THT Arnold Roth — corrected transcript English (US) 00:00:00.000 — 00:00:22.680 · Arnold Roth So he walked in. He was standing next to the two girls, my daughter and her best friend, peering up at the the the menu options for a couple of minutes to fulfill the instruction that the woman outside had given him and then pressed the button. None of this is suicide, and I reject every use of the expression suicide bomb or suicide bomber. He didn't have suicide on his mind. He had murder on his mind. 00:00:26.280 — 00:00:53.120 · Ben Chertoff Welcome to The Honest Take, the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff, and my guest today is Arnold Roth, whose 15 year old daughter was murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria bombing 25 years ago this week. And who has spent the last 25 years trying to bring the woman who planned it to justice. This is not an easy conversation. 00:00:58.240 — 00:03:11.140 · Ben Chertoff On the 9th of August 2001, a young man walked into a pizzeria in the center of Jerusalem carrying a guitar case. It was a school holiday, and the restaurant was full because it was lunchtime and because it was the corner kids liked. A few minutes before 2:00, he pressed a button on his chest. 16 people were murdered. Around 130 were wounded. One woman there that day with her toddler was left unconscious and stayed unconscious for 22 years until she died in 2023. Arnold Roth spent the next 12 hours not knowing where his daughter was, and after he found out at two in the morning that she'd been murdered, he spent the next 25 years trying to bring the woman who masterminded the attack to justice, and he's still trying. I asked him to do something on this episode that I don't think he gets asked to do very often not to make the legal case. He's made that a thousand times, and he makes it here, too. I asked him to describe what the second Intifada actually was for the people who yell it on the street, people who I don't believe could tell you a single thing that happened during it. More than a thousand Israelis were killed between 2000 and 2005, adjusted for population. That's the equivalent of more than 800 Americans killed by terrorists every month for five years. We also get into the woman who planned it. She was 21, Jordanian from a comfortable family, and she has never once expressed regret. In fact, she said publicly that her only disappointment is that she didn't kill more. She was released from Israeli prison in 2011, in the deal for Gilad Shalit, alongside 1,026 others, one of whom was Yahya Sinwar. I want you to hear what Arnold says when I ask him what he'd say to a student at Columbia in a keffiyeh, holding a sign that says Globalize the Intifada. Because his answer is not the one you're expecting. Arnold Roth. Welcome to The Honest Take. 00:03:11.180 — 00:03:12.340 · Arnold Roth Thanks very much, Ben. 00:03:13.260 — 00:03:33.940 · Ben Chertoff So we're taping this a couple of days in advance, but when this episode comes out, it will be likely just after August 9th or on August 9th. For those who don't know, which will likely be much of the American audience. Can you walk me through exactly what happened 25 years ago today? 00:03:34.740 — 00:04:38.920 · Arnold Roth The 9th of August was a school holiday. Frightfully hot Thursday. Uh, Malki, my 15 year old daughter was on vacation, having just come back from doing something that I'd like to talk about a little later on working with disabled children. She'd made an arrangement with the girl next door, who was really her lifelong friend. The daughter of our neighbors to go decorate. This is what girls do at 15 years old, decorate the bedroom of a friend who was coming back from a vacation in the United States. She wasn't back yet and they were going to surprise her. And when that was done, then before the afternoon activity arrived, which was go be with the other camp counselors for whom they were to Maggie and Michael, a friend in a youth group called Ezra, which is a religious Jewish youth organization here in Israel. Um, that was going to be in the early afternoon on the way. They were going to go have pizza in the center of Jerusalem. And, uh, it was no secret. They used to love going to Sbarro. 00:04:40.320 — 00:05:29.810 · Arnold Roth So they were at the counter at the Sbarro pizzeria that day, a few minutes before 2:00. Uh, and, uh, they probably didn't notice a young man walking in dressed in an unremarkable way, probably intended to look as Israeli as possible, but carrying a guitar case across his shoulder. And because Malki was a really talented musician and had played in the Jerusalem Youth Orchestra and loved music. I sort of covered myself in the thought that she may have glanced over at this guy and thought to herself, this is a good guy. Um, he's a musician, like I am. Maybe she didn't. Maybe she maybe she was alarmed, I don't know. Well, of course we have no way to know. And at almost exactly 2:00, he pressed the button on his chest and the guitar case exploded, releasing 00:05:31.210 — 00:05:31.730 · Arnold Roth him 00:05:32.770 — 00:07:03.930 · Arnold Roth several kilograms of black nails. I had several of them on my desk for years. Black nails, because they have fabulous flesh shredding capabilities. 15 people were murdered right there on the spot. Um, Malki was one of them. Uh, and it's worth mentioning right at the outset so that people have a sense of the of the humanity of what happened there. The 16th, a woman who was there with her toddler daughter was brain damaged as a result of the explosion and then lingered unconscious for the next 22 years. And I know her parents, and I know I mean, I don't know what it must have been like, but pretty much every day they were in the hospital, in the hospital, trying to do something for their daughter. So in the end, it was 16 people who were murdered. About 130 were injured. It was an enormous event. There were no security people outside pizzerias in those days. No one had seen a pigua. I want to keep saying pigua. A terrorist attack on that scale. And really, Jerusalem was never the same. The next day there were funerals all day and we didn't find our daughter or know her fate for a full 12 hours. There's a story behind that. Then we did 2:00 in the morning and we buried her the next day. 00:07:05.930 — 00:07:13.490 · Ben Chertoff I can't imagine what that would be like to experience that. Um, how did you find out? 00:07:15.330 — 00:08:50.410 · Arnold Roth I was running a drug development company here in Jerusalem. My wife called me a few minutes after two. I was not surprised to see her number on the phone, but as soon as I put it to my ear, she was screaming. She said there's been a pigua. I can't find the children. And she hung up. Um, a lot happened after that. Um, I've learned that most people really forgive me for saying it, but they're not that interested in what it was, what it was like to go through all of that. And so I pretty much skip it. But, uh, it's enough if I say that it was it was a walk through Dante's Inferno. It was something horrifying. I didn't stay in my office much longer, I thought. As I said to my wife, don't get so upset. You know how these stories go. Everything seems terrible. And then, you know. But this was not one of those stories. And what I remember very clearly was walking from my office, which was not far from where we lived at the time, to the bus to go home. I never took a car to the office and doing deals with God, offering him things so that let this have a happy ending. Because by then, by the time I left the office, I guess it would have been about an hour after the explosion. We already knew that there was a tremendous death toll. All I wanted to do was just, you know, call in whatever favors I might possibly be able to call in so that we're just not in this story. Just leave us out of this story. And by the time I got home, I. Most of our children were home. My wife was home. Home. Everybody was distraught and stayed distraught for the next 10, 11 hours. So 12 hours later, middle of the night, um, 00:08:51.970 — 00:09:28.290 · Arnold Roth our two oldest boys, one of whom had just started the army the day before. Um, they were taken by a social worker from Jerusalem to a place that's not in Jerusalem. The National Forensic Laboratory in Jaffa, in Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv, and a little bit after two in the early morning, uh, the boys phoned home, and I could tell from the sound of their voices before they even said anything, what was their head but would sound Malki? And that was the end. Of course, it was also the beginning of the next stage of our lives, which was a stage that has had an altogether different character to it. 00:09:29.410 — 00:09:39.090 · Ben Chertoff That was going to be my next question. How how do you possibly go through that and continue going on, let alone becoming such an advocate? 00:09:41.810 — 00:10:14.390 · Arnold Roth Well, the first thing to say is that you're asking yourself exactly that question almost from the very first minute. And there are lots of practical implications. What do I do with my older children? What do I do with my younger children? What do I do with my wife? What do I do with my neighbors? What do I do with my obligations at work? What do I what do I think about what happens when the journalists call? What happens when people come into their house? And what a comfort us. What happens when people come into a house and want to comfort us and say really idiotic things? 00:10:15.590 — 00:10:50.930 · Arnold Roth The questions are really endless and they didn't go away in a hurry. And even now, if I were to summarize them, I wouldn't be able to make a very coherent record of what all of that was like. It was playing by ear the worst moments of our collective lives as a family, and certainly the worst moments in my own personal life. Um, there's not much of an answer, I know, but the chaos and the uncertainty and the questioning and the doubts and and most of all, why has this happened? They they bedevil you. They don't leave you for a moment. And that went on for a very long time. 00:10:53.130 — 00:11:06.490 · Ben Chertoff You've said that you want people to know Malki because she's not a cause. That's that's your line. After 25 years of campaigning for justice for her. Um, who 00:11:07.930 — 00:11:09.290 · Ben Chertoff who was Malki? 00:11:10.530 — 00:11:23.850 · Arnold Roth 15 year old girl who was, um, sweet natured, uh, pretty talented, um, and had friends and was something of an influencer in a very modest kind of way. Um. 00:11:25.970 — 00:11:53.469 · Arnold Roth She was the middle child in her family. And I'm sorry that I'm leaving a little bit of mystery. So we just never talk about the number of children we have. It's kind of a family tradition, but that she was the middle child and everyone adored her. And she in turn adored her youngest sister, who was born beautiful, then became very damaged as a result of illness and then terrible mismanagement in hospital. And is today 00:11:54.750 — 00:12:10.550 · Arnold Roth here in this home where we live. She's 31 years old. She we've never heard her say a word, and she's brain damaged and blind and a lot of lot of really quite serious issues. Malki adored her. Malki saw something in her little sister that was really a 00:12:12.030 — 00:13:10.330 · Arnold Roth product of the love that she felt for her sister. She felt the love and therefore she felt it reflecting back. And you really need to know who the people are to really understand how quite incomprehensible this is. This is emotions and and pureness of spirit that you have to see in order to understand. So Malki was in, in no respect unusual, but in every respect was an agent for change and a bridge between different worlds. Bridge between most of the kids in her class, and the handful of kids who had special needs and were being mainstreamed in the school. She was a bridge within the family, and we miss her terribly. Not yet a special role in all the various circles in which she moved. And she was never sort of the child you would have looked at and said, oh, this is a leader. This wasn't a leader, this was a facilitator. This was a person who helped other people get along 15 years old. Um, 00:13:11.650 — 00:13:25.890 · Arnold Roth so the loss of a child like that in the family is felt from the first instant. And, you know, I can't imagine an ordinary child being murdered and families saying, oh, well, that's okay. I mean, of course that doesn't happen, ever. But this devastated us 00:13:27.090 — 00:13:27.490 · Arnold Roth again. 00:13:27.490 — 00:14:05.350 · Ben Chertoff I can't imagine how awful that must have been. I want to stop and do something very basic, because I, I really do think that a lot of Americans don't understand this. When? And this was the very beginning, or at least in the first year of the second Intifada, when when we say when you say intifada, what was that in your own experience? And I imagine, you know, again, many difficult memories and I'm sorry to have to push here, but for every college student at the encampments now yelling to globalize the intifada, what what is that for you? 00:14:06.630 — 00:14:21.630 · Arnold Roth There is a thing that legitimately can be called intifada, and it has to do with waging war via civilian forces, taking no prisoners, and being cruel and difficult. 00:14:22.870 — 00:17:01.480 · Arnold Roth Then there's the idiot's intifada, the globalize the intifada crowd who actually don't have in. I speak only from the experiences that I've had, and there have been many don't really have any idea of what they're talking about. It comes to them as a kind of I'm different from the mainstream. I really want to see the world better. I want to see. I want to see the triumph of good people over the oppressors. I want to see a bit of work and all of that sort of thing. In other words, it's all predicated on the idea that the conventional world that I've grown up in and the conventional people all around me my parents, my teachers, the people living on the street, they've screwed things up. What we need is intifada. We need things to be a lot, a lot, a lot better. These are idiots. You can want these positive things, but when you get it all mixed up by bringing in this concept of intifada, which is the kind of war that the woman who plotted the massacre at the Sbarro pizzeria talks about a great deal. When you mix that into your vision of a better world, you've created something which is devastatingly wrong. And if which happens a great deal, you turn that into a cry for action in the streets, marching towards the Parliament or the head office of the company that you now hate. Then you're calling for globalize the intifada. You ought to be arrested on any reasonable view. You are about to call for something that will result in the destruction of human lives, even if you yourself are incapable of seeing that. I'm particularly motivated, as I say these things, by a particular scene, which got a lot of attention in Australia. I'm from Australia. Malki was born in Australia. Our children all have American citizenship, but four of them were born in Australia. And not that long ago, only several months ago, there was a like an iconic scene in Sydney, which is not where we come from. We come from Melbourne, where a young woman with a lot of charisma, a lot of charisma. She was Australian of the year, was shown standing on the balcony of a major building, the Sydney Town Hall, shrieking, screaming globalize the intifada and the response from the crowd was fantastic. And a TV station there asked me because they knew my background to say something about it, and I said what I said about it, and I 00:17:02.640 — 00:18:09.420 · Arnold Roth hadn't realized until I started putting thoughts together and associating them with this charismatic young woman just how enraged it leaves me. These people have no concept of what they're doing. And one, two, three, before you know it, they've created an environment where people are going to get murdered. As it happens in Sydney, globalizing the intifada as a call ultimately was earlier than, and probably a cause of the massacre that took place on Bondi Beach. The last place on earth where you would imagine something like that to happen. So it's a very potent issue, and it's not treated as potent by the people who engage in it, nor is it treated as potent by the people who are supposed to be enforcing orderliness in our society. We can call them police. We can call them ministers of religion. We can call them parents. And it's failing the efforts to suppress the the group madness that has emerged around the notion of we need something better, the intifada, let's globalize it. The people have lost. They've lost the lost track of who they are and what the outcomes are. 00:18:11.620 — 00:18:46.840 · Ben Chertoff More than 1000 Israelis were killed in the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005, and adjusted for population. That's the equivalent of more than 800 Americans killed by terrorists every month for five years. It's incomprehensible when you see it in that scale. What what was the texture of that? Like? What did it what did it do to an ordinary week in Jerusalem? What did that feel like in 2002? What did people stop doing? What did what did you and your wife do differently? 00:18:47.320 — 00:20:32.400 · Arnold Roth Okay, let me start by saying that we were blindsided by what happened to us. There were no guards, security people on the streets or looking at checking people walking to pizzerias at that stage. And of course, from that day onwards, there were and that that mind shift that that set in once a real honest to goodness meets the definition massacre took place in a place in a location where you walk past it every day, and thousands to her things changed radically and fundamentally. I don't know that anybody took seriously what you just said. The statistics are statistics. Um, most people don't really have the ability to conceptualize what statistics look like. On the other hand, and I've seen this myself. If I'm sitting in a one on one or even speaking to a group, and I've done a lot of that over the years, can I tell them about how this impacted me? My family? My wife and I, we have kids. We have neighbors. We have normal lives. We are not. We're not monsters. We're really not monsters. We're really good people. We're surrounded by good people. And yet the people who are doing the killing, who are not good people, people like the woman who masterminded the the massacre at Sbarro, people like that are getting phenomenal support in phenomenally large parts of the world and not being treated by the intelligentsia or the people who you look to for leadership, for the monsters that they are. They need to be treated as monsters. They're going to achieve nothing good for their own side, and they're going to take a tremendous price from the rest of us. So as the years went by and the number of our neighbors. Being murdered did not go down. 00:20:33.800 — 00:20:36.880 · Arnold Roth All of us, I think, developed a certain scar tissue. 00:20:38.000 — 00:22:00.660 · Arnold Roth And it's it's we're going through it again. In in more recent days, I should tell you that, uh, um, a son in law of ours, a wonderful young man who married one of our daughters, um, was killed two months after the start of the war in Gaza. Not because he was engaged in acts of genocide. Quite the opposite. He was on the ground, uh, doing things that soldiers do on the ground when everybody knows we could just as easily have sent heavy aircraft over the same spot and just obliterated the area that he was working in, along with a lot of other people. So he's gone. He's dead. He was killed. And we've got at the time, we had an 18 month old granddaughter and her older sister, who was three, who were left without a father. That's not a statistic. It's not offered as some kind of objective measurement. It's simply an experience drawn from my life that when it happened, I didn't know what to do with myself. And that was two, nearly three years ago now. There are lots of moments like that. There's awful things going on around you where you just don't know what to do with yourself. And that goes back to what I've said to you before about the questions. Lots of questions. Try to figure out what is this going to mean for my children, for me, for the people at work, and so on. There's lots of questions. There aren't good answers. There are never good answers. So you're you're really wandering around in a haze, in a 00:22:01.820 — 00:22:26.800 · Arnold Roth wondering what attitude ought to be emblazoned on your face. There are no good answers. You've just got to figure it out as you go. You'll make lots of mistakes, and you've got to also remind yourself of what's really important. And for me, and probably most of the people I know, what's really important is keep the family safe at all costs. That's an easy rule, but that's been pretty much the story of my life since then. 00:22:28.360 — 00:22:59.920 · Ben Chertoff You mentioned the woman who perpetrated this. Who organized it? Um, we there's this preconception in the Western understanding that the only way you get to this point of is, is a point of desperation, because you've been oppressed for so long. That was not the case with Tamimi. Who who orchestrated this this slaughter. Can can you explain where she came from? 00:23:01.320 — 00:23:51.370 · Arnold Roth I'm going to bracket her with the human bomb. She wasn't the bomber. I mean, she was the bomber. I'll say that again. She was the bomber. She was not the bomb. The bomb was the fellow who walked with her. He had a guitar case filled with explosives, as mentioned earlier, and. And nasty little nails to shred the flesh. And he carried that on his shoulder that he knew that he was walking into a place. Where are you going to think that I'm going to say where he would meet his death. But I don't believe he thought about that for a second. He knew that he was walking to a place where he'd be able to kill a lot of Jews. Now, the woman, Ahlam Tamimi, 21 years old. When she did all of this, the Jordanian who was living in Jordan from the time she was born until about a year before she was tapped to carry out the massacre at Sbarro. She was 00:23:52.730 — 00:24:24.510 · Arnold Roth absolutely uninterested in giving up her life. She was in this because of pure hatred. Every speech that I've ever seen, and I've got many transcripts and also many videos given by this woman in the years since she took my daughter's life and became a celebrity in the process, reflects not a sense of, oh, we're desperate. Absolutely not. Not a sense of, how we need those territories back, or we have to move that border. What it reflects is, 00:24:25.630 — 00:27:05.589 · Arnold Roth and I'm not going to say hate. Even though hatred is deeply enmeshed in it. What it reflects is a sense that this is what God wants. And you cannot negotiate with people who think that what they're doing is what God wants. And that's certainly what she has turned into. She started out being a secular hater of Israel. A year earlier, she did a lot of growing up in that first year, once she came over from Jordan, she joined Fatah, the secular part of the Palestinian Arab political movement. And then it wasn't enough. And she did a conversion and became a radical Islamist, joined Hamas. She was the first woman ever to be admitted to the ranks and looked for opportunities to do something really spectacular. She did something really spectacular. A week before the murder of my child, and that was to carry her booby-trapped beer can into a supermarket about 200 meters down the street from the pizzeria, right in the center of town. It didn't go off the way she wanted it to, and she was heartbroken. You can imagine she was. She was desperate. She really wanted to kill people, and she demanded a second chance. And she got that a week later. And that was the human bomb carrying the guitar case she brought in from Ramallah, which is only about an hour away from Jerusalem, where I'm sitting. Brought him into the center of Jerusalem, told him what he needed to do at the entrance to the pizzeria, and said, give me a few minutes to get away from here. At the end of that, she didn't say which was, so that I can live and you can go ahead and die and then go inside. And so he walked in. He was standing next to the two girls, my daughter and her best friend, peering up at the at the menu options for a couple of minutes to fulfill the instruction that the woman outside had given him and then pressed the button. None of this is suicide, and I reject Every use of the expression suicide bomb or suicide bomber. He didn't have suicide on his mind. He had murder on his mind. And he also had a total disregard, since it was God who sent him off, what might happen to him. And from there, it's a short walk to this illusion that it's not an illusion, actually, it's a reality that these people perceive the act of murder as a way to be with their 72 virgins. It's not a not an easy concept to just throw away. They really believe that their best days are coming next, and they have now no commitment at all to let's make life for our own children and our own community, our villages and our towns better. It's nothing to do with that, so that there's a total disconnect when 00:27:06.870 — 00:27:51.810 · Arnold Roth we, the rest of us, the ones who are all grown up and know that we can't live in a state of war forever, we need to create peaceful relations to the extent that it's possible when we get together with people who advocate for the globalize the intifada force because we don't have a common language, they don't come with a grievance. They've learned to use the word desperate. But I know from my own experience, I know from the lives of the two people I've mentioned, the human bomb and Tamimi, who masterminded it. They were not desperate. They were well off. They were successful people from wealthy families. In both cases, what they want is to satisfy their God. That makes this challenging in ways that most people don't even have thought to. 00:27:53.210 — 00:28:02.570 · Ben Chertoff You describe a chilling moment in her trial when she was sentenced to if I it was 16 consecutive life. 00:28:02.850 — 00:28:03.610 · Arnold Roth Exactly. 00:28:03.690 — 00:28:15.630 · Ben Chertoff Life sentences. Um, but there's a chilling moment that you describe as as she was and she pled guilty as she was being sentenced. Can you can you talk about that? 00:28:15.670 — 00:29:45.650 · Arnold Roth Well, she pleaded guilty to all the charges. She was charged with the deaths of 15 people. And then there was an omnibus kind of a general other charge, which she also pleaded guilty to. And it wasn't just that she pleaded guilty. She was smiling. She was actually grinning at the judges the entire time. Three judges. And, um, and let me just take a sort of an interjection here and say we knew nothing about the process that was being done by the police and the Secret Service and the Prime Minister's office and whoever else was involved. We didn't know she was arrested. We didn't know she was put on trial. We didn't know what the trial was or where it was. We didn't know she was convicted. We didn't know she was going to be sentenced. All of this was done behind our backs. And I say that because there was someone in this picture, I still don't know to this day who called me up anonymously on the day, I think, after she was sentenced and said, meet me at such and such a place that we both knew. And I've got some documents for you. And I went and I got. And that's how I learned the things that happened in the trial. I could not have gotten that information otherwise, that she was grinning at the judges. The judges then said, we express our firm view to the governor that if there are any deals done in the future for the release of prisoners, she should not be involved. She should get no commutation of sentence. She really enraged them because in every possible way she was communicating the message of I'm not sorry. Then she actually said it more 00:29:46.690 — 00:30:09.470 · Arnold Roth explicitly at numerous opportunities in the future. She said, I would do this again if I had the opportunity. I want to do it. My only regret is that I didn't murder more of them. She didn't say murder, that I didn't kill more of them. She's never mentioned who she murdered. They're all Zionists. She's never used any other word. They're all Zionists. Most were children. 00:30:12.230 — 00:30:22.110 · Ben Chertoff In October 2011. Where were you and how did you find out that what happened happened and what happened? 00:30:22.590 — 00:32:59.110 · Arnold Roth October 2011 was the culmination of several years of grassroots activism here in Israel to get the government to do a deal so that the specific Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was being held hostage by Hamas and ultimately was the hostage for five years, should be released. The process was the cause of deep splits in Israeli society, but more and more Israelis came to understand that if we wanted to see Gilad Shalit freed, the price had to be paid. Now, let me declare my hand in this immediately. I was, I was, and I continued to be totally opposed to doing deals with terrorists in the end. Bibi Netanyahu presided over the doing of the deal. And I like to point out that I'm not alone in my fierce, principled opposition to doing deals like that. The paradigm of opposition to deals like that is Netanyahu himself, who wrote a bestseller in the mid 1990s. I always refer to it as the Dummies Guide to Dealing with Terrorists, but I admit that that's not the name of the book, but it was a serious book that had sold huge numbers. And he makes the point absolutely cogently that when you do deals with terrorists, all you're really achieving is enlarging their appetite for more, and you will never be done with them. The Shalit deal had all the hallmarks of a catastrophic deal, and in fact, catastrophic is the word that both my wife and I used in the many interviews that we did between the time that the deal was announced and 3 or 4 days later, when the deal was fully consummated, was a catastrophe, it continues to be a catastrophe. 1,027 convicted Palestinian Arab terrorists were freed, more than half of them, and this was never revealed to the Israeli public. My my data analysis, more than half of them had carried out murders. It was a it was a it was a snow job. People were never really given an understanding of what are the moral dimensions here and what are the risks to Israeli society in the days, months, years after the deal was done, many Israelis were murdered by the people who were freed. Tamimi was at the top of the list, and she has had a spectacular career whipping people up into a frenzy over doing more terrorism. And then there's Yahya Sinwar, who many people might recognize, and he was really the the chief Hamas guy when the massacre of the 00:33:00.390 — 00:33:34.120 · Arnold Roth northern massacre, the horrible events of the 7th of October 2023. Happened. He was he was in charge of Hamas at that stage and he walked out free at that time. In hindsight, the Shalit deal was really a turning point. It had more than 90% support among Israelis. Uh, I'm quite sure that the next deal, and I'm sure it'll be done, will have much smaller support because many Israelis, certainly the more thinking parts of Israeli society, recognize that that if you never you don't you don't really solve problems in this way. And actually you create huge problems that you don't have a solution for. 00:33:35.160 — 00:33:51.040 · Ben Chertoff In the time after she was released. Um, and she's still free in Jordan. Um, you were visited by a BBC interviewer. Um, and 00:33:52.640 — 00:34:07.740 · Ben Chertoff you were also you were you were put next to the father of Tamimi, right? I mean, not actually next to you, but you were. You were elevated to that same editorial lens. Can you? Can you talk about that experience. 00:34:08.179 — 00:35:27.760 · Arnold Roth And then tell it differently because you're actually blending two stories together. But they actually. Gotcha. They hold. They hold up in the way that you intended. And it's actually the ABC and the BBC. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation conducted itself disgracefully. The British Broadcasting Corporation conducted itself disgracefully. In both of those instances I was involved and tried to educate people about why this is so absolutely unacceptable in the national broadcaster, and I failed miserably. The BBC called our home on a Sunday morning after we buried Malki. We had a house full of people who came to comfort us. Lots of people, thousands of people, most of whom we had never met before, came through our home. That's not an unusual experience. And early in the day on that Sunday, I was handed the phone and it was a woman calling from London for the host of a talk show. The woman herself is not important here, and even the message that she conveyed was not important. What is important was that all she was interested in was a kind of a story. She wanted to hear from me because she had already interviewed the father of the human bomb, and she actually used the expression, my audience will be very interested to hear the contrasting views. 00:35:28.960 — 00:35:29.399 · Arnold Roth I 00:35:30.400 — 00:37:26.440 · Arnold Roth did a lot of growing up in the two minutes of that call and had the good sense, and I don't mind saying this about myself. Had the good sense to say to her, I don't think I can do that. And I hung up the phone. Um, I very soon afterwards had a call, but this one was from somebody I could relate to. He was an Australian like me, and he was telling me that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's not at all like these Americans, and he was also trying to get me to be on a double headed interview with the same guy with the father of the young man who blew himself up. But he had the. The word is chutzpah, the temerity to say, I've spoken to him and you know really what he wants his peace. He's very disappointed by what his son did. So I told him that I was not interested in doing this. It had lots of implications. Afterwards, it went to court in Australia. Um, but very shortly afterwards, that same peace loving father of the young man who blew himself up was all over the Arab media saying, Tarzan has restored the honor of our family. I hope my other sons will do what he did. We're not talking about ordinary attitudes that you can work your way around. And to make it worse, you've got the what? These journalists represent their paradigms. These were not stupid journalists. They were really at the top of their profession, and I could not get their minds around the idea that this is not a conflict between two people who just want essentially the same thing, and we can't both get it. What they're not getting is what it means to be dealing with Hamas. Hamas is a pretty good example of an absolutely inflexible enemy who doesn't care what happens to his own people, or even to himself, literally in every sense of the word. As long as he draws blood from our side, 00:37:27.560 — 00:38:26.420 · Arnold Roth he doesn't sell well, and we're paying the price for the fact that we've never really worked out a good way to convey to other people what it means to be at war with Hamas. This woman, Ahlam Tamimi, we haven't spoken about her very much alive. We won't talk about her specifically too much because she's really other than the fact that she's living free in Jordan now, and that creates all sorts of embarrassing situations that I'm trying to make even more embarrassing. She's nobody. She doesn't have any unique ideas. She's just had incredible good fortune and exposure. She's free. She had her own TV show which went all over the world for five years. Up until 2016, she doesn't have her own TV show anymore. And she's famous for what she did, which is? She murdered all of these Jewish children. All of that would be insignificant were it not for the fact that Jordan, which is everybody's favorite Arab country headed by everybody's favorite Arab despot, 00:38:27.820 — 00:38:44.420 · Arnold Roth wants her to be kept safe. And safe she has been since she went back there in 2011. She was raised in Jordan. She moved a year before the massacre to our part of the world. She then spent the next eight years in prison and then she went back to Jordan as a hero. 00:38:46.180 — 00:39:19.040 · Arnold Roth The TV show cemented her celebrity, and she really is in every sense, an icon in their world. The idea that Jordan, after all of these years, has still not only not handed her over, but has gotten away with not handing her over because it breaches the 1995 treaty between Jordan and the United States in not handing her over. That's astounding. And that's really at the heart of the activism that I've taken upon myself, because people just they don't they don't know it, they don't get it, and they have to understand it. 00:39:21.040 — 00:39:37.560 · Ben Chertoff She's currently indicted by the United States. And there's a five, right? A $5 million bounty on her head. Why hasn't the United States been able to affect any leverage to get her extradited? 00:39:40.280 — 00:39:45.000 · Arnold Roth This is always the hardest part of any interview. The answer to your question is, of course they can. 00:39:46.120 — 00:40:48.779 · Arnold Roth The reason that it hasn't happened is entirely self-imposed. I I. What I like to do is come across super cynical in talking about this and say, well, you know, the Jordanians have wrestled the Americans to the ground. They've warned the Americans not to push, and the Americans have stopped pushing. But that's nonsense. The Jordanians owe an enormous debt to the United States at multiple levels. Jordan is by far. The United States is by far Jordan's most important ally. It receives almost more than any other recipient of American aid in the world. It has a treaty, and it also has large numbers of American forces stationed permanently on its territory. There is every reason in the world why the Jordanians would do a quick mathematical calculation and say what the Americans are asking us to hand this savage over. We'd better do it. That's not what's happened. And the real analysis. I think we'll have to wait until 00:40:50.040 — 00:41:00.919 · Arnold Roth We succeed and she gets arrested in Jordan. Extradited to the United States and stands trial in Washington. That, of course, hasn't happened. There's a lot of mystery to this 00:41:02.080 — 00:41:25.120 · Arnold Roth that what is for certain not the case is the United States can't pull it off. Absolutely can pull it off. It chooses not to pull it off and never owns up to that. Which means that there's all kinds of moral contradictions and and ethical breaches and most of all, a total betrayal of us justice, all being done by the Americans. 00:41:25.800 — 00:41:42.400 · Ben Chertoff She's not just being harbored, too. I mean, as as you mentioned from the the four years after her release, from 2012 to 2016, she had her own weekly television show on the Al-Quds network, on Hamas's satellite channel, 00:41:43.920 — 00:41:56.810 · Ben Chertoff broadcasting out of Amman for four and a half years on Jordanian soil while she's already under indictment. I mean, what does that say about where she is right now and her hosts? 00:41:56.810 — 00:43:15.430 · Arnold Roth So there's one other element that I wish you would have mentioned as you rattled off the the issues and that is that that on any view, Jordan is one of the least free media environments in the world. It's like a number 138 out of 150. Um, nobody gets to use the airwaves in Jordan without the go ahead of the the ruling, um, entity. I prefer to refer to it as the Royal Hashemite Court, the RHC. That is literally true. It is the RHC. There's no way that this woman could have gotten to the point of being an icon and a celebrity and being able to get up on TV every week and say, this is what I did. I don't regret it. You should do the same God as happy with me. He'll be happy with you too. But what I'm saying there is pulled together from different conversations, but it's all literally true. Imagine the worst criminal that you've ever met in your life, who you bump into up the street and says, oh, I'm glad we've met because I want to tell you that God is on my side. This is going on every day. Even now, when she doesn't have a TV show, she gets platforms, her publishing houses. She gets people who speak out in her name. They might even be her. I don't know, there's a lot of social media voices that are very aggressively pro her. They may even, may even be her. 00:43:16.590 — 00:43:26.749 · Arnold Roth This is poison. This is toxin. This is going straight into the bloodstream of young, uneducated, poorly educated Jordanians whose textbooks are 00:43:28.030 — 00:43:29.949 · Arnold Roth replete with 00:43:31.470 — 00:43:56.690 · Arnold Roth heavily bigoted anti-Semitic themes. And I just want to pause and remind people, yes, it's Jordan, and I'm talking about everybody's favorite moderate country. Jordan Jordan has a shocking record and we don't know about it because it's not talked about because it serves multiple political interests to say, well, Jordan is really the human side, the the nice face of Arab society. 00:43:58.210 — 00:44:58.710 · Arnold Roth And I might even want to buy into that were it not for the fact that that claim is what keeps one of the world's worst savages America's most wanted female fugitive safe? There's a deal that it's a deal with the devil. My battle is to have people recognize that people in Congress, people in the commentariat, people in leadership positions, religious leaders to get them to understand this is a disaster. Yes, of course, this is called special pleading. I'm talking about the woman murdered my child. I've never hidden it. Of course I have an interest. But there were 16 people murdered there that day, and many others have been murdered in the name of the very toxic bigotry that she radiates, that she projects. And we all ought to be recognizing that that didn't come from nowhere, and it hasn't kept happening for no reason. There are reasons, and the reasons have to do with getting this whole issue of bringing her to justice wrong, and the issue of doing deals with terrorists. 00:45:01.150 — 00:45:29.750 · Ben Chertoff It's not just Jordanian media, too. That was broadcasting her. You had you had said in an interview that the AP, the Associated Press, had sent a journalist to Ahlam Tamimi's home in Amman. Interviewed her as if she were royalty. And you. Your quote was with us. It's as if we have leprosy. Um, I mean, what would you say to the AP if they if they had come to talk to you? 00:45:31.070 — 00:45:45.410 · Arnold Roth The same thing as I said to the BBC and to the actual managers of the BBC in a video conference that I demanded and got, and the same thing as I would say to Reuters, who've done the same thing, and Facebook have done the same thing. 00:45:46.530 — 00:45:55.490 · Arnold Roth There is a moral obligation in a conflicted, dangerous world that is not solving its terrorism problems. 00:45:56.930 — 00:45:58.890 · Arnold Roth There is a real obligation 00:46:00.050 — 00:46:08.970 · Arnold Roth to make a clear delineation between voices that are acceptable, and voices that should never, ever be allowed onto the airwaves. Um, 00:46:10.170 — 00:46:57.190 · Arnold Roth this isn't the opportunity to go into the details, but you've just mentioned actual cases. AP the video of the AP man interviewing her and her husband inside her home. I've got that video. I've got hundreds and thousands of video clips of relatively legitimate media outlet outfits who are giving this woman and her views the kind of coverage that you would give to the, you know, a country town mayor who wants to have his views heard. It's it's it's insane. But it comes back to the kind of moral confusion that you've raised in this, in this interview. Globalize the intifada. How many people can say the things that I said about globalizing intifada? Now, 00:46:58.270 — 00:48:48.950 · Arnold Roth globalized intifada is kind of the slogan for the madness that allows people to think smart people, good people. People in the West. People in the East. To think that the people who support the blowing up of synagogues or blowing up of churches, to think of them as just angry, just, you know, they haven't been treated well, they're desperate and it's all wrong. They've missed the entire point of the story. We are in a conflict which is growing and getting worse because the correct assessment of the people with these nutty and crazy and terribly dangerous ideas is being gotten wrong by pretty much everybody all the time. I always try to stop sounding as expansive as I just was for the last two minutes and bring it back to Tamimi, not because Tamimi is more important than the things that I just said, but because her freedom embodies everything that's wrong. Nobody has a better claim to getting out there and saying globalizing the intifada. She does. She doesn't use those words, though. She says God wanted what I did. I'm glad I did it. God was happy that I did it, and I only wish that I could do more of it. That's globalizing intifada and the people who don't get up out of their chairs and throw a rock at the TV, or call the newspaper and say, why are you carrying this woman's views are helping the process that's been going on now for years. The iconization and the normalization of insane views that actually are threats to the lives of all of us, not just to the murdered children who were in the Sbarro that day, but pretty much everybody everywhere. 00:48:52.350 — 00:48:54.550 · Ben Chertoff What would you say to 00:48:55.950 — 00:49:10.230 · Ben Chertoff a student on a college campus, let's say here in New York at Columbia University, wearing a keffiyeh, marching with a sign that says Globalize the Intifada? What would you if you had the opportunity to sit down face to face? What would you say? 00:49:10.270 — 00:49:43.009 · Arnold Roth I'd walk away. Wouldn't do it. I don't mean to be smart about this, but, um, that kind of discourse in the in the agora, the public space of a university is never going to work. What's needed is a process, and the process isn't being handled well. Let me approach this from a slightly different angle. The world is now looking at the Jewish world, in particular, those of us who are tuned into this more anti-Semitism and more violent anti-Semitism than we've seen in our lifetimes. And the solution that's being offered 00:49:44.330 — 00:52:00.920 · Arnold Roth pretty much universally is the organizations who have been combating and fighting anti-Semitism over the last 2 or 3 generations are saying, give us your support. We know what we're doing. We have the experience. And it's obvious to me that this is getting it absolutely upside down. We've done it wrong, and whatever the wrong is, I don't know it. I don't have that kind of wisdom or insight. It's clear that we need to be doing something very different. It surely is not going to be achieved in lecture halls or cafeterias, or one on ones, or standing on the boycott lines and yelling at each other. It's going to require something, a persistent, consistent something that's done over a long period of time, and that most likely we haven't even thought of what it looks like today. The other side. The side that's funded by Iran and Qatar, mostly Qatar. Uh, I understand this a lot, but in a functional sense, understand this a lot better than our side does. Long term investors in sowing the fields of real influence with people who come with packaged influence, that they're going to be sowing and harvesting and then reaping in years to come. That's been going on for a long time. Anything we do now to try to reverse the damage, the immense damage done by the Qataris. There's nothing wrong with saying that the Qataris are by far the most active in this field is going to take years. It's not going to happen quickly. In the meantime, uh, we're in a terrible situation. People are afraid to leave their homes. I mean, I would not go to Brooklyn. Brooklyn scares me for the same reason that I wouldn't go to, uh, Tanganyika, which is no longer a country. And I always mention it because it's no longer a country I don't want to offend people for the same reason. I would have a hard time feeling comfortable in Brooklyn, or in any other city where I know that you've got large numbers of people wandering the streets, standing outside coffee shops and saying Free Palestine, as if that were some sort of an invitation to a dialog. So a lot of things have to be done. Getting into a discussion with people like this is really unproductive. I hope other people can do it. I can't do it and I wouldn't try to do it. 00:52:02.160 — 00:52:26.760 · Ben Chertoff Before we started recording, I had talked about how I am here in the epicenter of of that whole Michigan scene in Brooklyn, and you had made the point that that there are many epicenters now of anti-Semitism. Um, what what gives you any glimmer of hope in the midst of all of this? 00:52:27.240 — 00:52:45.220 · Arnold Roth Um, The first of all, I'm going to be very narrow and then I'm going to be a bit broader. Um, I'm a Jew. I'm a proud Jew. At this point in my life, I'm an observant Jew. I wasn't always now I am, and I'm a relatively educated Jew. Judaism and Jewish life is immensely rewarding for me and for the people I love and the people around me. 00:52:46.380 — 00:53:16.259 · Arnold Roth I want people who don't have the advantages that I got in life. I'm speaking now about people who grew up in Jewish families, to become more conversant with what Jewish life can do to enrich, um, their lives. So I'm, I'm really focused on, first of all, trying to make sure that young Jews don't despair and walk away from Jewish life, because right now it's not a good 00:53:17.260 — 00:55:03.419 · Arnold Roth hand of cards to be holding. It's it's tough times. I'm quite tuned in to what's going on in university campuses, not only in the United States, but I know that I'm glad I'm not there, But the larger issue is a little more complicated. What do you say to the people in rural Sweden or in Portugal, just to pick two examples that have made have had enormous disruption to their lives, and it will never go back to what it was. What do you say to them now, as they realize that we've embraced foreigners who've come into our country on the argument that they were looking for refuge and, and, and shelter and, and they've taken over and things seem to be more different than we expected them to be. And how are we going to get our countries back? My view is that they're never going to get their countries back. But these changes are pretty much one way, and they certainly haven't run their course yet. It's it's a winning strategy if you're interested in global domination. And I think it's you have to be pretty stubborn not to see that. Islamism, the political expression of the Islamic religion, is interested in in precisely that in in taking over, in changing the character of Western society. I'm not a conspiracist, but to ignore the way, you know, Swedish villages that never had anybody in the town who wasn't blond. Now find themselves in a minority in their own villages of people who don't speak the local language. They are their their ability. They're really waving the flag. Some of them. Not too many. Not enough. And saying, we really messed up here. Watch out. Everybody should be watching it. Now, that's entirely narrowly focused. I'm talking here about immigration. Immigration is a big issue. I don't have any 00:55:04.540 — 00:55:08.820 · Arnold Roth easy prescriptions for how it gets fixed, but it's a big issue. Nobody should think that it's not. 00:55:10.140 — 00:57:50.439 · Arnold Roth But overcoming the influence of the idiots shouting globalized intifada. The answer to that is education. And education, by definition, is always slow and takes time and needs a steady hand and above all, needs leadership that is actually committed to making that change. In most places, I don't think we have that kind of leadership. I'm very negative about politicians in general. Um, we need a better kind of politician, but there's no reason why we can't get a better kind of politician. But now I'm. I'm speaking in what could only be called a glib fashion. I don't have a good answer. All I can contribute to this discussion and to your excellent question is, whatever we need to do, it needs to be done intelligently, fast, and on a systemic basis. In other words, everybody has to be involved in trying to figure out what's wrong and helping make it right. I don't see any society anywhere that's doing it right. There are no easy bromides, easy solutions for the problem as systemic and big as this. But it's a real mistake to think of it as well. Israel got us into all of this. Or this is all about hating the Jews, right? Hating the Jews and and viewing Israel as the source of all problems is a symptom. It's certainly not the cause. It's it's very successful. A lever in the hands of the right kinds of bigots. It works really well. If we thought that, um, never again was the the slogan for our generation that nobody should be any doubt. Never again doesn't work anymore. It's going to be again. And there's no reason to expect differently. Um, here, I'll just. I'd like to wrap up from a particularly Melburnian's point of view. Melbourne has had more, at least in my generation, Holocaust survivors than any other community in the world relative to its size. And so pretty much everything that turned me into the adult that I grew up to be was a function of being raised by parents who were Holocaust survivors. None of my friends had grandparents, none of them, as far as I can remember. Almost none of us had aunts or uncles and, uh, small families. Everybody came out of concentration camps. People who didn't grow up as I did in Melbourne, who weren't as lucky as I was to be raised by a family of Holocaust survivors. We'll never really understand how you can have a solid, values based upbringing by loving parents who did not have loving parents of their own because their parents were taken from them and they were just teenagers and end up having good, constructive lives. I know it sounds a little 00:57:51.880 — 00:57:55.360 · Arnold Roth kind of wishy washy when I say it, but 00:57:56.760 — 00:59:43.400 · Arnold Roth we are what we were raised to be by our families and families that have been raising people from the 1960s onwards are caught up in the essential assumption that everybody is good. We just have to find a common language. But that kind of avoids the reality that not everybody is good. And sometimes we're called upon to work out strategies for living in a world where not everybody is good and it's not going to work. If we decide that we're going to treat them as good, or, in the case of Tamimi and Jordan, allow the people who think that some good can come from not extraditing her to allow that to happen, because in the end, we'll deal with the problems of a murderer being free in Jordanian society. But it's more important that we send a message of brotherhood to the Jordanian people. I don't know how many people will relate to the comment that I've just made, but that really is the way I see this, that Ahlam Tamimi is free for the worst possible reasons, and when she is eventually arrested and handed over and put on trial, those reasons will become more obvious than they are today. But until they are openly discussed, there are going to be lots of bad decisions made, decisions that will result in terrorists being freed, and deals being done with terrorists with people being urged to treat other people who want to kill them, as if they were just people who were desperate and have an argument or a disappointment. And we can help them with the argument and the disappointment. But the world isn't like that. And sometimes what you've got to do is just make sure that you're taking care of your own family first, and then hope that other people will follow your example and take care of their own families, because that's surely not happening in today's world. 00:59:44.280 — 01:00:06.360 · Ben Chertoff I have one one last question. You you have experienced this violent anti-Semitism in the most intimate way. I can't imagine the grief that would come from that. How, how and you've and you've channeled that into becoming such a fierce advocate. How? How do you put one foot in front of the other? What has kept you going? 01:00:06.880 — 01:00:14.720 · Arnold Roth I'll give you a short answer, but it's a meaningful one. When we were still in the mourning house. Judaism prescribes seven days of mourning in your own home. 01:00:15.770 — 01:01:22.390 · Arnold Roth My children and I. My wife was unable to join. She was so devastated. We sat down together and discussed what we wanted to do to create a memorial. And the outcome of that was the Malki Foundation. It does really wonderful work by addressing families just like our own family, who, without any fault on their part, discovered that their own child was desperately disabled and and often in terrible health. Families like that can be helped and should not ever have to put that child into an institution. The Malki Foundation exists to help families make the decision not to put a very disabled child into an institution. That's the end of the advertisement. What that does for me is all internal. I have the confidence and the satisfaction of knowing that in her memory, objectively good things are being done every single day. There is a difference between good and evil. There is a side that's good and a side that's evil. I know that I'm on the good side. They can scream as much as they want and call me and my children and my grandchildren. People who are engaged in genocide. Good luck to them. It's nonsense. 01:01:22.550 — 01:01:27.110 · Ben Chertoff Arnold Roth, thank you so much for joining me. And may Malki's memory be a blessing. 01:01:27.630 — 01:01:28.470 · Arnold Roth Thank you. 01:01:34.630 — 01:04:04.390 · Ben Chertoff A few things he said that I'd rather not let slide past. That the word suicide is the wrong word and always has been. The man in the pizzeria wasn't dying for something. He was killing for something, and he expected to be rewarded for it. Once you hear it that way, it's hard to unhear. That the people who did this were not poor and were not desperate. Arnold has read every speech and watched every video this woman has given in 25 years. And he says what comes off of them is not grievance and not even hatred. Exactly. It's certainty that God wanted it. You can't negotiate with that, yet we keep trying to. That Jordan sits about 138th out of 150 on press freedom, which means that nothing reaches the airwaves there that the royal court hasn't allowed. And for four and a half years, what it allowed was a convicted mass murderer wanted by the United States to host a weekly television program, and that when I offered him the sit down with the student in the keffiyeh, the conversation, everyone assumes is the answer. He turned it down flat. He said he'd walk away not because he's given up, but because he thinks we've misdiagnosed the whole problem and that the fix is generational, unglamorous, and mostly hasn't been invented yet. Here's the thing I'd ask you to take with you. When I asked how he keeps on going. He didn't talk about extradition. He told me that during the seven days of mourning, sitting in his own house, he and his children decided to build something. And what they built helps families keep severely disabled children at home instead of surrendering them to an institution. He named it after her 25 years later. That is the part of this story that is still producing something good every single day. Malki had a little sister she adored who cannot speak and cannot see. That's who the foundation is for. If this was worth your time, subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And if you have 30s, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. It genuinely decides who else finds the show. Follow at Honest Reporting on X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. I'm Ben Chertoff. This is The Honest Take. And we'll see you next time.