Palestinian killer loses US citizenship, is deported

On Sept. 20, while American Jews were preparing for the Rosh Hashanah, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), arrived in Jordan after being tossed out of the United States.

Following years of legal wrangling, the Palestinian murderer who had been living in Chicago, lost her U.S. citizenship and was deported for concealing her murder and conviction in Israel for killing Israeli college students in Jerusalem.

Of course, if you follow the media reports you wouldn’t know that Odea murdered two children. The Chicago Sun-Times, for example, buried the lede; notice it mentions her time in prison but omits her crime:

“The 70-year-old Palestinian immigrant, whose U.S. citizenship was revoked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for not disclosing having served time as a prisoner in Israel, didn’t cry until the end, only after ICE refused her huge crowd of supporters entry into the airport.”

The real story is that Odeh spent a decade in an Israeli jail for her involvement in two terrorist bombings while she was a member of the PFLP. One of those attacks, a 1969 bombing of a Jerusalem Supersol Supermarket, killed two Hebrew University students — Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner — while they were shopping for groceries.

The Palestinian-born Odeh was sentenced to life in prison for being the ringleader behind the Supersol bombing as well as an attempted one at the British Consulate in Jerusalem (thankfully, that bomb was found and disarmed before exploding). 

After ten years in an Israel jail, Odeh was released with 77 other terrorists in an exchange with the PFLP for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon. She eventually moved to the United States where she served as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and later as an Obamacare navigator (snark withheld).

Odeh became a citizen in 2004, but in 2014 she was convicted of lying to immigration authorities about her Israeli conviction. Odeh checked “no” on immigration and citizenship forms she filled out when asked whether she had ever been convicted of a crime. She was also accused of lying in her immigration papers about her prior residency, falsely claiming that she had lived in Jordan from 1948 until her until she came to America.

For her immigration crime, Odeh was, sentenced to 18 months in prison, stripped of her citizenship, and considered for deportation. However, Odeh maintains she lied because she had post-traumatic stress disorder from the Israeli police sexually torturing and raping her to get a confession. There is plenty of evidence that claim is untrue.

Odeh was arrested on Feb. 28, 1969. But on March 3, 1969, just nine days after the bombing and three days after her arrest, JTA reported that the three key perpetrators of the Supersol bombing — which would have included Odeh — had confessed (emphasis added):

“Jerusalem police said today that they had confessions from three suspects directly involved in planting bombs that wrecked the Supersol supermarket in West Jerusalem on Feb. 21, killing two Hebrew University students and injuring nine other persons. About 40 members of the gang responsible for the supermarket blast and subsequent bomb plantings at the British Consulate in East Jerusalem have been arrested.

“Today police said that all members of the gang were in custody. Police said the bombs were planted by two girls who received the explosives from a third saboteur. They were concealed in shopping bags. The crime has been reconstructed with the aid of the suspects, according to police. Round-ups in East Jerusalem, Ramallah and Nablus uncovered stores of explosives and sabotage equipment amidst indications that it was to have been used shortly.”

According to Israeli court documents presented by prosecutors in her American trial, Odeh gave a highly-detailed confession on March 1 and 7, 1969, which is inconsistent with her claim that the confessions were the result of multiple weeks of sexual torture.

Odeh’s U.S. attorneys appealed based on the fact that “Federal Judge Gershwin Drain allowed the Israeli military court conviction to be entered into evidence, but barred testimony about her torture at the hands of her Israeli captors. That ruling eliminated the testimony of expert witness Dr. Mary Fabri, a clinical psychologist who has decades of experience working with torture survivors. Fabri was prepared to testify that the allegedly false answers on the immigration forms were the result of Rasmea’s chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).”

One of Odeh’s fellow terrorists on the mission, Aisha Odeh, confessed to the attack on Palestinian TV and gave her cousin Rasmea the credit for being the ringleader.

Despite the fact that her claims of torture do not fit with the published timeline, or the admission by her cousin, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the jury’s conviction of Rasmea Odeah and sent it back to Judge Drain for a new trial scheduled for this spring.

Rasmea Odeh didn’t hang around doing nothing while awaiting the new trial. On Feb. 6, she joined other radicals to write a manifesto for the March 8th Day without women protest. Her cohorts included Angela Davis, a self-professed communist professor (now retired), a member of the original Black Panthers, and a 1960s radical icon. Davis was prosecuted and acquitted in 1972 for an armed takeover of a California courtroom that resulted in the murder of a judge. Other co-authors included Maoism supporter Tithi Bhattacharya (Maoists are considered a terrorist group), as well as Linda Martín Alcoff, Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, Barbara Ransby, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Appearing in the British newspaper The Guardian, under the headline, “Women of America: we’re going on strike. Join us so Trump will see our power,” the eight women called for a continuation of the “new wave of militant feminist struggle” that began with the protests of Jan. 21st.

Here’s how manifesto described the event:

“The idea is to mobilize women, including trans women, and all who support them in an international day of struggle — a day of striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work, boycotting, calling out misogynistic politicians and companies, striking in educational institutions.”

Soon after that early March protest, on March 23, 2017, Rasmea Odeh accepted a plea agreement where she will serve no prison time but will be stripped of her U.S. citizenship and deported. She was finally sent back to Jordan on Sept. 20. America is a better country with one less murderer after her exit.

The twitter feed of the USPalestinianNetwork (@uspcn) on Sept. 20 showed a crowd of people at the Jordanian Airport and the words, “Family & friends of #RasmeaOdeh are waiting for her to finish customs in Amman, Jordan. We’ll go live when she does! #HonorRasmea”

HonorRasmea? Feh! America has honored herself by tossing this murderer out of the country.