A depressingly large number of people posting in various social media channels are hammering away right now at a campaign that tries to characterize the Palestinian Arab teen Ahed Tamimi as a victim of Israeli oppression, a human rights activist and a freedom fighter.
She’s the young woman many call Shirley Temper, a photogenic performer who for at least eight years now has been the central figure in a long-running propaganda performance orchestrated by her father Bassem Tamimi and his publicity business, Tamimi Press.
What others say about this is very much on our minds. What Bassem Tamimi himself says is a matter of record. Child abuse? Manipulation? Ha! The ugly child abuse in which he and his village engage chronically is dismissed in masterful fashion: “Our children are doing their duty and must be strong.”
We keep running into people who think they know the story of the Tamimi clan. But it’s clear to us that few understand the rich and ugly detail of their hatefulness, expressed not as mere protest and words but the kind of physical violence that has ended dozens of lives on the Tamimi side and among their many victims.
FBI Most Wanted Terrorist: The Arabic version is here
Regular readers of this blog know our oldest daughter Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a massacre engineered by Bassem Tamimi’s niece, Ahlam Tamimi. Since March 2017, she has been a fugitive from US justice, wanted by the FBI to face federal charges in Washington arising from the bombing/massacre of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem 16 years ago. She has confessed often and in great detail about her role as the mastermind of the slaughter.
Meanwhile Bassem Tamimi has been crowned a hero of Amnesty International. They sent him on a coast-to-coast roadshow in 2015. We tried to get some straight answers from him and from his generous sponsors to some straightforward, related questions… but got nothing: see “04-Sep-15: Mr. Human Rights Defender, a question if we may“.
But Ahlam Tamimi the confessed murderer, along with her uncle and aunt and cousin Nariman, Bassem and Ahed, are simply part of a long list of Tamimis associated with Arab-on-Israeli terror. Some of the details are barely known and are being deliberately obscured or hidden. We have been doing what we can to publicize them. We revisited some of the barely-known details just a few days ago in “19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh’s hideous buried secrets“.
On any objective view, enthusiasm for the “bravery” of Ahed Tamimi is a strange thing because of how it ignores the trajectory of her emergence as a media figure and the center of a multimedia “Free Ahed Now” project.
Below are some images from public sources that chart the process by which her family and her village – but most of all her parents – cultivated a jihadist. It’s a dismaying chronicle not only because it shows how there are parents who would do this to a child but also because of the people, a distressing number of them progressive Jews, who have embraced this child-abuse while giving no sign they see the malice, the hate, the bigotry and the obvious manipulation that has accompanied it from the outset until today.
July 2, 2010: Screaming on demand for her father’s cameras, Ahed Tamimi is confident enough to walk up to a fully armed soldier and shriek into his face. Someone has told her not to worry, everything will be OK, just show your anger. And so a career is launched. [See more in this video.] She’s said to be ten years old when this staged event took place.
November 2, 2012: Captured on video by the cameras of Tamimi Press and stage managed by Bassem Tamimi, her father, Ahed screams “I spit in your face”. [Image Source]
November 2, 2012: Cameras rolling: lights, action, fists and temper tantrums. Nabi Saleh packages up a social-media-ready performance. There is a large number of versions of this and closely related photos on the Web. Here’s the video from which some of them are taken.
December 24, 2012: Recognizing the power of a a little blonde tyke teaching the Israelis a lesson, Turkey’s government awards the juvenile performer its Handala trophy [Image Source]
December 31, 2012: In Turkey for the ceremony, she breakfasts with the prime minister, Erdogan [Image Source]
December 31, 2012: An intimate moment with Turkey’s prime minister [Image Source]
June 16, 2012: Ahed Tamimi stands on stage in Amman, Jordan, next to Nabi Saleh’s pride and joy, the boastful and confessed murderer Ahlam Tamimi who is marrying another Nabi Saleh murderer, Nizar Tamimi, also in the photo. Everyone in the picture is a blood-relative of everyone else. Background: “22-Jun-12: A wedding and what came before it“
A portrait of Ahed with the proud parents, published in February 2013 [Image Source]
2014: She and her flowing blonde tresses are center stage in a depiction of “resistance and human rights”. The Israeli soldiers in the picture are familiar with the game – the child is not at risk because the uniforms are Israeli. Everyone involved knows that anywhere else in the Middle East, the outcome would be radically different [Image Source]
November 21, 2014: AlwatanVoice publishes one of the many Tamimi Press snapshots of the Tamimi village children boldly marching to another entirely artificial “clash” with Israeli soldiers. As always, Ahed Tamimi is placed by her father in the most photographed position. Right behind her is Naji Tamimi, a full-time paid Fatah “activist” and cousin or brother (according to different sources) of Bassem Tamimi
March 13, 2015 The weekly Nabi Saleh media-focused confrontation with restrained and patient Israeli soldiers [Image Source]
March 13, 2015: Ahed playing her customary featured role in the weekly show outside Nabi Saleh , screaming on cue [Image Source]
May 29, 2015: The approaching FIFA Mondial is too rich a media hook to miss. So Ahed Tamimi in braids is the face of yet another weekly protest about something.
August 28, 2015: With her father Bassem moving into the camera’s view for a brief moment, but naturally doing nothing to protect his daughter, Ahed Tamimi writhes and struggles with an embarrassed beside a lone Israeli serviceman who could have theoretically used his gun to get out of a difficult situation but naturally did not. This is as viral an image as Bassem Tamimi can ever have wished. [Image Source: CNN]
September 2, 2015: Bassem, Nariman, Ahed and other members of the family are honored by a personal audience with the president-for-life of the Palestinian Authority [Image Source]
Some months ago, Ahed Tamimi was given the privilege of addressing a committee of the European Parliament.
November 2015: An invaluable examination by Petra Marquardt-Bigman of the Ahed Tamimi phenomenon, the horror of the messages emanating from her parents and cousins, and the context in which all this has been happening [The Tower]
The radicals of the terribly-mislabeled Jewish Voice for Peace are currently hard at work amplifying the Nabi Saleh/Tamimi Press messages and issued a tweet on Friday (below) that left us wondering what planet they occupy:
As to “butchered childhoods“, we happen to know something about how that works. Our daughter Malki, who never thrust a fist into the face of anyone at all let alone a soldier, was fifteen when she became an unwilling participant in the explosive moment which the Tamimi clan celebrate yearly with such huge enthusiasm.
Malki’s picture stands for the absolute opposite of what the Tamimi propaganda machine is marketing. It’s tragic how many people fail to understand that simple truth.
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