. Here's the first part of it.

Ten lessons the Shalit deal taught us   

FRIMET ROTH | Times of Israel | October 15, 2014

This week we mark the third anniversary of the Shalit Deal. On that day, October 18, 2011, my husband and I felt as though our child, Malki, murdered in the notorious Sbarro massacre of August 2001, was killed a second time. The anguish and torment we felt as we watched her released murderer, Ahlam Tamimi, triumphant and joyous, hug family and admirers celebrating her arrival at Amman airport were unbearable.  

How can that be compared to Malki’s actual murder? There are no expert psychological delineations of a normal reaction to such an experience. That’s because no other leader in the world has ever overturned 16 life sentences in one fell swoop to free a mass murderer, as prime minister Netanyahu did. No other leader freed scores of murderers and handed them back to their terror groups. No other leader trampled the rights of victims of terror the way he did. There are, therefore, no other instances of this torture to compare to ours. So please just take our word for it. Malki was indeed murdered twice.  

1. A stint in an Israeli prison rarely rehabilitates a terrorist. It punishes them and isolates them from bombs and missiles. But prison is where they belong for as long as our court deemed, just for our own and our children’s good. 

2. Terrorists who are freed from Israeli prison prematurely and return to terrorism are more dangerous than novices. This refutes the Shalit-camp contention that it’s immaterial whether terrorists remain in prison; there will always be a terrorist threat regardless, they say. But the fact is a released terrorist is the most lethal sort. 

3. Sending freed terrorists into exile does not render them harmless. They are equally capable of murdering while residing there as they would be in the West Bank or Gaza. Exile simply places them out of the reach of the IDF or other arms of Israeli security. Tamimi, the woman who engineered the massacre that killed my daughter, was “exiled” (in the government of Israel’s language) to the land in which she was born and raised, Jordan. Jordan is the very comfortable base from which she now travels and broadcasts freely throughout the Arab world, exhorting her audiences to respect and emulate the murderous actions of terrorists like herself...

The rest is at the Times of Israel. It makes some points worth sharing. If you have comments, please write them there. Also, please Tweet and Facebook it. We greatly appreciate the help of all who contribute to getting this message out as widely as possible.