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Members of the Far Left Gather to Cheer a Terrorist

Aug. 18 2017

On August 12, a crowd of over 1,000 people assembled to bid farewell to Rasmea Odeh, who participated in the 1969 bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket that killed two college students. Odeh, then a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was arrested and sentenced to prison, but later released as part of a prisoner exchange. She is now being expelled from the U.S. for lying about her terrorist past on her immigration documents. Jonathan Greenberg describes the gathering, which featured the radical writer Angela Davis as its keynote speaker:

[Odeh’s] supporters on Saturday included dozens of progressive advocacy groups and anti-Israel organizations that sponsored the event, such as Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Black Lives Matter.

The convicted terrorist received well-wishers like the bride at a wedding and paused to meet children like a celebrity. Have your kid’s picture taken with a killer! . . . The room was generally young, energetic, . . . diverse, and united around a narrative that included a common enemy: Israel. . . .

[In a speech, one of Odeh’s attorneys], Michael Deutsch, . . . said that her “militancy” had been an inspiration to him. At first, it seemed that word choice might have been a Freudian slip, but as he spoke, it became clear it wasn’t. Deutsch was the first speaker of the night openly—if carefully— to cast terrorism as morally acceptable. He was proud, he said, to . . . “put forward the idea that Palestinians have the international-law right [sic] to struggle against a brutal, illegal occupation by any means necessary.” The crowd cheered. . . .

In the near future, Odeh will be deported from the U.S. The [people present] at this event consider this one grave injustice among many perpetrated against them by a government—and society—that hates them. They are awash in victimhood and antipathy for the broader society in which they live.

Read more at Federalist

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel & Zionism, Leftism, Palestinian terror, PFLP

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic