Today's New York Times Magazine [ Image Source ] If you want to affect how people think about an issue, putting your case onto the cover...
Half-way through today's essay, he introduces a figure who embodies that âbig mistakeâ:
In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh.
That's all he writes about Ahlam Tamimi. But we can tell you more. Ahlam Tamimi is a Jordanian who was 21 years old and the news-reader on a Palestinian Arab television program when she signed on with Hamas to become a terrorist. She engineered, planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in 2001. She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb to its target.
The outcome (15 humans killed, a sixteenth still in a vegetative state today, 130 injured) was so uplifting to her that she has gone on camera again and again to say, smiling into the camera lens, how proud she is of what she did.
She is entirely free of regret. A convicted felon and a mass-murderer convicted on multiple homicide charges, she has never denied the role she embraced and justifies it fully.
Yet all the New York Times says about Nabi Salehâs favourite one-time resident is that she was an escort âwho now lives in exile in Jordanâ. Period.
This is no mere oversight. The editors at the New York Times showcased this same psychopath once before, six years ago. Then, as now, we  felt someone needed to push back and we posted two blog articles: â 7-Aug-07: Hot House: Cold Truths â and â 28-Jun-07: About sweet-faced young womenâ, and got a little attention for a while. But it was clear to us that those who thought they perceived greatness of spirit in the woman continued to do so.
One of the lives she snuffed out was that of our precious daughter Malki who was fifteen years old. Malki was the kind of young woman whose life and achievements ought to have entitled her to at least a fraction of the media coverage bestowed by the NYT editors and others on the murderer.
