How do Jordanians view the efforts to bring the Sbarro bomber to justice? - by Arnold Roth

Our comment: From the outset let it be clear. While the focus here is a woman who confesses publicly and repeatedly to bombing a restaurant filled with children, and who faces the likelihood of a lifetime sentence if she is ever put on trial in Washington DC, the author of this op ed is concerned with what this says about the view the United States has of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The fugitive killer and what she did raises not a single word of criticism in what follows. There is a victim in this narrative according to the pundit who write this. That victim is Jordan. 

Arnold/Frimet Roth.. 

This Ongoing War.. 

28 July '20.. 

It doesn't matter which Arab publication carried the article below. Or the identity or credentials of the person who wrote it. Or that person's religious, ideological or political alignment. 

Those are among the lesser aspects that ought to be on people's minds as they consider its contents. 

We have read tens of such articles emanating mostly from Jordan but also from other parts of the Arab world since May 2020. (Some of them are here: "14-May-20: In Jordan, they stand with confessed bomber Tamimi. And they're worried...") 

That's when the Arab world awoke to the reality that the US government has Jordan-centric sanctions on its mind and is serious about them. (See "05-May-20: From Congress, concern about how Jordanians deal with the fugitive terrorist in their midst") 

Some years ago, we started scanning online Arabic-language news media daily with the help of online translation tools like Bing and Google Translate. In all that time, we have not uncovered even a single published article dealing with the cold-blooded 2001 bombing of a Jerusalem pizzeria because of the children inside that criticizes the bomber. And if we're wrong and such articles exist, please send us a link or a copy. Trust us, we will be glad to give it all the prominence it deserves. 

Ahlam Tamimi is the central figure in the pizzeria bombing horror. A Jordanian student who was 21 when she selected the crowded fast food shop as her target for her Hamas superiors, she personally planted the bomb - a human being with an explosives-laden guitar case on his back that included a large quantity of nails for their flesh-ripping feature - at the central Jerusalem site, a pizzeria of the US-based Sbarro chain. 

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