Censored: FBI wants to arrest terrorist who killed Australian Jewish girl
Ahlam Tamimi is a monster. Bringing her to justice is something that should be close to Australians’ hearts…writes Michael Danby.
Tamimi is the convicted murderer of Australian-born Malki Roth. Malki’s life was cut short in a barbaric act of Palestinian terrorism in the crowded Sbarro pizzeria in the centre of Jerusalem in 2001. She was fifteen years old. Dozens of others, mostly children, were killed and maimed that day.
As her father Arnold Roth has written: “Tamimi walked free in the 2011 Shalit deal by which Israel freed more than a thousand Palestinian Arab prisoners in order to get back a soldier held hostage by Hamas for 5+ years. My wife being an American, our children all have dual-US citizenship. The significance is that this let us turn to the American authorities and ask them to bring murder charges against Tamimi under US law and extradict her from Jordan where she lives in total freedom. More than merely free, she has been living a celebrity’s life, hosting a weekly TV program (encouraging terror) and for a time being the designated “role model” of a prestigious university for Arab journalists which gets support from, among others, Australia via DFAT foreign aid.”
In March 2017, fifteen years after Tamimi delivered a human bomb armed with an exploding guitar case on his back to the busy fast-food place filled with children, the FBI issued a warrant for her arrest and extradition.
Ahlam Tamimi
Yet journalists such as ABC’s Jerusalem Correspondent Sophie McNeill haven’t reported any of this.
The Roths live in a Jerusalem suburb close to McNeill; Tamimi, the Hamas terrorist, lives openly in nearby Amman, Jordan. How has the ABC’s Jerusalem correspondent, McNeill, who is closely covering the DFAT-World Vision case, not reported any of the drama of the FBI going after the murderer of an Australian child in Jordan?
Arnold Roth and his wife Frimet have remorselessly documented how Tamimi masterminded, co-ordinated and executed the Sbarro murders. For her crimes, she was sentenced to sixteen consecutive terms of life imprisonment, but walked free nearly six years ago in the deal that secured the release of an Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit, from his Hamas captors.
In a devastating account of Stockholm Syndrome where terrorists and their supporters are adulated, the Roths wrote “A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns” [http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/17-mar-13-little-village-in-hills-and.html], an article that delves into the Palestinian village where Tamimi spent about a year and where almost everyone else is a member of the Tamimi clan.
Tamimi has described the experience of riding away from the massacre that day in a taxi and hearing initial radio reports of three deaths in the terrorist outrage that she herself had caused:
“I admit that I was a bit disappointed, because I had hoped for a larger toll. Yet when they said “three dead,” I said: ‘God be praised’…Two minutes later, they said on the radio that the number had increased to five. I wanted to hide my smile, but I just couldn’t. God be praised, it was great. As the number of dead kept increasing, the passengers were applauding.”
At her trial, Tamimi said she was pleased with the death toll from her actions, including the killing of children. She only wished she had killed more.
An Israel court gave Tamimi 16 life sentences.
The Sbarro massacre
Released in the Shalit deal in 2011, she returned to her homeland, Jordan, to a hero’s welcome, going on to become the host of a pro-terror weekly television show beamed throughout the world and with many viewers in Australia.
The US Justice Department filed sealed (secret) criminal charges against Tamimi on July 15, 2013. Two days after the secrecy was lifted in March 2017, the highest Jordanian court ruled that Tamimi could not be extradited under Jordan’s 19995 treaty with the United States. The reason: the Jordanian parliament allegedly never ratified the treaty.
Despite Tamimi now being on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, Jordan refuses to prosecute her or to allow the Americans to do so.
How easy would it be for Ms McNeill of the ABC – instead of reporting the conventional wisdom of the international media about Palestinian hunger strikes – to just take her cameras and interview the Roths? They live in the same city. Probably a suburb just next door.
The convicted terrorist, killer of a 15 year old Australian girl, lives openly in Amman. Again, how easy would it be, and how newsworthy, to get in your car, cross the Allenby bridge into Jordan and doorstop this killer with newsworthy questions on the FBI warrant?
A no-brainer story relevant to Australians, deliberately censored, like so much else, perhaps because of a fear that it might arouse understanding for the victims of terror. Or that it might be at variance with the world view of such anti-Israel activist-journalists as John Pilger and Mike Carlton or lead Australians to see the parallels between running down pedestrians in Jerusalem or Nice and stabbing policemen in Endeavour Hills.
While the US attempts to bring the mass-murdering terrorist to justice, Australia has a duty to Malki Roth. Malki was an Australian and it should not just be up to her parents to speak out against the failure of Jordan to act.
Every development in the jihadists tactics, using cars and trucks to ram people, the random stabbing of citizens, and shooting attacks on police were all pioneered in Israel.
The ABC’s failure to report on the indictment of the terrorist murder of an Australian and its dramatic circumstances seems deliberately designed to lessen the likelihood of Australians understanding and sympathising with Israel victims of terror. We deserve better.
Sadly a British exchange student, at the Hebrew University, Hannah Bladon was stabbed to death in a frenzied attack by another person of the same name Tamimi only last month.
This creature, initially portrayed as mentally disturbed, has now been found fit to plead and was apparently motivated by the hope of accessing the Stipend, the salary that the Palestinian Authority pays the family of slain terrorists.
Michael Danby is the Federal Labor MP for Melbourne Ports
The silence is deafening here………
Michael Danby (who is my Federal MHR) were the terrorists who blew up The King David Hotel in the 1940’s ever gaoled? I believe the bomber is still alive and living in Israel.
The King Davis Hotel bombing killed British servicemen and civil servant as well as hotel staff who were both Jewish and Muslim.