The previously discussed Hamas terrorist Ahlam Tamimi “has evolved into a pan-Arab media celebrity and a respected mainstream figure in Jordanian society.” Thus marveled Arnold Roth, the father of one of Tamimi’s murdered victims. Her fame as a Jordanian “national treasure,” after a 2011 Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange freed her from a lifetime behind bars, provides a damning indictment of the prominence of jihadist ideology within Muslim societies.
Tamimi’s orchestration of the notorious August 9, 2001 Sbarro pizzeria suicide bombing in Jerusalem and subsequent conviction in Israel have brought her accolades and rewards from fellow Arabs from the very beginning. Six weeks after the attack, Al Najah University in the West Bank town of Nablus glorified the perpetrators with a recreated Sbarro featuring bloody plastic body parts and partially-chewed pizza crusts. The governing Palestinian Authority (PA) also began payments to the terrorists and/or their families that totaled over $910,000 by 2019 under the infamous “pay-to-slay” program. The PA even considered in 2008 awarding Tamimi the Al Quds Mark of Honor.
Israel correspondingly sanctioned PA complicity in the attack. Shortly thereafter, Jerusalem municipality police closed the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Jerusalem headquarters (Orient House). The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also took over Palestinian military and political buildings in Abu Dis, an often-proposed PA capital just outside of Jerusalem, and attacked the PA’s West Bank police headquarters in Ramallah.
In Jordan as well, Tamimi has turned her journalism background (following her college studies before her imprisonment, she completed in 2018 a journalism graduate degree at Amman’s private Middle East University) into stardom. Between February 2012 and September 2016 she hosted her own television program, Nassem al-Ahrar (“Breezes of the Free”), on Al Quds TV, one of Hamas’ two global satellite channels. Produced and distributed from an Amman studio, this program focused on incarcerated terrorists in Israel, as she had been. With these broadcasts, particularly during Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, Tamimi became “central to their jihadist war against the hated Jews,” Roth noted.
As Roth has observed, Tamimi has also taken her show on the road. She “traveled widely among the Arab states, addressing enthusiastic audiences with a message blending incitement and vile bigotry.” Her itinerary has included Algeria, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Tunisia, and Yemen.
Accordingly, Tamimi in 2014 won praise as a “success model” throughout the Arabic website of the prestigious Jordanian Media Institute (JMI). Princess Rym al-Ali, a graduate of Columbia University’s journalism school, former CNN reporter, and wife of the half-brother of Jordan’s King Abdullah II, founded JMI in 2010 to promote professionalism in Jordanian journalism. JMI received funding from numerous big-name public and private donors including the governments of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as Saatchi and Saatchi. Before criticism prompted JMI quietly to erase Tamimi from its website, her laudatory biography noted that she had attended “Martyr’s University,” or Ramallah’s Birzeit University, the alma mater of many terrorists.
Roth found especially shocking a televised “‘This is Your Life’-like tribute” to Tamimi and her fellow terrorist-in-love husband, her cousin Nizar, who also escaped an Israeli life sentence via the 2011 prisoner exchange. The October 23, 2018 edition of Caravan, a weekly show on Jordan’s most watched television channel, the privately-owned Ro’ya TV, focused on these “special guests” and “heroes.” Earlier in January 2018, Tamimi was also a keynote speaker at an event attended by a former Jordanian prime minister and other public figures in honor of another Tamimi cousin, Ahed. She had gained international celebrity by slapping an Israeli soldier in the West Bank.
Tamimi seems omnipresent in the Arab world. Propaganda posters have lionized her. Her social media is active, despite firms like Twitter and Instagram repeatedly taking down her violence-promoting accounts after complaints from groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Roth has grimly observed that
Tamimi may be the first mass murderer in history to be given her own television program, to have operated freely for years under her own name on Facebook and Twitter, and to be interviewed regularly in the Arabic media—special mention here of the Aljazeera Network.
A Roth friend who regularly travels to Jordan for business has told him that “high-achievers, intelligent and well-educated people, movers, shakers, up-and-comers in Jordanian society—see Tamimi as a national hero.” The Amman-based journalist and analyst Daoud Kuttab has accordingly adamantly rejected recent efforts by the Washington, DC-based Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) to win Tamimi’s extradition to the United States for trial. “It is not a gray area,” he stated; “Jordan will not turn over someone who is seen as a Palestinian patriot to the Americans” in a country whose population is an estimated 70 percent Palestinian in origin.
Tamimi’s current Jordanian lawyer, Hikmat Rawashdeh, expressed similar sentiments in closing remarks during his defense in a 2006 terrorism case. “Most Jordanians wish to fight Americans and Israelis,” he stated; “should I be punished for this intention? If this is the case then the authorities should punish the entire Jordanian population.” A Jordanian law professor likewise responded to the EMET-led efforts by declaring Tamimi’s civilian victims as Israeli settlers at war and therefore legitimate targets. Meanwhile, Jordanian legislators have previously defined antiterrorism laws to exclude violence against Israel.
Tamimi’s life in her surrounding culture explodes for Roth myths that Muslims like her are extremists turning to violence merely because of socioeconomic deprivation. He mockingly juxtaposes this debunked Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) thesis with “Countering Vacuous Euphemisms.” By contrast, his excellent anti-jihadist website This Ongoing War flatly states on its masthead that his daughter Malki “was a victim of jihadist hatred and barbarism.”
Roth has learned from the bitterest personal experience that Tamimi’s “religious faith was all the motivation she needed to murder Jews” as a “devout Muslim.” In Amman on October 19, 2011, the day following her release from Israeli imprisonment, she declared that “I dedicated myself to Jihad for the sake of Allah.” Thus Roth correctly concluded that “it’s religious warfare for her and her fellow Islamists.”
Tellingly, Roth examined the facts about the suicide bomber Tamimi guided to the Sbarro in 2001. This “human bomb,” Izz al-Din Shuheil al-Masri, was the son of a successful Ramallah restaurant owner. Thus he “was a young newly-religious fanatic from well-to-do family: not poor, not uneducated, living neither in misery nor despair.”
That Tamimi is such a popular icon in Jordan has the profoundest of implications for a country often touted as a unique Western ally in a dangerous Middle East. Western politicians and think tanks often court Jordan’s ruling Hashemite monarchy, but its survival is largely the function of support from countries like Israel and the United States. As this series’ next article will show, these realpolitik facts have frustrated Roth’s quest for justice for his daughter.
Westman says
My only wonderings are why the Israelis traded her and why they never sent an assassination squad after her?
If she had masterminded an attack on the House of Saud, how many suitcases would be leaving Jordan?
Eva says
Those are excellent questions, and ones that I, too, would like answered.
After all, how difficult would it be to find her and remove her permanently.
gravenimage says
Ahlam Tamimi’s Middle East Terror Morality Tale (Part Two)
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Why are we still sending foreign aid to Jordan?
OLD GUY says
The United States of America needs to stop sending tax payer money to Jordan and any other islamic/muslim country. The only benefits to Americans is to the wealthy and corporations that are allowed todo business in their country through our tax payer bribes in the form of aid. Our government needs to be out of the charity business and let the people decide on what charitiy funds are sent outside of our country through donations NOT TAX DOLLARS.