Extract from a family snapshot taken a few weeks before Malki’s life ended. |
[This is the first part of a three-post look at the little-known and deeply troubling way the Kingdom of Jordan deals with a Hamas murderer/terrorist living unhindered and free in its midst. In the next two parts, we ask what this means in the context of current US efforts to see our daughter’s killer extradited from there to face trial on US federal charges.]
Being the parents of a child murdered by a proud and pleased woman who doesn’t stop boasting about what she did was never going to be easy.
She married another convicted Arab terrorist/murderer, Nizar Tamimi, in the summer of 2012. He is her cousin. Another cousin is Ahed Tamimi, the 17 year old blondish “icon” of Palestinian “resistance” recently released from an Israeli prison.
Screen shot: Jordan’s RoyaTV promo for the Caravan “youth show” |
She dropped out of the program in September 2016 when, with no publicity, she was arrested very briefly in Jordan on an Interpol warrant, and subsequently lowered her profile as the efforts to have her brought to trial in the US worked their way through the system.
Caravan is a weekly TV show on Jordan’s privately-owned Ro’ya TV channel, evidently the most watched of Jordan’s TV channels. Caravan aims explicitly at a young audience and tries hard to seem hip in a vaguely Western way. In its October 23, 2018 edition, the show’s attention was entirely given over to Ahlam and Nizar Tamimi, Jordan’s best-known husband-and-wife team of convicted, unrepentant Palestinian Arab murderers. And as becomes painfully clear, a pair of well-loved Jordanian heroes.
The Tamimis were on for 45 minutes. There wasn’t anything especially headline-worthy of anything they said. They never talked about their terrorist act, just their life in prison. You would think they had been sentenced to jail for parking tickets. The host of the show was fawning all over them, calling them special guests over and over again. The husband said “we are living the best life possible now”. The details of their so called heroic imprisonment were quite banal. How they smuggled letters to each other, how they got hope from programs such as the one they were on that talked about prisoners in Israeli jails. How they survived mentally by “challenging” the prison system… At one point, asked what her ambitions were at the age she became a terrorist, she rambled on but ended up praising Jordan and King Abdullah… Watching the show, I was literally cursing into my phone…
The obsequious Tamimi tribute received heavy promotion on social media [Twitter] |
From our friend’s report, it appears no mention was made in the entire hour-long program of the atrocities carried out by the Tamimi couple. No indication of the acts of savagery that earned them their conviction before Israeli courts. Not a word about Ahlam Tamimi’s constant incitement to terrorism. No hint of her repeated public endorsement of how murdering Israeli children serves the interests of the Palestinian Arab resistance.
There was also no reference to how she claims now to be innocent of all the charges brought against her by the Department of Justice; or of how she believes the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews, far from being about occupied territories and national self-determination is actually a “religious struggle”.
- Presenter (Aya Al-Khayat): “There are many heroes behind bars; they have stories and struggles against the occupying enemy. Today we will host a number of released prisoners to get to know their stories.
- Welcome Ahlam and Nizar Tamimi. It is a great honor for us to host you in the Caravan studio. The first question is: How did you get to know one other and how did you get married?
- Nizar Tamimi says they met in 1998 after he was already imprisoned. [Imprisoned? Why? Viewers are left to assume it may have been for a traffic offence; there’s no hint given of the brutal murder of an Israeli man of which he and several other Tamimi cousins were convicted in 1993]. Ahlam, he says, was a Jordanian citizen who came to study in Palestine. At that time, relatives’ visits to the prison, both second and third degree, were permitted. They were related (he doesn’t say how – in reality they are related in several different ways since the Tamimis are deeply involved in marrying within their clan), and she came to visit him. They stayed in touch.
- Nizar Tamimi: “Then in 2001, Ahlam was arrested because of her involvement in the struggle and jihad [Notice that the fifteen people she murdered, the sixteenth person who remains unconscious to this day – these are not important enough to be mentioned even once in this program] In prison, we were in contact… It was difficult to be in contact, it was not permitted, and the security conditions became more stringent after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Thank Gd, in 2005 we managed to make a marriage pact while we were in prison… Praise God we are now living well.”
- Presenter asks Ahlam Tamimi how she felt when sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment.
- Ahlam Tamimi: “A life sentence is not a logical thing. But the defense establishment of the Zionists aims to compare [translator’s note: seeks to balance] the state of fear generated by the Palestinians via the struggles we have been waging over the years – with life imprisonment. They consider that every dead Israeli should be answered with a life imprisonment sentence and in this way placate the anger of the Zionist families of those killed in the various operations. Nizar was arrested in 1993 and remained in prison for about 20 years [sic – in reality 18 years]. I was arrested in 2001 and I remained ten and a half years [sic – just barely ten years] in prison. Nizar got a life sentence, I received 16 life sentences! And that’s to be expected. When we choose to go on the path of struggle, we or any Palestinian, there are known scenarios [ahead]. Either you are arrested or you die as a shaheed [martyr], or you get injured or you become a fugitive. When we choose to go on that path, we are ready for any possible scenario.
- Presenter: “This is admirable! You, the people of the struggle, elevate the name of Jordan!”
- There’s a break next – some coverage of a current art exhibition focusing, like the program, on prisoners. This includes an interview with Abdullah Barghouti‘s mother. She says he wants to be released, that he is optimistic and hopes to be released “in the next deal“. [How did Barghouti get locked away in an Israeli cell? The answer isn’t given; Barghouti built the exploding guitar that destroyed Sbarro along with other bombs that in total took erased 70 Israeli lives. He has boastedon American TV that when eventually released, he will kill more Israelis.]
Abdullah Barghouti’s mother sheds tears over her son’s sad fate – being locked away by the Zionists. No mention at all of the 70 Israelis his terrorist bombs blew to pieces… |
- Video grab (on the right): On display in the art exhibition, a portrait of Kuwaiti mass murderer Abdullah Barghouti, the Hamas master bomb-maker. His worried mother, speaking with considerable emotion, is interviewed live on the program and with maximum sympathy. She says she is optimistic he will be out of prison soon.
- Ahlam Tamimi [this segment is evidently interviewed at the art exhibition]: When we were in prison and we heard that one of the artists was painting us, or writing us a poem or a story, it encouraged us a lot – that there are people who remember us.
- Presenter: Were you aware of [the Shalit deal] while you were still in prison?
- Ahlam relates that the Shalit Deal had been under discussion from the time Shalit was abducted in 2006 until the mass prisoner release in 2011. She notes that in this transaction, out of thousands of prisoners, only 1,450 prisoners were released [sic – in fact the number is 1,027]. And the others expected their names to be included in the list, but unfortunately they did not leave. But, thank God, there is always hope, and the proof is that there will be another deal, inshallah, and with the help of Allah all prisons will be emptied. [Presenter: Inshallah.]
- A member of the audience congratulates the program’s guests and asks whether the Jordanian government stays on top of the issue of Jordanian prisoners [in Israeli prisons]. Ahlam answers that the embassy [in Israel] does take an interest in the prisoners, but it does so only to a minor degree, and it is to be hoped that this degree of interest [by Jordan] will grow.
- Presenter asks if they feel the support of the [Arab] street for them,and for the Palestinian cause. Did they feel this support when they were in prison? Nizar Tamimi answers that there is radio and television in prison. This has happened thanks to the efforts of the prisoners, their protests and strikes. There are programs focusing on peace demands and so on for the prisoners. These strengthen and encourage the prisoners.
- Presenter asks Ahlam Tamimi what her aspirations in life are or were. The enemy’s media [Israel of course] disseminates the message that those who join the Palestinian resistance lack aspiration, lack a love of life apart from the desire to succeed in injuring their enemies.
- Ahlam Tamimi: “I was a student at Bir Zeit. This is a university with many demonstrations, and many shaheeds [martyrs]. It’s a central institution in the Palestinian struggle. Once the school day came to an end, the lecturers and the university administration would organize themselves according to the students’ wishes. Once school was over, we would organize the Palestinian street according to our desires. Our aspiration in Palestine, from when we were youths right up until now, is to liberate our land. This is not just the aspiration of the Palestinians but of every Arab citizen. And here‘s the thing: wherever, in every land that has occupation, we are unable to accept it from a human standpoint. This is especially so when we’re speaking of the place of the Prophet’s journey [refers to Jerusalem] since he is the prophet of allMuslims. So it is very important that we try constantly to [instill awareness of] the problem of Palestine within the education of our children. How can we raise a generation of liberation if we do not educate our children about the Palestinian problem, in the educational curriculum, in life, in the family and so on? How else will they know there is an occupied Palestine, and that they have to turn [their attention] to it? You [she turns her attention to the students in the audience] – it is vitally important that you undertake a variety of actions so that you can “live” the Palestinian problem. Jordan comes first on this subject. Its geography is ‘one’ [perhaps united?] with Palestine. The concern is ‘one’. And His Majesty, along with the Hashemite monarchy, never ever abandoned the Palestinian problem. Thus we hope there will be ever more such activity for young people, around the issue of Jordanian prisoners and Palestinian prisoners. So that we can direct our words towards the Zionist Entity [Israel of course] saying: “No! To the matter of the Palestinian prisoners there are consequences not only within Palestine but also extending out to Jordan, to Tunisia, to the entire Arab world.”
Smiling faces, open admiration: The murdering Tamimis |
When Ahlam Tamimi urges “more such activity“, it needs to be absolutely clear that she is not referring to knitting classes.
It’s evident the Tamimis, who in April 2017 began maintaining a relatively low profile, have now been given a signal to emerge and to take their place in Jordan’s public spaces. At the same time, they have taken care, or been carefully instructed, not to sound violent or directly threatening, though the female clearly does engage in incitement to terror and violence directed at the young audience that Caravan seeks.
It’s worth underscoring the central point here: not a single word of the entire program addresses why the Tamimis were in prison, or the length of their sentences (multiple life terms). This is not “reality” programming but rather soft-focus, inspirational television, in some ways like certain religion-centric shows familiar to us in the West. But the people getting the adulation. the respect and the platform are not mere eccentrics or Bible thumpers. They’re coldly enthusiastic murderers. Entirely unrepentant and embraced as role-models and heroes by mainstream Jordanians – and their mass media – because of that.
The full video of the Jordanian tribute to the Tamimis which originally went to air on October 23, 2018 is online here. As far as we can tell, no one in any part of the mainstream media has given this attention.
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