One of eight women running “A Day Without Women” — the follow-up protest to the January 21 anti-Trump Women’s March on D.C. — is one Rasmea Yousef Odeh. She is more than just your garden-variety kneejerk (emphasis on jerk) liberal Trump hater. Odeh spent a decade in an Israeli jail for her involvement in two terrorist bombings made while she was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). One of those attacks, a 1969 bombing of a Jerusalem Super Sol Market, killed two Hebrew University students who were in the store shopping for groceries.
The Palestinian-born Odeh was sentenced to life for being the ringleader behind the attack. After spending ten years in prison, she was released with 77 other terrorists in an exchange for the return of an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon.
After her release from prison Odeh eventually moved to the United States where she served as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and later as a Obamacare navigator (snark withheld).
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Odeh became a citizen in 2004, but in 2014 she was convicted of lying to the immigration authorities about her Israeli conviction. 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 application.
She was sentenced to 18 months in prison, stripped of her citizenship, and considered for deportation. However, Odeh argued that she had lied as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder from the Israeli police sexually torturing and raping her to get a confession. According to her attorneys, Odeh falsely confessed after being was viciously tortured and raped by Israeli military authorities for weeks. There is plenty of evidence that claim is untrue.
Fast forward to now and to a story published in The Guardian earlier this month under the headline “Women of America: we’re going on strike. Join us so Trump will see our power.” According to the opening paragraph, the strike, to take place in March, “may mark the beginning of a new wave of militant feminist struggle.”
Militant struggle? That sounds right up Odeh’s ally. The article further explains:
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.
The article doesn’t mention whether Odeh will be packing heat, but don’t be surprised if she is.
Cross-posted at The Lid
