Malki’s parents feel alone 25 years after Sbarro

After a quarter century of seeking justice for their daughter Malka Chana “Malki” Roth, who was 15 when she was murdered in a suicide bombing at Sbarro in Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001, Arnold and Frimet Roth feel abandoned — by their American government and by many whom they expected to keep fighting with them.

“We’re alone in every meaningful sense, fighting powerful people who never, ever, at any stage, say what they actually mean or what they intend to do,” Arnold Roth told JNS. “Quite the opposite. They say things that are superficial and that are calculated to keep us in the dark and never lead to where we want to go.”

Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who lives freely in Jordan, brags openly on television about helping plan the pizzeria bombing, in which Judith Shoshana Greenbaum and Chana Nachenberg, both American citizens like Roth, and 13 other civilians were killed. Some 130 were injured in the attack.

Tamimi was released by Israel along with 1,027 other prisoners in a 2011 swap for one kidnapped Israeli — soldier Gilad Shalit

In 2013, the United States charged Tamimi with participating in the Sbarro attack. She is listed on the Most Wanted FBI terrorist list, and the State Department’s Rewards for Justice program has offered up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest.

Jordan, which has an extradition agreement with the United States dating back to 1995, has refused to comply in Tamimi’s case, and successive US administrations seem to have been unable to enforce the treaty.

Jordan has said that handing Tamimi over would lead to riots in the streets, but those involved with the case have told JNS repeatedly that Jordan’s claim is a convenient excuse for Washington, which is loath to rock the US-Jordan relationship.

Roth has visited Jordan several times and had business relations there before his daughter was murdered.

Stuck in a perpetual state of mourning for his daughter, Arnold Roth’s pain and quiet anger are palpable in his voice.

“No one ever, in my experience, who is seriously in a position to do something about it, calls out the regime that runs Jordan, which is essentially a family business,” he said. “Nobody’s calling on the parties that own that family business to do something.”

“The notion, the very idea, that the woman who murdered Jewish children should be the reason why we leave the king alone, why we don’t push Jordan, makes me sick,” he said. “It’s absurd.”

The lack of a resolution after 25 years “leaves us with no choice but to recognize that only we care about this murder and this loss, and only we — and this is the hard part — care about what it says about American justice,” Roth said.

He said that the lack of attention from elected US officials is “a failure of American values and a failure of the professed commitment to justice.”

The families of the other two American victims “give us their quiet support but prefer not to take a public position,” Roth said.

Several American Jewish leaders have told JNS that they broached the subject with Abdullah when he held court on frequent visits to the United States. But they wouldn’t characterize the Jordanian king’s responses in the off-the-record meetings.

Roth thinks that much of it is lip service.

“There are prominent Jewish organizations, who’ve taken large amounts of money over the years from people of good nature and of philanthropic bent in the name of defending and protecting America’s Jewish interests, who have done either absolutely nothing or have pretended to do something,” he said.

Those groups have “then said, ‘Don’t ask me any questions. This is the way we operate’,” he said. “Those people enrage me.”

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which represents more than 50 Jewish groups across the political spectrum, is an exception, according to Roth, and “has consistently been doing things that we’ve appreciated.”

The Conference of Presidents shared a letter, which it was planing to deliver to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, exclusively with JNS.

“This case directly concerns the murder of American citizens abroad, the enforcement of a binding extradition treaty and the principle that those responsible for terrorist attacks against Americans cannot evade accountability,” William Daroff and Betsy Berns Korn, CEO and chair, respectively, of the Conference of Presidents, state in the letter.

“Accordingly, we respectfully urge the State Department to make Tamimi’s extradition a priority in the US-Jordan relationship, raise the matter directly with King Abdullah II and demand her immediate extradition in compliance with the treaty,” the two leaders write.

A State Department spokesman told JNS that Washington “continues to impress upon the government of Jordan that Tamimi” is a “brutal murderer who should be brought to justice,” the Foggy Bottom spokesman said.

Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, stated last week that Malki Roth’s “picture sits on a shelf in my office as reminder.” He added that “after 25 years, the Sbarro bombing and its aftermath still matter.”

Roth said that there discussions with US officials haven’t yielded “any real momentum towards a resolution, [that] it really just amounts to ‘We’re on this’.”