By: Arnold Roth, Jerusalem Israel

During the first week of August, the Jewish world paused to remember one of the deadliest attacks of the Second Intifada. Twenty-five years have passed since the Hamas-directed massacre at Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria.

For my family and our circle of friends, the dates carry deep resonance. We lost the luminous life of our 15-year-old daughter Malka Chana. She and our next-door neighbour’s daughter Michal Raziel rest in adjoining graves. The azkara on the yahrzeit has been held together by the two families every year.

Life changed in profound ways for us and the families of the fourteen other victims. Additional challenges none of us foresaw arrived later.

Starting in 2012, weeks after the Jordanian mastermind of the atrocity walked out of her Israeli prison cell and was whisked to a hero’s welcome in Jordan, my wife Frimet and I began a campaign to have her tried as a terrorist under U.S. law.

Twenty-five years after Ahlam Tamimi executed the plan that brought years of misery to our family, she continues to live free in Jordan—free, famous, and phenomenally influential because the Hashemite Kingdom wants it that way and is allowed to get away with it.

Jordan appears to have wrestled its main benefactor and ally to a stalemate. It violates its 1995 extradition treaty with the United States, and until now no one in Washington has held it to account. Annual U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to Jordan has risen steadily; the kingdom remains near the top of the recipients list.

For Jordanians, the Tamimi saga ended when she arrived back in triumph after Israel released her in the 2011 Shalit deal. She went straight from prisoner to certified national asset. There was no intermediate stage in which proud Jordanians might have paused to wonder how one of their most prominent national symbols is famous because of the Jewish children she targeted and succeeded in slaughtering. If any Jordanian citizens are nauseated by this, I have seen no sign of them. Tamimi’s every media appearance has been as an icon.

Nothing about this outcome makes sense. Jordan egregiously violates its treaty with the United States, which is why Malki’s FBI Most Wanted killer stays free. The ruler of Jordan continues to address the U.S. Congress and is received with pomp in the Oval Office. He is routinely described in mainstream American media as moderate and peace-minded. A recent biography is titled The Most American King: Abdullah of Jordan.

Yet that admiration is incomplete. While we marked 25 years since Malki and Michal were taken from us, a senior Jordanian official—the deputy speaker of the House of Representatives—publicly insulted Israel in crude terms, declaring that neither King Abdullah nor other Jordanians trust Benjamin Netanyahu, that “Zionists and the Jews” deceived the prophets, and that the “Zionist entity” is a cancer in the region. No dressing-down followed. Rallies of wild support for Tamimi, however, do.

No part of the Jordanian media has ever told Jordanians a single respectful thing about the human beings, the Jewish children, blown apart by Tamimi’s bomb. Tamimi herself regales audiences with the story of hunting around Jerusalem for a child-rich target. The only label she has ever given those she murdered is “Zionists.”

Here is what neither Tamimi nor any consumer of made-in-Jordan news will ever know: Malki was a baalat hesed, a deeply devoted daughter and sister who spent much of her time helping her severely disabled youngest sister. Thirty days after the atrocity we established the Malki Foundation (kerenmalki.org). In 25 years it has helped about three thousand families across Israel’s socio-economic spectrum—almost a third of them Muslim, Christian, Druze, or unaffiliated—without discrimination. I do not know what Malki’s murderer would say if she knew. It does not matter to me.

Article XI of the 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty requires the Jordanians to “abstain from hostile or discriminatory propaganda.” Authorizing a television program that glamorizes the mass murder of Israelis—the show Tamimi herself hosted for five years—clearly violates that obligation.

Is there still hope that she will be brought to justice? Malki and two of the other Sbarro victims held American citizenship. Under U.S. law, Washington not only allows but requires the prosecution of terrorists who kill Americans overseas.

We have met with many U.S. officials over the years. Not one has said no. Yet Tamimi lives free, unrepentant, and toxic just a few kilometers from where I write.

In July 2013 the Obama administration charged her under US federal law but kept this secret. In March 2017 the Trump administration made the charges public and formally requested extradition.

Jordan refused and keeps refusing. A $5 million State Department reward sits unused. Tamimi has never been in hiding for a single day.

It is maddening that the United States—at least publicly—takes Jordan’s “no” for an answer. Sanctions exist that both help and oblige Washington to press compliance. Meanwhile Jordan makes a mockery of treaties and justice, and Jordanian officials launch outrageous anti-Israel tirades, while our appeals fail to move decision-makers.

We continue to be driven by hope, conviction, and love. And we look forward to the day when justice is done.