Convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh entered a guilty plea Tuesday and will soon face deportation for lying on her immigration papers to United States authorities about her 1970 convictions in Israel stemming from two deadly bombings.
According to the Associated Press, “Odeh found it impossible to say the word ‘guilty’ when repeatedly asked by U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain. He gave up and accepted her reply that she had admitted her crime in the court document” by saying, “I signed this.”
Before she entered her guilty plea, a man from Detroit reportedly held up a sign outside to honor the victims of Odeh’s 1969 supermarket bombing. “I’m out here for the families,” Dan Cutler, 65, said of Leon Kanner and Edward Joffe, who were just 21 and 22 when they died during the deadly supermarket bombing. Eight others were wounded.
The deadly terrorist attack was one of the first carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). After serving just 10 years of her life sentence, Odeh was released during a prisoner swap in exchange for a captured Israeli soldier and emigrated to the United States several years later through Jordan.
Odeh applied for a U.S. visa in 1994, while living with members of her extended family in Michigan, but allegedly failed to disclose her criminal record. The AP notes that she also allegedly failed to state it when she applied for citizenship in 2004; a crime that would have disqualified and barred her from entering the U.S. in the first place.
In her plea agreement with prosecutors Tuesday, Odeh reportedly said she made the false statements on her immigration papers “intentionally and not as a result of any mistake, post-traumatic stress disorder or any other psychological issue or condition or for any innocent reason.”
Odeh was one of the organizers of the anti-President Donald Trump Women’s March and previously worked as the associate director of the Arab American Action Network. Earlier this month, she received a standing ovation at the anti-Israel Jewish Voices for Peace conference she keynoted at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago, Illinois.
The families of her victims held a memorial service to mourn the loss of their loved ones at the same Chicago hotel while she spoke.
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