Remembering August 9, 2001

On this date in 2001, my life and the lives of all the members of my family underwent the kind of turbulent and violent reset of which nightmares are made.

That day, we lost a beloved child, blown up in a vicious bombing. But in meaningful ways we lost even more than that. And absolutely against our will, we were initiated into years of re-education about values we thought were the bedrock of the lives we lived until then.

Eleven years have passed since criminal charges were issued by a Federal judge in Washington, D.C. against the woman who murdered my sunny, lovely, empathetic 15-year-old daughter Malki. The fugitive remains free until the present moment. Understanding why requires confronting a string of decisions, acts and failures made by officials that have been systematically concealed by the news industry and disregarded by politicians.

The fugitive killer admits to her central role in the massacre for which U.S. have gone after her. And though she brags about her atrocity (“the crown on my head“) and even hosted a television show (it’s mentioned below), she lives the life of a media figure, inspiring others to do what she did, in Amman, Jordan.

Something is shocking, even confounding, about the fact that her ongoing freedom gets negligible-to-no attention in the news industry and public discourse—even in the US. By painful contrast, to the extent the Arab media report on her, it is overwhelmingly favorable and sympathetic.

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It’s not hard to uncover the dry details of Ahlam Aref Ahmad al-Tamimi’s long-thwarted prosecution. The mugshots, the biographical details and the charges can be accessed via three US government sites: The FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists, the 2017 Department of Justice unveiling of the hitherto secret charges and the State Department’s 2018 post of a $5 million reward that is still unclaimed years after it was made public.

But who and what is behind Tamimi’s freedom? That’s harder to ascertain.

Those who know don’t talk openly, And those with a stake in her ongoing freedom are too often untruthful about it. Understanding this and conjecturing why it keeps happening is at the heart of the nightmare my wife and I endure years after our beautiful child’s life was extinguished.

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Tamimi was recruited by Hamas when she was a college student in 2001. As the first female to become one of its jihadists, she was given the mission of bombing one of Jerusalem’s few large department stores.

Hamashbir Lazarchan, located back then on busy King George Street, was an easy hit. On July 30, 2001, she entered its basement supermarket with an explosives-filled beer can. No security people were posted at its doors in those innocent days. Tamimi placed the beer/bomb on a shelf among other beverage containers and strolled out.

Still flush with excitement in a 2012 interview on an Arab TV station, she recounted what resulted:

“The supermarket completely exploded… The Israelis said that nobody had been killed or wounded… This was the beginning of the intifada, and it was normal for them to conceal the number of casualties in order to avoid panic among the Zionists” (Arabic-to-English transcript).

A calmer version from the standpoint of the bombmaker, a Kuwaiti kinsman of Tamimi by the name of Abdallah Barghouti, stated:

“The operation was not intended to cause deaths or injuries but was intended to test the occupation’s security precautions” (source).

Both accounts are absolutely untrue. Though the aim was to cause a bloodbath, no one was injured by Tamimi’s bomb. In the embarrassing wake of that failure, Tamimi badgered her Hamas handlers to immediately provide her with a better bomb for a second shot at jihadi glory.

It came just nine days later. An exploding guitar case fabricated by the same Barghouti was handed to Tamimi by a Hamas handler who paired her up with a religious zealot willing to sling it across his shoulder and carry it inside the target premises she had selected: central Jerusalem’s bustling Sbarro pizzeria.

On the morning of August 9, 2001, accompanied by her suicidal human bomb, she set out from Ramallah by bus and cab to nearby Jerusalem. From an East Jerusalem transit stop, the pair walked through the city’s downtown streets where, unknown to Tamimi or the young man by her side, the Israeli police were on alert following an intelligence tip that a terrorist attack was going to take place.

Tragically, it’s a warning that no one shared with the general public.

The massive explosion gutted Sbarro at two o’clock on a hot school vacation afternoon, erasing 16 lives and injuring 130 other innocents. Three Americans were murdered, one of them my Malki.

Tamimi was arrested a few weeks later. Tried in Jerusalem, she was convicted and sentenced to sixteen terms of life imprisonment. The three-judge panel, horrified by the smiling accused who admitted all the charges against her, recommended from the bench to the Israeli authorities that Tamimi should never be set free. Not in any political deal. Not on bail. Not for any reason.

They might have been talking to the wall.

Tamimi walked free in a 2011 deal between Hamas and Israel for the release of a young IDF soldier held hostage for five years. Israel paid heavily, conditionally commuting the sentences of 1,027 convicted Palestinian Arab and other Arab terrorists and setting them loose. More than half had blood on their hands. A considerable number went on to re-establish their careers in murderous terror. A handful became the 2024 leadership of Hamas.

Tamimi was bused to Cairo on the day she was free. Following a high-profile media event there in which Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal blessed her arrival, she flew to Jordan, a tumultuous welcome at its main airport and instant, noisy, appalling stardom.

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In the years that followed, she embarked on a uniquely successful television career. She begam hosting “Breezes of the free”, a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood production, which was beamed by satellite from Jordan every week to Arabic-speaking audiences the world over, promoting the cause of Palestinian Arab terror. (This continued until 2016.)

She settled into a jihad-centric talk circuit that got her in front of television cameras, on public event panels and before live audiences right across the Middle East. With published opinion pieces in influential Arabic mainstream and social media outlets, Tamimi’s position as one of Islamist terror’s most influential icons has been beyond doubt for years.

Meanwhile, starting in 2012, just weeks after she left her Israeli cell, Tamimi became a person of interest to the U.S. Department of Justice. A core factor was that two of her many victims were U.S. citizens, one of them Malki. (A third, who suffered profound injuries in the atrocity, died in May 2023, having never regained consciousness.)

Those charges, issued in Washington in the summer of 2013, were immediately sealed by order of the court, evidently at the request of the U.S. government lawyers. They became public knowledge only much later, on March 14, 2017 via a Department of Justice announcement.

Hours before that announcement, my wife and I were quietly given to understand that Jordan, which is obligated by a 1995 bilateral treaty with the Clinton administration to extradite Tamimi, had flatly refused to comply. “You’re now in the court of public opinion,” a senior u.S. government official told me. “Good luck.”

The court of public opinion doesn’t have a single address but many. As Malki’s parents, we have tried to reach as many of them as we can. We have gone to Congress, assailed the mainstream Western media, written privately to the Biden administration and to that of Trump and Obama, turned to a herd of America’s Jewish organizational insiders, sought help from the government of Israel, and engaged with numerous respected commentators and analysts with expertise in the field.

One or two have said getting Tamimi prosecuted is a bad idea if it offends Jordan. The majority either fail to respond or acrobatically avoid dealing directly with the issue even as they sit in the room with us. It’s a demeaning experience.

But whether they share with us what they think or tell us nothing, the result is about the same: We come away frustrated and dismayed by the miles-wide gap between the values they profess and their inaction or actual obstruction.

We have occasionally written or spoken about some of those beating-our-head-against-the-wall moments. A small sample:

• Jordan signed an extradition treaty with the U.S. in 1995 and complied with it for years. There’s no doubt that it remains valid and enforceable. But a Jordanian court, suspiciously ruling just a week after the charges against Tamimi were unsealed in Washington in 2017, said the treaty needed to be ratified by the parliament but never was and thus was invalid.
• No reporter whom I have contacted has ever pressed the Jordanians about the patent falseness of this claim. If it’s true, Jordan created the problem and Jordan can fix it by simply ratifying the treaty tomorrow morning. But as we discovered by suing the State Department in 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act, King Hussein—the father of Jordan’s present King Abdullah—personally ratified the treaty and swore not to allow its violation. That should have ended the controversy. Of course, it hasn’t.
• Years of our reaching out to some of the most senior members of the American Jewish leadership firmament have been mostly brushed off. We and our pursuit of justice are comprehensively ignored. There’s no rational justification for this.
• But two breakthroughs came in the past year: The American Jewish Committee (AJC) wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland in July 2023 and the Conference of Presidents wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken in January 2024. They asked the U.S., in their own ways, to press Jordan harder so Tamimi is handed over for trial in Washington. Both requests have failed to get any kind of response. People who know Washington tell us this is unusual. To us, it’s stunning, unacceptable and a clear signal that while they are fine with U.S. justice being trampled, those who enable the trampling don’t want you to know.
• My wife Frimet is a registered voter in Queens, New York, where she lived for 20-some years. Our requests to the lawmakers who represent her to take up the Tamimi issue with the State Department have either gone unanswered or met with excuses and evasions. As a generalization, both sides of the aisle in Congress have shrugged off the idea that they ought to tackle this. No Congressional committee has ever taken up the issue, though Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has twice tackled candidates for the ambassadorship to Jordan at their confirmation hearings.
• All our efforts to engage with Washington’s ambassadors to Israel and to Jordan have been, putting it respectfully, a disappointment.

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But we did get a message about the Tamimi case from President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. And that may be the nastiest encounter of them all.

After the failure of a string of our efforts to reach them – notably via the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and some other outlets – we realized we were wasting our time in trying to engage with the State Department and the White House. That’s when a letter address to Frimet and me and dated October 25, 2022 arrived from Victoria Nuland, at the time the Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs and Deputy Secretary of State, and described as America’s third-highest ranking diplomat in a recent article.

Her letter opens with these startling words:

“On behalf of the President, Secretary Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan I want to reiterate…”

She goes on to list things no government figure has articulated until now: Tamimi must be held accountable; the U.S. is fully committed to getting her into a U.S. court; it’s pursuing “all viable options” with Jordan; and getting justice for Malki and others “is a foremost priority for the United States.”

The most distressing part of Nuland’s letter was its final sentence:

“We will stay in contact with you regarding our ongoing efforts to ensure Tamimi is held accountable for her despicable crimes.”

She didn’t stay in contact at all. I wrote her a dozen letters in the eighteen months after her deeply sympathetic note to us; not one was acknowledged. (Several were conveyed to her office by diplomat channels who provided confirmation to us that they had been received.) She retired in May 2024. So that chapter is closed.

As we see things, the ongoing pain of our bitter experience stems from the failure of major U.S. institutions to live up to their own stated values. They include Congress, the executive branch and the mainstream media.

But for us, there are especially painful lessons here about American Jewish life and its leadership’s failure to lead. The list is longer than that; I prefer not to be more explicit.

The Tamimi case is a red light for what may lie ahead.

* * *

Our battle for justice and against the terrorists has been personal from the outset. Not because it’s important for us alone (it’s more important than that) but because it’s driven by pain and grief. Those feelings grew even more intense some months ago when our adored son-in-law Naftali Gordon, the beloved husband of one of Malki’s sisters and the doting father of two of our toddler granddaughters, was killed fighting Hamas in Gaza.

It’s time to change how America views the war against the terrorists and those who stand with them. Everything dear to us depends on getting this right.