Terry Joffe Benaryeh, the niece of one of two men murdered in the Palestinian terrorist bombing of an Israeli supermarket in Israel, is slamming the involvement of Rasmea Odeh, one of the alleged perpetrators of the attack, in an upcoming women’s protest against President Trump.
“[E]xplain how my family is supposed to reconcile the reality that the woman who stripped my uncle of his life is now deemed a hero by many of my fellow Americans,” Benaryeh wrote in an op-ed she penned in the Huffington Post. “What justification is there for Rasmea Odeh, a woman who killed two people (with the intention of killing more!) to lead a peaceful fight for human rights?”
She asked, “What is the difference between the acts of Omar Mateen, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylan Roof, and Rasmea Odeh? There is no difference. They all carried out acts of terror in the name of their causes, which resulted in the death of innocent civilians. Whether they were targeting the LGBT community, Americans, African Americans, or Jewish Israelis, these were all terrorist acts.”
The Day Without A Woman protest is scheduled to take place on International Women’s Day. “On International Women’s Day, March 8th, women and our allies will act together for equity, justice and the human rights of women and all gender-oppressed people, through a one-day demonstration of economic solidarity,” reads the group’s website.
Last month, ahead of the planned march, Odeh co-authored a manifesto in the Guardian where she called for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.”
Benaryeh wrote that while she supports the Women’s March, she believes “[a] self-confessed murderer should not be the voice for them. Do these feminists support her despite her past? Or worse, because of it?… There is a red line. Supporting someone who purposefully took the lives of innocent civilians is crossing that line. It seems that many have lost their way.”
Breitbart Jerusalem previously reported on Odeh’s case:
As an alleged member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group, Rasmea Odeh was arrested for her alleged involvement in two bombings in the late sixties. Two Israeli university students were killed and nine more were injured.
In 1980, Odeh was freed from an Israeli jail as part of a prisoner exchange deal, and a decade later emigrated to the U.S. She recently made headlines again after being charged with immigration fraud for lying about her terrorist background when applying for U.S. citizenship.
…As part of her immigration fraud case, Odeh claimed that she was sexually assaulted and tortured while in Israeli prison and that she was coerced into confessing.
Rasmieh once worked for the Arab-American Action Network. The group was founded by Mona Khalidi, wife of Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, who was close with Barack and Michelle Obama when they lived in Chicago, Illinois.
A video of Joffe’s late mother, one of Odeh’s victims, shows her inability to recover from the anguish and pain from the loss of her son that she says overshadowed her for 40 years before she died. In her final message to her family, two weeks before she died, Roslyn Joffe said: “What’s overshadowed all my pleasure has been the loss of Edward. I could never get over that and it overshadowed all my joy.”
Follow Adelle Nazarian on Twitter and Periscope @AdelleNaz
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