“The Abu Akleh
clan have pursued what they call accountability with fierceness and with
heavy suggestions that not only did someone Israeli do the killing but that it
was deliberate and focused on her. In reality, no
smoking gun has been found. The Aljazeera reporter’s death came in a flurry
of live gunfire captured on video coming from two opposite directions.
“They have a
problem however, and it’s not one of proving what happened. It’s simply that
this took place outside the territory of the United States. The US has no
jurisdiction in Shireen Abu Akleh’s death-by-shooting,” says Roth, who reveals
what it has been like for him to watch the attention showered on the Abu Akleh
family by American government officials.
“It’s been
distressing to watch high-level US officials and politicians respond to the
waves of Abu Akleh outrage with boundless support, sympathy and understanding.
“Secretary of
State Antony Blinken met in Washington with representatives of the Abu Akleh
clan in July 2022 after personally
inviting them there. The report is that he ‘expressed deepest condolences
and commitment to pursue accountability for her tragic killing’ [JTA, July 27, 2022].
“Did I say
distressing? It’s very, very different from how those very same officials along
with their predecessors in office have treated us.
“Mr Blinken and
his State Department colleagues – a long line of them - have maintained total
public silence in the face of repeated efforts by my wife Frimet and me to
engage on a different matter of accountability – one that is absolutely a
matter of US justice.
“Failed US justice,” says Roth, who points
out that while some questioned whether Abu Akleh’s death was accidental, there
is no question at all that Malki Roth was killed in a deliberate act of terror.
“Our daughter
Malki was murdered at the age of 15 in a pizzeria bombing. There is not the
smallest doubt that this was terrorism. Also: that it targeted children, that
the goal was to inflict the heaviest possible loss of life; that it met with
appallingly widespread approval in Palestinian Arab and Jordanian society; and
that the exploding man (misleadingly called a suicide bomber in the news
industry) who is a legend today in Palestinian Arab society was brought there
to kill by a Jordanian woman.
“Ahlam Aref Ahmad
Al-Tamimi, an avowed Hamas terrorist, is the Jordanian woman. A journalism
student at the time she chose the site for the atrocity and brought the bomb to
the door of the pizzeria, she has made a spectacular career out of confessing
her central role. She continues to inspire audiences throughout the
Arabic-speaking world with the re-telling of the details.
“For instance,
she chose the site because of the many Jewish youngsters likely to be there on
that particular school-vacation afternoon. She has explained that the
Arab/Israeli conflict is a religious one and that what she did in planting the
human bomb had great religious significance. She has no regrets about doing
what she did, Heaven forbid, except this: a sincere-sounding regret that she
did not manage to achieve a larger death toll.
“But the 15 dead,
including seven children and a babe in the womb of her mother, were ‘the crown
on my head,’ entitling her to join ‘the annals of history by committing the
best act.’ She said that in a YouTube clip that is still viewable, delivered to
a gathering of Islamist zealots, all of them woman and many of them girls, in
Turkey less than a year ago,” said Roth, who has been stymied in his quest for US
justice since Tamimi’s release from an Israeli prison in 2011.
Roth recites the
details of how he and his wife have been shafted by the US government, and what
comes through is the way officials tried to keep things quiet—how they tried to
make the Roths think they were actually doing something about this, when they
were not (emphasis added):
“The US charged Tamimi
in 2013 and then kept the indictment sealed – a total secret – for the following
four years. It unsealed them in March 2017 and made her only the second woman
on the FBI
Most Wanted Terrorists list. From then until July 2022, no US government figure even once mentioned
her name in public, let alone the disgraceful reality of an American ally -
Jordan – brazenly breaching the treaty between them because of a technical
“flaw” that does not exist and that, even if it did, was a Jordanian
flaw, caused by the Jordanians, fixable by the Jordanians right up until this
morning – and never fixed.
“Meanwhile quiet
efforts were rumored to be underway, intended to persuade Jordan (where she was
born, where she lives and works today) to hand Tamimi over to US law
enforcement as the treaty demands.
“But no one in
the Trump or Biden administrations addressed any of this in all the years since
the charges were laid. That has been maddening for us.
“Then this,” said
Arnold, referring to all the attention focused on the accidental shooting death
of Abu Akleh.
Of course, the plausible deniability of American officials is key to the game
of evading the Roth family while looking as if official America actually gives a damn. As if to underscore the point, Arnold
quotes a startling public statement by Jake Sullivan, head of the National
Security Council in the White House. As reported by the AP, Sullivan said: "The US government continues to seek her
extradition and the Government of Jordan’s assistance in bringing her to
justice for her role in the heinous attack."
“Continues to
seek”? says Roth, with some astonishment. “That’s a challenging way of framing this.
How does it fit, for instance, with President Joe Biden’s lavish and repeated praise
of Jordan’s ruler in the most public of ways?
“In fact, we have
a long list of questions that only senior American government figures can
answer. The details of our efforts to engage, to get responses, to encourage
the doing of American justice, are many. And we have consciously avoided making
them public.”
Things have
changed, however, and the Roths have stepped up their campaign to get America
to sit up listen, and act. The way
the Abu Akleh affair was handled must have felt like an insult to their daughter’s
memory, but that wasn’t really the catalyst that infused their fight for
justice with new vigor. The catalyst was the realization of just how much time
has passed in the annals of American inattention to their plight. “Now that
2,000 days have elapsed (a depressing milestone that was passed last Sunday)
since those Department of Justice charges were made public in Washington,” says
Roth, “we feel it’s time we spoke out.
“We are preparing
ourselves for that now.”
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Tuesday, November 19, 2024
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