Rejuvenation: Morality and Money

[Music] hi everybody eve harrow rejuvenation on the land of israel network it is the afternoon here in a beautiful israel july 20th 2020 the 28th day of tammuz 57.80 moving up into what we traditionally call the nine days the first nine days of where experience has shown um not usually good things happen to the jewish people uh in those nine days and so it's uh i would say even with covet and everything else going on their sense tends to be a little bit of an even bigger vibe of caution i would say as we move into the next few days it's very interesting to actually feel that um i am very honored to guest today arnold roth uh arnold i met many many years ago the father of malki roth hashem yokom dama who was killed in the sabara's terror attack in august of 2001 that summer found me actually in the united states my husband and i weren't the kind of parents who took the kids to vacation every summer in the united states when they were growing up not only because we couldn't afford it but because we also thought it was very important to spend our summers in israel israel shouldn't just be where you go to school and work and then you have all the fun somewhere else but that summer we did take the kids away on a very big trip our family had also suffered a terror attack in june of 2001. my niece batsheva's five-month-old baby yehuda was murdered by someone who threw a rock through the windshield of their car and hit him in the head and he died of brain damage and it was a very difficult summer for the greater harrow family and we had a wedding in the states and we hadn't seen my parents in a while and all of it cool cooked up together that we said we need to get out of here for a little bit and uh and we were in the states and that's how it happened to be that um we were in chicago actually for this nephew's wedding and i saw got up early in the morning and opened a newspaper and saw a picture on the front page of bodies being carried out of a pizza parlor that i knew very well in the center of jerusalem the sabaro's terror attack um that the the pizza parlor blew up that day but for arnold and friend roth and many other families um their world blew up and i met arnold not long after and don't know where he and his wife get the strength to do what they're doing but 19 years later the battle for justice for what happened on the corner of jaffa road and king george street so many years ago is still and possibly now even at its peak so arnold um and i know you you've really devoted now all your time retired lawyer and very involved in the israeli high tech scene for a long time but now this is how you really spend your day so um thank you so much for joining me here on rejuvenation today and for allowing me to open my audience to a very painful period of time which a lot of people would like to forget and which we can't and it's still a very open wound and justice has not been done so please share with uh share with my audience what what has been going on i just want to share first of all the pleasure it is to be in the company of somebody who has the sensitivity to understand that there's a private life and there's a public life and however animated the public life might be shown in the in the telling the private side of it which is never really exposed and certainly in my case it's not is uh is is is is quite a story which i'm not going to go into but yes even though 19 years have gone by the um the sense of loss in the wake of losing multi who was precious soul and the middle middle child in our family who really did a great deal of the holding together of everybody else is is very painful what's happened to make all of that kind of recede into the background so far as talking to outsiders is concerned is that we're at war we've been at war since the uh transaction that turned our lives upside down in 2011 which had from the perspective of most people fairly simple elements to it israel got back a hostage a soldier who had been held in appalling war crime circumstances by the hamas but who cares about that the answer is nobody cares at this point not that they shouldn't care but the fact is people don't care that it was a war crime and 1027 palestinian terrorists were released from israeli prisons um and as i try never to miss the opportunity to tell more than half of those 1027 were murderers people had actually killed other people not all of them killed israelis or jews a lot of them had killed arabs but they were murderers and the doctrine if there really was one by which israel never released uh people who fit the category of blood on their hands that's the expression that's always been used without people really stopping to really understand what it means was forgotten at that point it ended and israel is now in the business of releasing if the perceived need is there people who have blood on their hands and uh hope that the price turns out to be worth it who what government what where were we in 2011 uh the government in 2011 was headed by the same person who heads the government today that's uh prime minister bibi netanyahu what's interesting in his case and and here eve i know how much um it would upset you if i were to criticize the government of israel or even say critical things about israeli politicians and i want to put your heart uh in a much more comfortable place when i say i criticize politicians in every country at every opportunity they're not when i'm being interviewed and not when i'm in a place that's as sensitive and uplifting as this space that you've created so let me simply say that the prime ministership of mr netanyahu has always been in my eyes a little strange and even i would say compromise but in a way that i plan to justify by reason of the fact that in the 90s the same person who has not been the prime minister wrote a book about what other people ought to do if they ever confronted with having to do a deal with terrorists i often have the quotation in front of me i don't have it at this moment that i can easily call it out in which the best-selling book that made him a lot of money in the period of 95 96 explains chapter and verse and with great wisdom with real good sense what you ought to do sadly for all of us prime minister nathaniel when he confronted the challenge of actually doing what his book was designed to do which was guide you into best practices did the exact opposite he correctly observed a decade earlier that if you give in to the terrorists you've opened yourself up to endless extortion and so it was and so it will be and for some what we don't need to say for some reason but for reasons it made sense to the prime minister and to more than 90 of our fellow israelis at the time the transaction was worthwhile my wife and i did not oppose the deal at the time what we certainly did with every bit of energy that we had was to campaign that this woman whose name is the woman who spearheaded the battle of the sabaro pizzeria the attack with horrible explosives on a pizzeria full of children that she should not walk free that we lost so where is she now what are what are you doing now why is this back in the headlines and why are different organizations specifically from the united states i understand but not only suddenly waking up to essentially what's an old story thousands of people have been killed by terrorism here in israel some of the murderers in jail obviously the homicide bombers are not in jail because they are wherever murderers and horrific people go uh what what is happening now that has brought this back into the headlines well it's a sequence of events and i'll compress it in 2011 two days after the deal was transacted and the prisoners had walked free aflam tamimi arrived to a tumultuous welcome in amman jordan and that's because that's where she came from only a few years earlier um and i'll take the opportunity to say what's never reported in the newspapers she left jordan to come and settle in uh in judea and sumerian specifically in the area around ramallah because she had just had a baby she did not unfortunately have a husband and there are certain guiding principles in this um very honor focused society of theirs that say that a woman who does this or to be put to death and preferably put to death by the members of the family it's an interesting story which i i learned about from somebody who actually interviewed her and wrote a book about it but it doesn't matter because no one is interested in that either she turned up here she enrolled in university and was a journalism student and then carried out the horrific bombing and she was the leader of the group that did the bombing and sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment but then when the shallow deal came along she was in that 1027 who walked free and as i say two days after the transaction was over not before she had gone to cairo to a tumultuous reception by khalid meschel the most powerful man in hamas who was there in order to receive her she then turned up in jordan the first thing about what happened in jordan and i'm going to move forward quickly after that is that she had a tumultuous have i said that enough times a tumultuous reception organized by the jordanians in a jordanian courthouse no question that was under the ages of the jordanian establishment the kingdom the royal family lots of excitement she then embarked on a career of full-time lecturing about the things that being the murderer of jews especially jewish children taught her and what her experiences taught what to teach you where you is the germanian public and then very shortly after that the iowa public public within eight weeks or so of her returning there something really dramatic in my eyes happened this was a difficult time for us and friend my wife and i were watching it all closely but then the straw that broke the camel's back for us was she got a tv program uh in jordan jordan which has a famously restrictive media environment where you frankly can't say anything without having the jordanian secret police and government officials come marching in and taking you to jail she was given the right which continued for five more than five years to walk into a studio in downtown oman record a program along the most extreme lines of lethal militant islamism on behalf of the muslim brotherhood for five years every single weekend a program which she hosted which went for a full hour was beamed throughout the world now you told me that you have two people who listen to this program who don't live in israel and i want to talk to those two people right now because if they live in a country you know one of these primitive countries australia the united states new zealand england france then they can be absolutely certain that program was beamed into the homes of their neighbors provided that they lived anywhere near people who spoke arabic in other words the reach of tamimi's journalistic show business life was entirely global it was it was being doubted not only by satellite but also by what called internet streaming repeater stations where it meant that anybody who had a telephone or a laptop or a television and who had enough passion for dead children dead jewish children could hear from the horse's mouth what it meant to be blessed by god and to be released by the zionists and that's what she did and she did it every week for five years and i want to go back to the point i just made king abdullah ii of jordan doesn't approach any um doesn't brook any uh freedom of expression in his country his country is notoriously and listed as such by um liberty house which which ranks every country in the world on a certain scale as unfree jordan is certainly unfree it's media certainly i'm free but not for ah so for five years that went on in the meantime not just in the meantime in the week after she started a tv program i took myself to washington with the consent of my wife who doesn't travel we have a very sick child at home from it stays home and cares for her on a full-time basis that i went with a good friend who's a lawyer who has been in on our case all these years to the department of justice in washington where we had a big meeting a meeting with a large number of people prosecutors investigators doj senior officials fbi senior officials and i spoke to them about something that was a painful subject of course you know that i'm going to be talking only about painful subjects but this one is kind of in a class of its own because i reminded them that under u.s law for the previous 15 17 or 18 years there was a law that said the following thing if there is an act of terrorism that takes place outside the united states in which the victims who are killed are citizens or nationals of the united states then the united states takes upon itself the obligation and the privilege which no other country on earth as far as i know has ever done of going after that terrorist or those terrorists bringing them to the united states to face justice under us law in a u.s court of law so standing in front of all of these officials i said and as you know that looks never once been applied in the state of israel and i want you to do it in this case i'm here to ask you to break your model and to go after akhlam tamimi and i got a very positive reception uh when we left my my lawyer friend and i i called from it and said we're in for a tough few weeks because they told us in the meeting that it's going to take some time and they're not going to be able to tell us anything until they can tell us everything but it was more than five years of total silence from the authorities in washington until under circumstances that if we've got another two hours to talk about it i would explain at a painful length but they called they said we're coming to jerusalem meet with us and we had a meeting and not just us but the family of the other american national uh family who's now i won't mention here on the f on the program we're quite close uh this was their only child and she was pregnant with her first child and uh right the same right in other words victim of the very same beast the very same so they were there and we were there and everyone else in the room was smoothly belong to the button justice or the fbi and what they said to us then which is which is put the mark on what's happened ever since then here we are now in july 2020. this was march 2017 was we've charged her we've put her on the fbi most wanted terrorists list today we've asked the jordanians to arrest her and we've asked the jordanians to extradite her now i'm a lawyer and i happen to know something about extradition i already knew about extradition back then but what i didn't know was that the jordanians in the united states had signed an extradition treaty in 1995 during the period of king hussein the father of the current king and president clinton and in the course of the years the jordanians had dutifully handed over one jordanian after another every time the americans came knocking and saying you've got a fugitive we want him in our court and the jordanian said which flight suddenly as we learned an hour or two after we left the americans at the hotel in jerusalem in march 2017 the jordanians were saying well and then six days later the highest court in jordan pretty much out of the blue as i was told by american officials but it can't have been out of the blue convened to hear the most exalted panel of judges in the country hand down a decision pretty much out of out of nowhere that says that 1995 uh treaty with our most important strategic ally the one who keeps us alive whose funding is what helps our budget continue to operate from year to year that treaty is is invalid and not only is it invalid it's been invalid since the day it was signed so much to say about that that i'm really not kidding eve when i say we need to spend a lot of time talking about this and since we're not going to i'll quickly come to the bottom line the bottom line is no one takes seriously except the jordanians the claim that the treaty is not on foot unfortunately it took me several years of pushing before i was able to hear an american official say yes we will go public and confirm what you know and what really everybody knows but nobody is saying that the jordanians are still bound by the treaty you can't just walk out of a treaty and from our point of view they owe us the obligation of handing this beast this savage this barbarian over for trial in washington so now the battle that we're talking about is exactly over that we want to see jordan persuaded in the way that people can be persuaded if anybody's seen the movie series the godfather they understand that there are offers that a country cannot refuse even without sanctions but now there is in fact a sanction let me just quickly jump to that and then i'll pause so that i can breathe and you can talk in december of 2019 the congress of the united states with no publicity at all passed a law that said the following things without mentioning jordan number one if we give you a lot of money number two if you have a treaty with us number three if you breach that treaty number four you don't get the money anymore that's what the sanction says sounds pretty good to me people come here for hr 705 um but nobody gave it any publicity until on the last day of april just a couple of months ago a group of lawmakers from the us congress as it happens all of the members of the gop in fact all of the good things that have happened uh on a political level all seem to come from members of the gop and i speak as somebody who isn't an american and doesn't vote and doesn't actually have views about american politics wrote to the ambassador of jordan to the washington and said we've got some questions we hope that all of this can be resolved very peacefully we great admirers of king abdullah ii we all want peace blah blah blah blah blah but we'd like this woman extradited and ever since that letter was sent there's been a state of anxiety in jordan the very few people who are not as i do reading the tridentian media every day will have no sense of which is that this is a big issue that after years of fremant and arnold roth and our friends making big statements and speeches impassioned saying how appalling that a woman who murdered children and blah blah blah and she's free and blah blah blah when we started talking about money it's extraordinary how the whole environment changed so we expect that something is going to break we hope that it'll break our way without being sure of it one of the things that we've just done in the last week and i'm very happy about this and i want to mention it now is we've felt really abandoned we felt the word i often use is that we're the lepers in the discussion people don't talk to us or listen to us or give us the opportunity to speak that that's been the case until pretty recently and it's almost as if we've done something wrong why this is requires a lot of analysis but there's something hypnotic about the king of jordan who has gotten enormous support and lots of it from jewish leaders in the united states would be that as it may 18 of the most important national level jewish organizations including the most important of them conference of presidents of major jewish american organizations and apec signed on to a declaration that we ask them to consider and it says that we're with you and we want to see jordan pressured and it's there's no doubt that what's needed is for justice to prevail so we're now in a battle for justice wow this is really really huge uh a couple of comments um is this 1995 is the year that israel signs a peace treaty with jordan it was this part was this a separate treaty that the jordanians signed with the united states or is it part of kind of a triple thing or israel has nothing to do with this particular legal aspect that you have now brought up i i can't address the word nothing to do i don't know but okay the proximate cause for this treaty was something very specific something very jordanian the attempt to bring down the world trade center in 1993. one of the key operators there i i don't know if he was quite senior as though that description just another one of the jackasses who drove a truck filled with explosives into the car park and i i was in the building that morning as fake in new york uh they did a lot of damage and there were people who died that day and this fellow fled went back to jordan and the united states got it into its head that they wanted to bring this fellow to justice in the united states which makes a lot of sense not only because the offence took place there but because no one really trusts the jordanians i think to uh bring their own citizens to account in criminal court and then exact the right kind of sentence unfortunately we've seen too much of what happens but in any event the americans prevailed on king hussein a treaty was duly signed all of the requirements i i emphasize that all of the requirements were complied with and that still didn't stop uh 22 years later the highest court in jordan presumably populated by some of the most important and independent judges which is kind of a joke if you know what really goes on in to say well actually the the parliament should have ratified this treaty and they never did so nothing you can do she can't be extradited this is just one nonsense on top of another now does this have anything to do with the taylor force act that also uh involved of course an american who was killed in israel and whose parents or are incredible people and really have worked hard maybe you can explain that also from a legal point of view what that is well from let me start by saying no it's not really part of the same process but a lot of what happened in order to make the table force act become law uh is relevant to us and we're kind of following in the footsteps the essence of it is to say these people can't be taught how to live their lives in a normal way and be decent neighbors so what we've got to do is find ways to smack them to remind them that what they're doing is disgusting and and and we don't have any time for it so in the case of the taylor force act if you people over there meaning the palestinian arabs insist on taking almost all of the money that that the misguided uh sovereign level funders of your economy keep shoveling into your treasury and spending it on the encouragement of fresh acts of terrorism well we've tried to stop you and you're not open to being stopped so what we're going to do is dollar for dollar we're more or less a dollar we're going to take away from you money that you would otherwise get so that you're penalized for the money that you're spending on your terrorism incitement and encouragement industry or as it's often called pay to slow pay to slay right so we're actually trying to do something similar the sanction that has already been legislated it's got much less publicity than the taylor force act but i can tell you that it's just as potent he's in place and i can tell you that it's got the full attention of the jordanians i don't know the way it's going to be played out by the u.s administration right now we're talking about president trump and and secretary of state pompeo they could have acted they haven't acted we hope they will act secretary of state pompeo has in this sanction the veto power of saying well that may be what the law says but that's not what i say he hasn't said that and he doesn't say that but in any event the mechanism is there so yes it resembles the taylor force act in that sense but um what we're told here is that unlike with the palestinians and the taylor force act where they just grumble and continue to get funded by the europeans the jordanians are saying is not on your life now that's come from the foreign minister who is hailed as a champion of peace his name is ayman safadi the foreign minister of jordan he's the one who got up in front of the jordanian audience just a couple of months ago and said not on your life they can threaten us but we have our pride and this woman he doesn't he didn't say what i'm going to say he didn't say and she's a national hero because that's absolutely the truth she is and therefore they can't bludgeon us into giving him so we'll see i'm not sure that everyone knows that uh the tamimi name is to terrorism what hershey's is to chocolate okay this is not uh yes i made that up for whatever that means um this is not a one-off person uh the family village nebisala with which i'm quite familiar it's across from the v8suf where i have where i often go where i have good friends who live uh not in the ramallah district as you said in the chamron is a pit i mean if it takes a village to raise a child that village raises terrorists and i'm in a position which i believe many people are maybe even you yourselves even having been through what you have been through which is desperately wanting to believe that most people are good that most arabs be they muslims or christians are good people and there's just a few bad apples there who ate in a bet and lawed terrorism who make national heroes out of people who murder other people that the death cult uh is is the big deal and that in order to clear your name i mean you mentioned something that i think is extremely significant for anybody who understands the honor shame society in which israel is embedded here in the middle east which is that if you have had a child out of wedlock which would is it just a terrible thing the only way to clear your name or one of the ways to clear your name of course is to kill jews or kill christians or somehow you know that that erases it um it is a sick mindset i'll say that flat out um not just as a jew but as a someone who considers herself a semi moral human being but that's what we're up against here and um i would still hope that the majority of our p the people in the middle east are good people but it doesn't matter and that's what i am going to try and explain to the audience it's not a democracy in the sense of if 51 of the people living in the middle east are good people it's a good region and everything is fine even if 99 percent are good people but the people who run the show the people who run the media the people who run the military the people who run the courts are not good people and if the society is a fierce society meaning that anybody who feels differently cannot say what they they're not free to say what they want to say then we have countries even countries that with which we have signed peace treaties like jordan and like egypt for example where there is definitely not a relationship that anybody would call friendly in any sense there's an absence of war and that's good that is most definitely good but the idea of a peace treaty that we understand in the west is far far far from being what's on the table and so it is in this whole murky kind of sewage pond that you find yourself now and also the difficulty and i'm sure that not a few people that are listening to this show are squirming in their chairs because of what i'm saying because it's this i we don't want to think this way we don't want to think this way it cannot be but it is and for somebody like this who is so proud of the fact of that she was behind the sabaro's uh terror act and in addition to malki who was killed the shiva's verder family two parents and three of their children were murdered and the lives of the other children have been have never been the same as you can imagine um their baby i found out later in her coffin the only thing that's in her coffin is actually her pacifier with a piece of her lip on it because that is all that was found and in judaism there is a very very strong idea that the body has to be buried in its entirety as much as possible uh to the fact that we had people climbing into trees at some point during the years where so many things were blowing up and people were blowing all over the place to find any bit of body part to be able to bring it to some kind of closure and holy burial that's all they found of the baby that somebody who could who was even a part of something like this could be in any way seen as a national hero is such a blot on jordan that uh but i don't expect that we're going to find too many jordanians who are able to stan even if they want to who are able to stand up and say this doesn't represent what i feel this doesn't represent what i want and until that day when the good people can stand up and say something we are going to have to act in effect that there are that that's all not a good society and i think and deal with it accordingly because we don't know where we can trust somebody and it's such a different mindset that we're used to in the west and i imagine that most of the people listening to this podcast live in the west somewhere in the west and we really people it took me a long time to understand the mentality of what we're dealing with here i hate it i disagree with it with every fiber of my being but we have to recognize that this is what it is and act accordingly with no mercy when it comes to justice if it's ever going to change there has to be a punishment for this kind of behavior and if it's monetary then let it be monetary and i agree with you it's horrific that it has to be monetary it should be coming from someone's sense of just this is so wrong not because i'm not going to give you money unless you extradite her which is the basic thing but that's the way it is so that's the way it is maybe you know as parents sometimes we have to punish our children from knowing right from wrong until they realize what's right from wrong by saying fine you're not watching tv tonight whatever it is something that'll speak to them maybe this is how it has to start if that's the tool that the united states and that the west has is not allowing the funding to go until justice is done then so be it um but where do you feel the chances are here of this actually happening that even if the united states let's say pompeo comes out and says that's it we want her what what do you think the jordanians are going to do they're going to take her to the airport and put her on a plane yeah that's what they're supposed to do and the only question that they are supposed to ask is which flight but uh i'm not naive and and more than that i also read some of the most uh influential journalists around including i won't mention his name in this conversation a fellow i've subscribed to for years he's the head of one of the major jewish syndication services very smart guy writes magnificently who wrote an article just a few weeks ago saying the title of it is why there's no justice for marky roth didn't speak with me has never spoken with me made a whole series of statements which many people will agree with saying yes he says yes yes it's pathetic that the roths have to run around begging for people to help them get justice but everybody knows why there's no real prospect of justice being done here and it's because of the real politic and everyone in jordan uh israel and the united states who's grown up understands that and that's the way it is um i reject that approach um really from wall to wall it's it's it's uh it's highly moral and it also is an echo of things that i'm hearing in other places for example and i just want to focus on two issues here that come directly out of what you were saying and they aren't points that i wanted to make until you made your point speed which i think are absolutely spot on and wonderfully articulate asante is a name that people in the human rights business know pretty well he was sent on a wall-to-wall coast to coast national tour of the united states by amnesty international just a few years ago it was a fiasco it didn't start out being a fiasco and had a host of well-known uh co-sponsors but it turned into a fiasco because of inevitable things he conducted himself very badly with little children elementary school children in ithaca new york and one thing led to another and he's no longer allowed back in the united states but this doesn't absolve amnesty amnesty no of course they know they know a great deal they have a huge staff that uh is up to his eyeballs in encouragement of terrorism he's the father of ahead of the little little uh who will never reach maturity because in the in the in the media she's always being presented as a 12 year old but she's she's 19 now um he's not only her father but he's also the uncle by reason of being the mother's brother of the husband of the atlanta me and he's the cousin of aflam taming as well you mentioned uh nabi salaf they're all cousins everybody marries within the clan so they're tamimi before the wedding and they're too many after the wedding in their tummy to the ends of days because they really define themselves not as palestinians and not even as arabs but like most arabs they define themselves as members of the clan by the tribe by the tribe and uh in the case of the tamims i had one little anecdote which i i think says a great deal over the years i have tracked the wikipedia arabic pages describing nabi salah and the tamimi clan and it's gone through a sanitization process they've cleaned up almost all the stuff that i published but i've snapshotted it and anybody goes to my blog can read it they adore dead people they adore dead jews because that's the that's the fate of jews and they adore dead to mimi's because that's a sign of heroism and glory and all the dead tamimi's are up there with their 72 virgins and endless proximity to to their god but in a larger sense this is also what jordan is doing jordan is a kingdom it's not telling a big secret if i say that for years the man who owns jordan the chief executive of jordan the king comes to new york at the time of the start of the united nations general assembly and has a gathering with a large number of people from a certain religion and it's not christianity and it's not islam and in those breakfasts he is praised to the skies the meetings are always off the record absolutely confidential and are always reported in detail by the jordanian media which says the king told and the king said and the king's wisdom and year after year the members of the religion that i'm not going to mention here turn up to the breakfast and turn up to the other events where they pay allegiance to the king the great peacemaker the great moderate our great hope for peace in the middle east jordan has a higher degree of anti-semitism down to the roots of its society than all but one society in the middle east and that's the palestinian arabs this is extraordinary because they are really a part in essence they're indispensable in several the king the hashemite family of jordan is a family that we would have normally called saudis because that's where they come from but that gets us into a different discussion my point is the way in which people transfer onto the personality of king abdullah their wishes for the way the middle east ought to work and it helps that he has a faintly british accent and has been taught pretty good manners he conducts himself well and people who i've spoken to who have spent time with him say he's charming can think of some other pretty hideous personalities about whom you can say pretty much the same thing and unlike those other personalities this one harbors the murder of my child and does so at the risk to his own society of losing its foreign aid and being cast off now i don't think they're going to lose their foreign be cast off and i think at the end there will be hard words that somebody in the united states administration is going to find the courage uh and the uh the articulateness the eloquence to express i can't say who it's going to be like because i don't know and i can't say when it's going to happen but i believe it's going to happen in other words i don't agree with the jewish journalist who says you need to know why there is no justice for malki roth it just it upsets me so much even to talk about that i can't say that i'm 100 confident any of these things are happening but i can say one thing with 100 confidence and that is that fred and i aren't giving up and as lonely as this process has been as humiliating as it has been to be the unwanted guest at the wedding to be the leper who walks in the room and watches everybody shrink away from us i'm speaking metaphorically we don't walk into rooms and we don't have leprosy we're not giving up we're not giving up we have a lot of supporters and friends and not only that but we have justice on our side and i as i've i've tried to say in a number of meetings with top jewish leaders including one just a couple of days ago and i'll just stop for a moment and explain what i mean by that i feel the need to say as you know the high ground in this conversation is all on my side now i don't mind being accommodating and understanding and tolerant of the acrobatics that you and your colleagues need to do but we both know that what's being done to justice in this affair is a disgrace so and i'm not going to give away any more details than i've already given away when i say that i had lunch with a prominent figure in the jewish world three days ago here in jerusalem and it was a prominent figure of an organization that signed on to the list of 18 organizations that we publicized last week who have said we're with the rocks we want to see justice done and my question to him at the end of a very pleasant seriously pleasant conversation was so what can your organization now do for us here are the issues that are happening for us in washington and he said i'll have to get back to you he got back to me yesterday and he said none nothing zero zip wow and that's um that leaves me in a position where i'm counting my blessings thankfully we have those signatures and we have i think genuine support from certain people and then there's a whole wasteland of jewish leadership who not only didn't join or didn't uh didn't uh succumb to the blandishments of my letter saying join us be on the side of justice letters i sent out dozens of letters during the month of june but they also some of them said no others just didn't say anything simply not responding and and and let me finish that rant with one rather painful observation that every one of the organizations as far as i can recall that has either said no or didn't answer has gone on the record as expressing understanding support and undying loyalty to black lives matter this has been a busy summer for those organizations but standing up for justice for a jewish american girl and another jewish american woman who i'm not going to mention as i just said and a third jewish american woman who's been unconscious from the 9th of august 2001 until today and who never gets mentioned because she's technically not dead right those are not causes that we the jewish establishment feel that we need to interrupt that day to stand with what about christian organizations you know so much of the tanakh the bible which is a book that is not just holy to the jews but of course is holy to um to our christian friends is against real politic right the idea that well you kind of have to play kate jordan because look at their position on the map and if we don't have king abdullah as miserable a human being as he is we could end up with someone even worse look what else has happened around the middle east the shah was no uh you know mother teresa but look who we got instead et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera all right so that's real politic that we're just going to have to eat this one because king king king abdullah has to stay where he is and we can't play around with the jordan the bible the tanakh the book by which so many of you and i and many i would imagine of my listeners as well would like to feel that has given us the um the road map for our personal lives was never about real politic it was about what is right and what is wrong and in the time of the prophets which is long long ago we had someone yelling at us when we were wrong it's been a little more difficult in the last 2 700 years to figure it out and we didn't have someone telling us and this is what hashem says to figure it out but it seems pretty clear that in this case so where have you even attempted to be in touch with christians because i think that a lot of people also realize and i know this sounds trite but it's one of the sayings that's out there you know first the saturday people and then the sunday people that this isn't this isn't just about erasing israel as a jewish state and anti-semitism and getting rid of the jews but it's you know in when it comes to global jihad of which kamimi is is a massive part um our christian friends are are not far behind on the uh on the firing line um has there been any kind of reaction or any kind of help or even words of encouragement from christian organizations and not even necessarily pro-israel christian organizations because this shouldn't be a political issue this isn't a political issue exactly so three um bullet point answers the first is that three of the most important allies we have are the three fathers of three u.s green berets who were murdered in cold blood on a jordanian air force base in 2016. i could expand on that but they've been wonderful and we're trying to be as supportive as we can with them and yes we we have so much in common and we are looking for ways to do things because we both want the same thing second the the pro-israel christian ranks um respond to pro-israel jewish ranks that are organized i am the prime minister and foreign minister and defense minister and the man who makes the coffee mushrooms the dishes and my wife is everything else we're not an organization at all and we've kind of done it deliberately this is a passionate pursuit of justice for the murder that turned our lives absolutely upside down so i'm i would love to be in contact and i would love to get the support of good christian people who understand the bible and understand what justice means and understand what evil is because there's lots of people evil in the world but i don't know how to reach them and if you can help me that's that would be wonderful the third thing i want to mention which is related to the two above is we have a petition a petition is one of those things that anybody can sign on to and you don't need to pledge allegiance you don't need to pay money you just need to stand up and our petition is a stand-up opportunity it's a petition calling on secretary pompeo to put the necessary pressure on the jordanians and if i can just blurt out the address of the petition it's online yes and it's a change.org slash extradite tamimi change.org slash extradite tamimi and we would be delighted and proud if people would come and put their names on that petition we needed to be big numbers we have about four and a half thousand people right now that's nowhere near that we need much more that's what i'm trying to say so yes we're right on the same wavelength we're not as organized as as uh perhaps people think we are and certainly as we should be but that's what it's like when you're running a family and we have a very disabled child and both fruit and i have very active in helping nurture the malki foundation which does wonderful wonderful work in on behalf in the name of our murdered daughter if we were doing this as a if we were running for congress if we were looking for a tax break if we were trying to be appointed as an ambassador we'd do this an entirely different way but that's not what any of this is about it's really all about something so elemental that moves me to tears when i even talk to people because at the end what i've got is my daughter's face in my mind and the sense of loss that's not a powerful message to convey to other people because no one understands it but that's what's driving me and that's why i always end up after conversations like this with a migraine headache oh i'm sorry i invited you know that i invited well i hope that some of the people listening or all the people listening will sign the petition and i also do want to say a word about karen mulkey which is the foundation that you established in um a way to make the world a better place you know when the darkness comes so you can make the light shine brighter and what you did even though monkey's not physically here anymore is take the goodness and the light that she had in her life and you mentioned you have another disabled child that my understanding is that malkie helped her sister all the time and was huge hugely a part of that so you established a foundation to help other families with disabled children and i just have to say on a personal note that when something good happens in my family i go into the computer and i give a donation to karen mulkey because none of us should be taking for granted the good things that happen to us any one of us can lose someone to terror to illness or to anything at any second in any moment of time every really every minute that we have of life and of health and of the people that we love around us is a gift and uh we cannot take it for granted and so the way that i try and express my appreciation when something good happens to my family is to move it on to help other families through the foundation that you have established in malki's memory and this way a multi will never really die because what in her name you have helped so many other people and affected so many people in a positive way and um and i think that that is a choice that you and friend made that you didn't necessarily have to make um and then i know you put a tremendous amount of work into it and get nothing from it other than the understanding nothing nothing more return on investment is huge yes but not the kind of you know most people think again we're talking about punishment for in monetary terms but there are things way way way beyond money that are the ones that give us the most lasting satisfaction and understanding um of the really the horrible tragedy that befell your family and and what you're doing and i think it's important to remember that this isn't you're not just looking for justice for monkey but for every person that was murdered if if someone is allowed to get away with this it just gives uh um you know like a more power to other people who are thinking about doing this and that puts every single one of us in more danger this isn't just about the roth family and about sabaros and about what happened with malki and about i don't even want to mention her name sitting in jordan this is really about all of us and the fight for good and for evil in the world that we have today and we may think as individuals what can i really do i mean i'm sitting here and thinking i'm so small i mean what i'm doing today i'm giving you a platform arnold to be able to tell people what's happening it's such a drop in the bucket but at least it's something i can do and any one of you who's listening out there what can you do if it's sign a petition if it's to get a hold of your minister or someone in an organization that you belong with and say we have to try we may be tilting at windmills and realpolitik may be way bigger than we can do but we have to know at the end of the day that we did what we could and we never know we just never know how much all of that together will count and uh and to never give up 19 years on and um and this is you know this is what you're doing and and i just i hope that you finally succeed because your success is the success of all of us it's not it's your personal family's pain but it's much bigger than that so uh with that anything else that you'd like to to add um you know it occurs to i got married two weeks before princess diana and it occurred and i also stayed up in the middle of the night to watch her wedding it occurred to me that the world the western world is so enthralled with monarchy you know so you put king in front of abdullah and suddenly he's this oh my goodness i have to go have breakfast with him and he's just the most incredible person maybe we should have been a monarchy here in israel and maybe we would have had more sympathy there's something very strange about that about that need to kowtow to anybody who's a king or a princess and be on people magazine but we have to move away from that and understand that it's just a title and it it doesn't absolve him as a matter of fact maybe it makes it more serious that he should take responsibility and and show the right way for his people and not hide behind whatever it is he's hiding behind and so i certainly hope that all your efforts will come to some kind of positive fruition and despite the migraine headache i really thank you for joining me here today i know this is never easy for you it's a gift eve and listening to you speak is uh one of the most uplifting experiences you know that ever happens and i'm so pleased that you keep doing this and more power to you it's obviously what hashem needs me to do and so i'll keep doing that and uh hoping to be able to share with my listeners or they'll see it for themselves in the newspaper uh some good news or at least some some justice finally being done um to end not to end but to at least put some kind of closure to some degree on the nightmare that you've been living with for so long so arnold roth thank you so much for joining me today where can people be in touch with you website uh how karen the easiest is let me give the email address it's this ongoing war at gmail.com one word this ongoing war gmail.com that's the blog that you've been writing no that's that's my email address anybody who writes to that i promise will get a response and all the information i could possibly want and more okay all right everybody you heard that okay eve harrow rejuvenation on the land of visual network i want to thank ben and tabitha and everyone at the network for giving me this platform and hope that wherever you are in the world you are well you're coping with the craziness that we're all living in and that this next week will be a better week for all of us so take care everybody thanks for listening goodbye for now enhance your faith deepen your understanding align your destiny with the land of israel subscribe to the land of israel fellowship an exclusive virtual seminar led by jeremy gimpel and ari abramolets with live weekly interactive sessions and ongoing personal mentorship subscribe and join this 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