My daughter deserves more than a mention

No one who types the chilling words “Losing a child is” into a search engine is ever surprised by the result. Losing a child to an act of murder takes the eviscerating pain of grief to a still-more agonizing level. Coping is as hard as things get. A nightmare.

But when the murderer becomes a celebrity, that’s uniquely, impossibly dark. When leaders of various kinds get visibly tongue-tied in your presence or play deaf, you don’t merely find yourself wondering how this can possibly happen. It’s happened. And dealing with it inevitably becomes one of those tasks where no one but those personally at the vortex of the emotional storm that follows can understand or help.

Everyone who knew my daughter Malki knows what an angel she was. Then at fifteen she was taken from us. A nightmare set in that continues today, enveloping my wife, our children, me. The latest chapter in that horror is unfolding in Australia right now.

A Jordanian woman, Ahlam Tamimi, lives free in the land where she was born, kept safe there from the authorities in Washington who since 2013 have sought to put her on trial for her key role in an act of savagery that explicitly targeted Jewish children. Jordan keeps her safe though it’s a close ally of the United States, gets more billions of dollars in annual taxpayer-funded US aid than almost any other state, and has a binding, valid treaty with the US that requires it to hand people like Malki’s murderer over to the US justice system. And yet.

Since this is a nightmare, it’s understandable that so far Jordan and the woman are winning. Which brings us to Australia.