TEL AVIV – A convicted former Palestinian terrorist was among the Women’s March activists who urged American women to join a day of “striking, marching and blocking roads” next month, highlighting President Donald Trump as “aggressively misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist.”
Organizers of the “international day of struggle” are calling it a protest “against male violence and in defense of reproductive rights.”
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.
In an oped published by The Guardian on Monday entitled, “Women of America: we’re going on strike. Join us so Trump will see our power,” Odeh and her cohorts urge the mobilization of women – including trans women – to strike against “attacks on Muslim and migrant women, on women of color and working and unemployed women, on lesbian, gender nonconforming and trans women.”
Violence against women … has many facets: it is domestic violence, but also the violence of the market, of debt, of capitalist property relations, and of the state; the violence of discriminatory policies against lesbian, trans and queer women; the violence of state criminalization of migratory movements; the violence of mass incarceration; and the institutional violence against women’s bodies through abortion bans and lack of access to free healthcare and free abortion.
Let us use the occasion of this international day of action to be done with lean-in feminism and to build in its place a feminism for the 99%, a grassroots, anti-capitalist feminism — a feminism in solidarity with working women, their families and their allies throughout the world.
Odeh has also been invited to deliver an address at the upcoming National Member Meeting for an organization that goes by the name of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). She will speak alongside Linda Sarsour, the anti-Israel Palestinian-American activist who made headlines for becoming the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Trump’s executive immigration order.
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.
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