Hypocrisy reigns when Jordan's king visits

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King Abdullah II of Jordan is a welcome guest at the Trump White House. He is also a popular host of senior U.S. officials including Vice President Pence and Jared Kushner.

Tomorrow (Monday June 25, 2018), he will hobnob with the president at his second official visit to the Trump White House.

Topics of discussion according to an official U.S. announcement will be "issues of mutual concern, including terrorism, the threat from Iran and the crisis in Syria, and working towards a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians".

As usual, the hypocrisy of the king will be studiously ignored. The fact that he is harboring our Malki's killer, mass-murdering Hamas operative Ahlam Tamimi, will not be raised. Nobody from the Trump administration will challenge Abdullah's refusal to extradite Tamimi despite the Department of Justice's explicit demand that he do so after her indictment in March 2017. 

No mention will be made of the extradition treaty signed by Jordan and the U.S. in 1995 - a treaty implicitly recognized by Jordan when it extradited fugitives to U.S. custody on three separate occasions. One of them was convicted on terrorism charges just a few weeks ago.

My Malki and another of the fifteen victims of the Sbarro bombing executed by Tamimi in 2001 were citizens of the U.S. A third U.S. citizen has been comatose ever since the attack. 

Tamimi has confessed and boasted in gory detail on camera about the attack she planned and carried out. She was convicted in an Israeli court and sentenced to sixteen consecutive life terms. But in 2011 she was freed in a deal foisted on Israel by Hamas. 1,027 terrorists, including hundreds of convicted murderers, were handed by Israel to Hamas in order to retrieve a single kidnapped Israeli, Gilad Shalit.

During the seven years that Tamimi has been free and protected by King Abdullah, she has tirelessly incited Muslims to emulate her and commit fresh acts of terrorism. She has flown throughout the Arab world to address her fans and spread her evil message.

"Justice, justice pursue" is the Bible's exhortation that has driven (or "impelled") my husband and me. We have written, worked the phones, reasoned, argued and pleaded. But all for naught. Because King Abdullah, it appears, reigns not only in his kingdom. He reigns in the U.S. as well.

As long as King Abdullah is embraced by President Trump's administration, is hailed as an enemy of terrorism, is allowed to violate the extradition treaty he signed - only one clear message can be gleaned: my Malki's life does not matter. Putting her murderer behind bars does not matter. My own right as a U.S. citizen to justice does not matter. 

What does matter, it seems, is buttressing the Jordanian king and prolonging his reign.

Mea culpa

Proteus Mirabilis

I'm still busy wiping the egg off my face. 

For a while, I've been blogging here about my daughter Chaya's neurological fevers and their increasing frequency and severity. 

We even consulted with the neurologist about it last week. But for certainty's sake, we brought her to the pediatrician on Wednesday for a clinical exam.

No other symptoms surfaced, but our thorough prize of a doctor sent us for blood and urine tests. Afterwards, he said, it would be safe to presume she's really got rising neurological fevers. 

On Thursday after the visiting nurse took blood, her fever spiked to 40.2 Celsius. So despite the complication of it, my husband rushed our child to the local health fund clinic where the nurse took urine via a catheter. (The visiting nurse declines to do that with female patients and we were going to postpone it to a more convenient day).

It was immediately clear that she has a urinary tract infection. So within an hour, we had already started her on Cefuroxime, an antibiotic.

Since then, her fever has been steadily dropping. It's back to her usual slightly-elevated readings with an amazing, fluky 36.8 C thrown in last night! I can't remember her ever having a reading that low. 

Her pediatrician surmises that this infection has been simmering (and Chaya silently suffering, of course) for a while.

Today the urine culture results arrived: Proteus mirabilis. It's actually quite a work of art (see above).

As for the moral of this story, I'm sure it's obvious: Never presume anything about our complicated children who can't convey to us what they're feeling

From bluster to blunder

JK Rowling of Lumos [Image Source]

It was bound to happen eventually. When you churn out the PR bluster ad nauseum, the occasional blunder is unavoidable. 

So when the team at Aleh related how the recent Gazan missile barrage impacted residents of Aleh Negev, they described that institution as "the only birth to death residential facility in the world for those with the most severe special needs" [archived here in case it disappears].

The wording is so egregiously grotesque and crass that I am baffled to see nobody at Aleh has scrambled to delete it. As I type this, it remains posted on their partner's Facebook page.

Aside from the abysmally poor choice of words, the claim that there is no such institution anywhere in the world is also puzzling. There are plenty of such warehouses in impoverished third world countries. Lumos, J.K. Rowling's organization ("Children belong in families, not orphanages") endeavors tirelessly to close them all down. 

True, such warehouses have, for the most part, already been eradicated in the rest of the developed world. But is Aleh truly conceding that its dumping ground for children with disabilities is the last one of its kind extant in the enlightened world? 

If so, then I must pronounce them, this once, truthful to the point of self-indictment.