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Alex Odeh was the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee when the advocacy group's offices in Santa Ana, California, were bombed on this day in 1985. The FBI quickly narrowed the list of suspects, honing in on the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a recognized terrorist group in the United States.
Odeh's death was one of three bombings at the time attributed to the JDL by the FBI.
Years later, the JDL was responsible for the bombings of Arab American US Congressman Darryl Issa's offices in San Diego in October 2001. Two JDL members were sent to prison for the Issa attack, which only received one mention by CNN in the national media of their sentencing. One died incarcerated.
WHY TARGET ODEH?
Odeh was Christian Palestinian-American whose family fled the Occupied West Bank in 1972 and resettled in the United States. He was a noted human rights activist, poet, and writer who gave his life to pursuing human rights.
Experts believe the motivation for Odeh's assassination was revenge for the murder of Leon Klinghoffer on October 7, 1985. Klinghoffer was a Jewish American sailing on the Achille Lauro. According to Israeli sources, the ship had been hijacked by terrorists representing the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). However, the information coming into the ADC, intelligence services, and media did not support this assertion. Odeh went on national television after the attack in the United States, clarifying neither the PLO nor Palestinians were responsible for the incident.
His position did not go over well with certain people, and four days later, terrorists bombed the ADC offices in California, killing Odeh.
Odeh would be proven correct in 1992 as the PLO was not responsible for the Achille Lauro hijacking nor the death of Klinghoffer. This fact would become known with publishing the expose book "Profits of War" (page 122) by former Israeli Defense Forces Senior Intelligence Officer Ari Ben-Menashe.
Ben-Menashe had direct knowledge of the event and made it clear that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had nothing to do with the Achille Lauro hijacking. The hijacking was, he disclosed, a black flag operation by Israeli intelligence designed to place blame and delegitimize the PLO in the early days of the First Intifada. At the time, the Palestinian cause was gaining sympathy, and international support for Israel's actions was waning. Israel reversed this trend by presenting the Achille Lauro hijacking as a terrorist act by Palestinians. Israeli intelligence would deploy a similar propaganda tactic in 2010 against the Mavi Marmara, which was also proved wrong.
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Alex Odeh was murdered because he supported human rights, his ethnicity, origin, and his refusal to bow to terrorism. Decades later, as of this writing, and despite several suspects living in freedom within Israel, no one has been questioned or arrested. The ADC continues to declare Alex Odeh Day every year until justice occurs for him and his family.
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