Melanie Phillips: The agenda that undermines America’s bond with the Jews
Among those who understood the depth of former US President Barack Obama’s hostility to Israel, there’s understandable anxiety about the Obama retreads and acolytes among the foreign policy and security nominees being chosen by the prospective president-elect, Joe Biden.20 years on and still no justice
Obama’s hostility is assumed to derive from his left-wing mindset which regards Israel, falsely and ahistorically, as a colonialist occupying power. He demonstrates this in his new memoir, A Promised Land, in his profoundly distorted account of the origins of the modern State of Israel.
There is, however, a deeper reason why both Obama and the left find Israel so intensely problematic, and why a Biden presidency will once again have Israel in its cross-hairs. This isn’t about foreign policy. It’s about the programme for America itself.
The core of the left’s agenda is to remake the western world; and the agenda of Obama and the American left is to remake America.
Their target is the western nation-state and its culture. The core precepts of that culture are articulated and enshrined within the different histories, laws, religions, institutions and traditions of individual western nations.
The left, however, deems the western nation-state to be evil because it declares itself superior to cultures that don’t share its values while excluding those who don’t belong to it.
Hence the left’s constant undermining of immigration laws in their attempt to erase national borders; their refusal to grasp that citizenship is a bargain between the citizen and the state to which he or she belongs; and their savage denunciations of those who uphold such notions as racists or xenophobes, in order to erase their voices altogether from the cultural conversation.
The nation, its specific attributes and the borders that define its territory must instead give way to a Kumbaya vision of the brotherhood of man expressed through trans-national institutions and laws.
Much of this erosion of western values has already been achieved, in schools and universities, through the culture wars. Obama’s strategy in his eight years in the White House was to weaponise this agenda through the presidency.
Out of the hundreds of terrorist attacks etched on Israel's collective memory, the slaughter at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem stands out as one of the worst. On Aug. 9, 2001, when summer vacation was in full swing, Hamas terrorist Muhammad al-Masri entered the restaurant in the city center carrying a bomb hidden inside a guitar. When it detonated, it killed 15 people, including half of the Schijveschuurder family (both parents and three children, and two other children were seriously hurt), wounded a total of 140, and left an indelible trauma.
The victims included six American citizens, four of whom were wounded – including Chana Nachenberg, who remains in a vegetative state – and two of whom were killed – Shoshana Greenbaum, a 31-year-old teacher from New Jersey who was six months pregnant, and 15-year-old Malki Roth, who died alongside her friend Michal Raziel.
In a response that was considered harsh at the time, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered that the Palestinian Authority offices in Jerusalem, primarily the Orient House, be shut down. And as the horrific days of the Second Intifada continued, the public's attention shifted to the even more deadly attacks that soon followed.
Twenty years after the Sbarro catastrophe, one matter remains unresolved. The 22-year-old suicide bomber had been driven into the heart of Jerusalem by a pair of terrorists, Mohammad Daghlas, who was behind the wheel, and Ahlam Tamimi, a Palestinian TV anchor who used her press pass to get through the security checkpoints on the way to the capital. Tamimi directed the suicide bomber to his target destination, and immediately fled the scene. She got on a bus at Damascus Gate and heard radio reports that the number of Jews who had been killed was mounting.
"There was great joy on the bus. People congratulated each other, even though they didn't know each other. They didn't know about my part," Tamimi said later in several interviews. Later that evening, she reported on the attack without revealing the part she had played. A few weeks later, the IDF arrested her. She was sentenced to 16 life sentences and another 15 years in prison. While in prison, she announced that he had married her cousin Nizar Tamimi, who had murdered Beit El resident Haim Mizrahi in 1993.
A decade after Tamimi was imprisoned, Israel made a deal for the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. Tamimi and the driver were both released, and subsequently, Tamimi arrived in Jordan. She was the only Jordanian citizen among the 1.027 prisoners who were released in the deal.
Nizar Tamimi was also freed. He was supposed to remain in the West Bank, but someone in the Israeli establishment helped him move to Jordan, duping Malki Roth's father, attorney Arnold Roth, who had been trying to keep the couple from being reunited.
Frimet Roth: Forever 15
This week, we mark yet another agonizing birthday.
My sweet daughter, Malki, would now be 35 years old if Hamas operative Ahlam Tamimi had made some misstep on Aug. 9, 2001.
But Tamimi was and still is a seasoned, determined, efficient and bloodthirsty terrorist.
In the Sbarro bombing, which she confesses she masterminded and which she calls “my operation,” seven babies and children perished with nine adults—some parents alongside their offspring. It was an unmitigated massacre.
Never could we have imagined that her murderer would now be free as a bird—and protected by a ruler who is coddled by both the United States and Israel—King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Tamimi’s stated determination to kill Jews is matched only by the determination of world leaders to ignore our pleas to correct the travesty of justice that Tamimi’s freedom embodies.
Our letters, phone calls, op-eds, tweets and front-page advertisements have fallen on deaf ears. They have only elicited excuses, evasive double-talk, or total silence from most of the people who could easily assist us if they cared to.
There are no obstacles in their path: - Legislation has existed for years empowering the United States to arrest, try and convict terrorists in U.S. courts under U.S. law if they kill a U.S. national, which Malki was. - In 1995, an extradition treaty was signed and ratified between the U.S. and Jordan, and accepted as valid by both countries. The State Department still takes that view. - Tamimi was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2017. A $5 million State Department reward for her capture and conviction was announced in 2018. - Legislation enacted in 2019 empowers the U.S. to impose a foreign-aid sanction on any country failing to abide by its treaty obligation to the U.S.
None of the steps that could be taken to right this moral wrong has been taken.
















