Friends,

There are currently about 10,000 of you who have signed our petition. Thank you for your support. I hope we will shortly close the petition, deliver its message to those who need to receive it, and go public with what you and we are asking.

I started my day this morning (Thursday) in the center of town: Jerusalem, where I live and work. I got a call last night inviting me to meet a television news crew there outside what used to be Sbarro and do an interview. They work for a station whose programs go into one of the world’s most important Middle East countries –one that’s not friendly with Israel. Why today? The so-called Second Intifada erupted on Rosh Hashana exactly twenty years ago. So they’re interested to get some Israeli insight into how the families of victims have coped with the terrorism that overturned their lives.

Before they started filming, I explained that I won’t give a hand to terror pornography. That’s my name for the journalistic practice of peering into the lives of victims without any meaningful context. Too often, anniversaries of terrorist outrages are marked by reciting the facts pretty much as they were known on the day of the attack: how many killed, how many injured; who took credit; some near-miss anecdotes; and how life more or less goes on after the broken glass has been swept away.

It’s a dishonest and unhelpful way of looking at terror and it happens all the time. So to each of the interviewer’s questions today, I mentioned the way the spearhead of the Sbarro massacre is alive, well, famous and thriving in Jordan all these years later, and that Jordan refuses to hand her over to face American justice.  I said we’re deluding ourselves if we think we can defeat the terrorists while our strategic allies turn them into icons and celebrate their achievements. I hope it comes out that way after the editing is done.

As long as my wife Frimet and I have been working to get the Tamimi extradition process moving, there’s been a great deal of frustration for us on several counts. One of the most difficult is seeing one part of the US government try to get Ahlam Tamimi handed over to US justice by Jordan while other parts of it seem to not even be aware of the issue.

The latest round of that came this week when we noticed a publication of the US military proudly reporting on its co-operation with Jordan’s military. Please keep an eye on our blog This Ongoing War [http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/ in the next few days as we write about the problem and how we are addressing it.

Since Rosh Hashana is starting tomorrow, I will take the opportunity to wish all of us a good and happy new year full of blessings and relief from the challenges of the pandemic.

And this heartfelt request: please encourage friends to sign our petition: www.change.org/ExtraditeTamimi We feel there’s far more support than the number of signatures today reflects. With your help we can grow the number significantly.

Finally, our friend Ralph has his own petition which we said we would mention here in the hope that those identifying with its message of peace ("SAVE THE CHILDREN! SAVE THE WORLD!") would want to get behind: go to http://chng.it/gqXQ2QCR

Good wishes
Arnold Roth