The real reason why Tamimi remains free is that the U.S. looks at its citizens harmed in and around Israel as somehow being “Israeli”: you went there, so it’s your problem. This appears to be the case, even though a U.S. law was specifically passed which declares that if Americans are harmed anywhere in the world as “victims of international terror,” the U.S. government can prosecute them.
When I met the FBI agent responsible for the cases of Americans who have been killed or injured in Israel in 2010, eight years after my son and I were seriously injured in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, the agent told me that our case file was empty. Dozens of pages of material that I had sent and whatever information they had gleaned from the Israelis had been thrown in the garbage. While my wife and I went out for coffee, he copied it all over again.
When the Shalit deal went through a year later, it was a private lawyer who had to inform the FBI which of the released terrorists had harmed American citizens. The FBI could not figure out the English spelling of the names of the released terrorists and thus did not know who had been released. The U.S. does not care about its citizens harmed in Israel, and its the same indifference of the State Department to the fate of Jews in Europe in the 1940’s.
Why didn’t Roosevelt bomb the tracks to Auschwitz? Yes, and why doesn’t Obama seek the extradition of a woman who admits her guilt in killing American citizens? It all smells the same, three generations apart.
The US lack of prosecution of Tamimi and dozens of other Palestinian terrorists who killed and maimed American citizens during the Second Intifada is the result of a disdain for the victims. Jewish victims, and by extension, the minority of non-Jews harmed in these attacks, simply do not merit the attention of U.S. law enforcement and State Department officials.
Such a state of affairs is really not surprising. The Trayvon Martin case led DoJ to set up a special hotline for anyone who might have some damning evidence against George Zimmerman. In the thousands of cases of blacks who murdered whites, no such hotline was ever set up.
The DoJ acts and reacts according to its perceived interests—and this state of affairs was the same under Bush as under Obama. Grabbing a Somali pirate from the high seas or pulling bin Laden’s son-in-law out of the VIP lounge of Amman’s airport is important; arresting Tamimi and the numerous other terrorists who have proudly claimed their roles in killing and wounding American citizens—Jews and non-Jews alike—in Israel hold no interest for the US.
Tamimi is the test case. If they don’t arrest and prosecute her, then the US will have proven that nothing has changed in 70 years: Jewish blood is cheap; it was then and it still is now.
I have twice asked the director of OJVOT about the “rights” of terror victims that they claim to uphold, as stated on their website and in a pamphlet they send out to terror victims. I never received an answer. The reason is simple: in the eyes of the U.S. government, we really have no rights.