Upcoming fundraiser for convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh at DePaul Univ.

Upcoming fundraiser for convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh at DePaul Univ.

Rasmea Odeh is the Palestinian woman convicted of the 1969 Supersol supermarket bombing in Jerusalem which killed two Israeli students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner.  Rasmea also was convicted of the attempted bombing of the British Consulate.

(Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner)

Rasmea lied about her past on her immigration and naturalization papers, and was recently convicted by a federal jury in Detroit.  The brother and niece of Joffe attended the trial.

The evidence against Odeh was overwhelming on both the murder and immigration charges, as I documented in my post, Rasmea Odeh rightly convicted of Israeli supermarket bombing and U.S. immigration fraud:

If this were just another immigration fraud story, it would be unremarkable. Regardless of whether Rasmea’s Israeli conviction and prison time were deserved or just, they happened and needed to be disclosed in response to clear questions on immigration forms. Case closed.

But there is another story here, in which Rasmea, her attorneys and supporters seek to exonerate Rasmea in court and in the court of public opinion by trying to relitigate Rasmea’s 1970 conviction, and the history of the Middle East conflict going back to the creation of the State of Israel.

As with all anti-Israeli propaganda campaigns, facts are invented, denied or twisted, and repeated with religious fervor to the point that Rasmea now is portrayed as the victim rather than the perpetrator….

That victim narrative, which will be explored in more detail later in this post, is false based on the known facts and evidence….

This actually is just a story of a terrorist bomber rightly convicted in Israel, who then lied on her visa and naturalization applications to the U.S. and was rightly convicted a second time in federal court in Detroit.

Among other things, Rasmea’s co-conspirator stated in a 2004 pro-Palestinian documentary that Rasmea was the mastermind. Rasmea herself admitted to the attempted bombing of the British Consulate. An observer from the U.N.  International Red Cross stated at the time that the trial was fair. Rasmea confessed in an exhaustively detailed written statement just one day after arrest, though she and her supporters now claims the confession was only after several weeks of sexual torture. And so on, and so on.

Yet Rasmea has become a hero to the anti-Israel movement, including activist groups in Chicago and campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine nationally.

The false narrative of Rasmea’s innocence in the bombing still is peddled by her supporters, despite having been completely refuted. In mid-January 2015, writing in the socialist Jacobin magazine, University of Illinois at Chicago Prof. Nadine Nabar writes, Organizing After the Odeh Verdict:

What Odeh could not say was the following: an Israeli military sweep had picked up her and five hundred other Palestinians in 1969. The Israelis sexually tortured her for forty-five days, pushing her into a confession about two bombings that killed two people and injured many more. She had testified about the torture at the United Nations upon her release in 1979. She had been denied a fair trial. And she withdrew her confession shortly after she made it.

I wrote to Nabar, asking her to correct the record or at least acknowledge the evidence, but I heard no response and as of this writing the Jacobin article, which has been shared widely on social media, has not been corrected.

This reflects the abject refusal of Rasmea supporters to focus on evidence rather than an anti-Israel conspiratorial victim narrative.

That victim narrative will be on full display in the coming weeks, as a national week of action, National Week of Action to Defend Rasmea, is planned for February 9-15.

The National Week of Action is just part of a larger strategy trying to influence the court for the March 15 sentencing on the immigration charge. This action includes an organized letter writing campaign meant to appear grassroots:

You may recall that protest actions by anti-Israel groups caused the federal judge in the Detroit trial twice to impose orders protecting jurors from protesters.

Various SJP affiliates will be holding campus events at which there will be a live stream of Rasmea and others.

But before the National Week of Action, there is the DePaul fundraiser.

DePaul SJP has been particularly aggressive, as we documented in If you know a DePaul student, read this:

DePaul SJP succeeded in passing an anti-Israel divestment resolution, which the university rejected.

No surprise, then, that DePaul SJP is hosting the Rasmea fundraiser, at the student center it has used before for anti-Israel activism:

Here is the Event Page on Facebook (see also Featured Image):

Paul Miller writes that there may be a reaction on campus to the fundraiser:

The February 3, 2015 event is being touted as “a fundraiser to celebrate the resilience of Rasmea Odeh.” But some Blue Demon students believe this gathering serves as an indictment of SJP and their support of terrorism, not peace.

“While we’ve seen SJP use a variety of underhanded tactics on campuses across the country, this is a new level of extreme,” Mick Silverman, VP Students Supporting Israel at DePaul, told the Salomon Center. “It just goes to show that this is an organization that has no interest in a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but only seeks to continue to destabilize that situation by allying with convicted terrorists.”

We’ll keep following the Rasmea story; it epitomizes at so many levels the false victimization narrative of the anti-Israel movement.

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