The US must always stand with its citizens harmed by terrorists.
There is a story about Joe Namath relating to his throwing a couple of first-half interceptions. One of his linemen caught up with him during halftime and said, “Hey Joe, we’re the ones wearing green.” There are times when one sees the US government support illegal immigrants over families of those killed by illegal immigrants or terrorists over their victims and you want to scream, “Hey guys, we’re the ones wearing red, white and blue!” One of those moments comes now.
I wrote previously that our son, then 7 years old, and I were wounded in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem on 21 March 2002. For us, that is zero hour. There is life before the bombing and then there is life after the bombing. For years, we found ourselves saying that this was the first time we did something or went somewhere “since the bombing.” I would not wish on anyone to go through what we went through. My wife ran between surgery wards as I had shrapnel taken out of my arm and our son had shunts put in his head to prevent pressure buildup on his brain.
After we were injured, I was visited in the hospital by an official from the US consulate in Jerusalem. It was a sincere visit and I was grateful for the support. Later, I communicated with the then-US ambassador to Israel who directed me to contact people at the FBI and Department of Justice (DoJ). As the years passed, I pressed DoJ to extradite individuals involved in our attack. It never happened. Not only did it not happen in our case but not one of the dozens of terrorists involved in harming a few hundred American citizens during and after the Second Intifada has ever faced extradition or trial in the US. One of the most infamous, Ahlam Tamimi, who orchestrated the Sbarro Bombing in 2001, is the subject of a US indictment but sits happily in Amman and knows that she will never be sent to the US to face trial.
It feels bad enough that the US only paid lip service to the terror victims, but now it has gotten worse. Hussein Al-Sheikh, the heir apparent to an ever more feeble Mahmud Abbas, is coming to Washington for meetings with Tony Blinken and his colleagues next week. Hussein Al-Sheikh appears prominently in the indictments of those involved in “our” attack. He was in 2002 the head of Fatah for the West Bank. According to the indictments, based almost exclusively on the signed confessions of the terrorists involved in planning and carrying out the attack, Hussein Al-Sheikh provided money and weapons before the bombing and wrote the letter of responsibility immediately after the attack. The paragraph numbering below is based on the military indictment of Akrim Aweis, a senior Palestinian Authority (PA) intelligence officer who organized the bombing. The translation from Hebrew to English is my own:
19. On the same day, the accused, Nasser Shawish and Mohammed Hasheikah visited in the office of Hussein Al-Sheikh, General Secretary of Fatah in the region. There, the accused received from Hussein Al-Sheikh money and two hand grenades for the purpose of performing the intended attack.
30. Afterwards, the accused and Nasser Shawish turned to Hussein Al-Sheikh, General Secretary of Fatah in the region to prepare an announcement that the Al-Aksa Martyr Brigade, the armed wing of Fatah Tanzim, took responsibility for the suicide attack described above. After preparing the announcement, Nasser Shawish went to the offices of ANN New Service, and there was photographed as he read the said announcement of taking responsibility for the said attack.
Shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated, an official from the State Department came to Israel and met with al-Sheikh in Ramallah. I wrote an article at the time against such a meeting. Now, Al-Sheikh stands poised to go to Washington next week—the week of Yom Kippur!—to meet with senior US officials. For me and my family, this is a painful outrage. This man was involved in a plot that led to the injury of two American citizens. I had two screws pass through my left arm and our son had the head of a screw pass fully through his right brain. Why would US officials tolerate meeting such a person? The FBI and DoJ have known about Al-Sheikh’s involvement in our attack for well over a decade. The State Department also knows about his past and his close affiliation with Fatah terror groups such as Al-Aksa Martyr Brigade, Tanzim, and Force 17. So why do they meet with him? Why do they debase the honor of the United States of America and ignore the pain of its citizens injured by the actions of this murderer by granting him official meetings in the nation’s capital? The answer is twofold.
The first is that the State Department has always seen American terror victims as little more than pains in the backside. Our desire to seek justice and our lawsuits in the US against the PA are seen as annoyances at Foggy Bottom, and State would gladly run over US terror victims and our interests if they felt that it would somehow advance the ephemeral “peace process.” We saw it firsthand when Tony Blinken, then an under-secretary working for John Kerry, came in on our lawsuit on the side of the PA and the PLO and against eleven American families who had won a large judgment against the bad guys. That State and its minions do not care about fellow American citizens is not new. Americans harmed by Saddam also got shafted during the Bush administration.
The second reason why State is so eager to meet someone with our blood on his hands is that State has concluded that the Palestinians cannot produce anything better. In many past instances, those involved in violence, especially violence against citizens, were considered to be unfit for any future leadership role. The US spent a great deal of effort to prevent Nazis from assuming positions of importance in post-war Germany. Such is not the case with the Palestinians. Their purported leaders like Al-Sheikh and Marwan Barghouti are all unrepentant terrorist bosses. Natan Sharansky said that he once brought Palestinian businessmen to the White House as potential future leaders for the Palestinians; he was rebuffed by Bill Clinton who said that only the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat would be the leader of the PA. The US has simply given up on the idea that the Palestinians can produce upstanding men and women who can lead their people to a better life. So they ignore the blood on the clothes of their PA counterparts and fantasize that someone willing to blow up a 7-year-old boy (and kill a woman pregnant with twins as well as her husband) will be a real peace partner.
My request for the US government: arrest Hussein Al-Sheikh at the airport. Read him his rights and take him off to jail. He tried to kill two American citizens and he should be held fully accountable for his actions. American blood should never be cheap in they eyes of the US government.
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