It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Your children go out for the evening and they don’t return. Kids being kids, out with friends and murdered in cold blood simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We watch the news coverage in horror, asking ourselves, who could do such a thing? We listen to claims of responsibility and wonder how one could ever justify such indiscriminate killing.
While this does indeed describe the recent terror attacks in Manchester, England, it also describes a very different terrorist attack that received far less coverage.
In February of 1969, two university students in Jerusalem went to the supermarket to buy goods for a field trip the next day. As they were in the market, a bomb exploded, killing them and wounding nine others. Thankfully, due to the discovery and diffusion of a second bomb, more parents didn’t receive fateful calls that day.
Who could do such a thing?
In the case of this Jerusalem terror attack, the perpetrator’s name is Rasmea Odeh, a terrorist who was not only found guilty by an Israeli court of law, but who also confessed to her crime during the proceedings.
More recently, after decades of living in the United States and trying to gain legitimacy as an activist, it was discovered that Ms. Odeh had lied on her immigration papers by failing to disclose her conviction. As a consequence, the U.S. is preparing to deport her to Jordan later this year.
Despite all that is known about Ms. Odeh and her criminal background, Berkeleyside.com recently featured an article on a new bakery in Oakland that had decorated its interior with a giant mural of her face. In the first iteration of the article, Ms. Odeh and her criminal record were not contextualized — a mistake that was, in the end, corrected.
However, as this publication was seeking out context from the bakery owner, it allowed for utterly insufficient answers to its clarifying questions to stand uncontested:
First, the bakery owner asserts that Rasmea Odeh was a political prisoner, tortured into a confession. This is a lie. Records show that Rasmea Odeh was a criminal prisoner who freely confessed to her crime. Easier than facing the consequences of her actions, or for that matter, the families of the children she murdered, Ms. Odeh decided to continue her string of lies. In fact, Israel has a prohibition against torture and is regularly cited in U.S. congressional testimony about the immorality and ineffectiveness of torture. Furthermore, Israel’s courts are widely known as a progressive institution that regularly rules in favor of Palestinian rights groups. It is this same judiciary that saw an Israeli Arab justice sentence a former Israeli (Jewish) president to prison.
Second, the bakery owner would like to believe that Odeh is controversial simply because she is a Palestinian activist. The facts just don’t match. Few movements have as much universal appeal and recognition in countries across the globe as Palestinian self-determination, which manifests itself in foreign aid, of which the Palestinians are the largest per capita recipients. Rasmea Odeh is not controversial because of the movement she supports; she is controversial because she is a convicted murderer and terrorist who is trying to whitewash her crimes by appealing to progressives by portraying herself as an activist.
As our national political environment gets more toxic by the day, and it becomes more common for outright lies to be put into the public domain, we must oppose this trend at the local level if we are to have any power to combat it at the highest level. The bakery owner’s excuses for Odeh are not matters of differing opinions. They are lies and what can only be described as “alternative facts.”
The intention here is not to litigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, place unilateral blame or even suggest a solution. It is simply to make clear that distorting reality and elevating a convicted murderer to role model status takes us further away from justice. Let us never conflate legitimate political activism and social justice movements with terrorism. We can never let one be an excuse for the other.
The bakery owner suggests that she is open to dialogue and having the tough conversations. I believe that to be another lie. We would all find it appalling if a restaurant opened in Oakland that drew inspiration from the terrorist who killed so many young people in Manchester. We would also find it humorous if our fictitious restaurateur thought this would be a platform for dialogue. As a private establishment, a real-life restaurant can make its own choices. As consumers, I suggest we do the same. I won’t support a bakery that sprinkles each dish with hate.
its not kosher. shouldnt eat there anyway.
Thank You, Daniel, for the informative, detailed article.
Yeah, right. All bullcrap.
hisorry to bother but in CCleaner I found an easy update , I found Glary Utilities pro in the advanced sections it has privacy and security click tracks eraser and let it run , click clean after , firefox being non responsive and trying to clean this will hole over 30000 files , cleanj thise CCleaner works nlike a quick charm those nfiles stall CCleaner sorry to come in unavnnounced but hoping you can get the word out , slicker tan snot on a doorknob loolmsorry apologies have a nice day ron b
I notice you’ve studiously avoided mentioning that the owner of this bakery is Arab.
Look, you’re not going to get anywhere with her. Odeh is a terrorist to you and me, but to the bakery owner a terrorist is an Israeli pilot who drops a bomb that accidentally kills Arab civilians. Odeh is a hero to her, as that pilot might be a hero to us if, on another mission, he cratered an Egyptian airfield on June 6, 1967.
If you want to live in a country that, broadly, shares your views on who is a hero and who is a villain, then stop promoting mass Muslim immigration. Let these wonderful people work to better their own countries.
you cant really be comparing the pilot who doesnt mean to kill civilians with a terrorist who does…right?
dont really care what the owner thinks, he isnt allowed to create his own dictionary definitions
owner has every right to post whatever he wants on his walls
we have every right to point out that the mural is of a murdering terrorist and owner is a terror sympathizer
Well, strictly speaking, I can *compare* anything to anything else; I can compare Adolf Hitler to Albert Schweitzer if I wish. And I can compare a mouse to an elephant. To compare doesn’t imply asserting an equivalence.
Now with that out of the way, I’ll stress that my idea about who are the heros, and who are the villains, lines up well with yours. But that’s not going to do us any good if we keep allowing the immigration of people who demonize our heros, demonize us for that matter. For a taste of how that will play out, sit in on a student government debate at Berkeley, Davis, UCLA or hundreds of other campuses. There, we Jews are outnumbered, and we’re being routed.
Today the student senate, twenty years from now the US Senate. It doesn’t have to happen, but it will unless we close the spigot.
Oh well, I dropped a bomb in an area with a bunch of civilians but I didn’t “mean” to hurt any civilians, so I am absolved from all responsibility. Fuck that noise.
BDS, asshole.
Extremely sensible comments, but sadly your ideas are not commonly shared, from what I can see – one of the
problems is the sacred word “asylum”.
Is there a reason the article doesn’t mention that the bakery in question is Reems by Fruitvale BART?
Hey Daniel: You don’t diffuse a bomb. That would mean that you’re spreading it around. You defuse it so it won’t explode. Learn it.
Hmm, well, it seems that despite the author’s claims that Israeli authorities would NEVER use torture to obtain a false confession, Odeh testified before a UN special committee that she was in fact beaten and sexually abused by her captors (https://www.scribd.com/document/323356610/Rasmea-Odeh-Testimony-at-UN-Compiled-by-Joshua-Ruebner). That being a fact, it’s difficult to take this article as credible, since it is clearly biased and non-objective. It starts with a sensationalized attempt at fear-mongering, before claiming moral authority and absolute command of the facts, while actually presenting misleading information which contradicts the known facts. The headline is misleading, because the bakery in question doesn’t actually serve up “hate,” it serves up baked goods, and also supports resistance against state-sponsored genocide and xenophobia against Arab women and the Palestinian people. Look, you can’t have it both ways. You don’t get to define hate and terrorism as one-sided things, when in fact they are not. A bombing of a grocery store isn’t actually a hate crime in the same way a bombing of a church, mosque, or temple would be. It’s not an attack against a religion, but a response to oppressive and genocidal statist policies. It’s unfortunate that people were killed, but the victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and could have been anyone — there’s no evidence that Jews were specifically targeted. Furthermore, by this definition, the state of Israel commits hate crimes on a daily basis against the Palestinian people, including the murder of children. if a child throws a rock at a soldier, and the soldier shoots him, does that make the child a terrorist and not the soldier? When you remove bias and emotionality from the argument put forth by this article, there’s not much argument left, is there? The fact is that in writing such a slanted piece, Mr. Frankenstein is co-signing Islamophobia, violence and sexual abuse of women, as well as oppression and genocide by an occupying, colonialist state. And the results of this piece have been cyber-terrorism and false testimonials against a small business — and an outpouring of community support for the bakery and the mural. I’m not even going to ask the author if he has any shame, since he hasn’t condemned these untruthful attempts at economic gerrymandering, nor admitted that his presentation of the facts was selective and biased. I think it’s pretty sad that someJews themselves cannot distinguish between the Jewish people and the state of Israel–which are not one and the same–and are apparently so obsessed with being on the right side of any moral argument, that they are willing to compromise integrity, truth, and human compassion to do it. Which makes the author of this piece a moral hypocrite. it is entirely ironic when viewed through a historical lens, that the victims of mass genocide would become the perpetrators, not just of genocide, but of fascism against a marginalized population they control with brutal military force and through discriminatory policies. Referring to Israel’s human rights record is a total joke, and yet another example of extreme bias and myopia. According to a Human Rights Watch article dated June 4 of this year, Israel controls its occupied territories through “repression, institutionalized discrimination, and systematic abuses of the Palestinian population’s rights.” (https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses) The HRW report goes on to note unlawful military killings and targeting of covilian structures, excessive police brutality and murder, the building of hundreds of illegal settlements, forced displacement, restrictive pass laws, widespread detention abuses, and a lack of accountability for these abuses.That is such a far cry from the human rights model the author claims Israel is, it begs the question of whether Mr. Frankenstein is delusional or merely uninformed. If we are stating the actual facts here, Israel has essentially instituted a state of apartheid against the Palestinian people. These conditions should provoke outrage from anyone truly concerned with human rights. Yet Mr. Frankenstein is so captivated with spinning the story to claim victimhood that he is unable to discern who the real victims are, and continue to be. Again, that’s sad. I wont even get into the global conflicts which are made possible by the Israeli military-industrial complex, and the millions of human rights abuses they have caused, or the fact that Israel supported the apartheid government in South Africa. If there is any remaining vestige of human compassion in Mr. Frankenstein’s countenance, he should recant the false narrative of this article and repent his attempts at justifying horrendous crimes against a marginalized population in their own homelands. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
Apparently a few activists got together to inform the local community about the mural– and they were attacked. http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/2017/07/non-violent-vigil-attacked-at-reems-in.html
There was a non-violent vigil at Reem’s bakery in Fruitvale that just ended in a vicious assault on the participants. Signs were ripped out of the participants hands- and several were attacked .
Some much for Reem Assil’s claims to be open to hard discussions
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/10b04369dd0697110dfd99f269a9857f0e4b3244216784b0c7ad972d2994f619.jpg .
A bakery that dishes out hatred then tries to capitalize on it http://www.israellycool.com/2017/07/14/reems-bakery-shamelessly-lies-about-non-violent-protest-to-cash-in-on-it/ https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/43afd2aca08709758e556ac665572b12c3629d93b44990418f6a14878334de9d.jpg
Today, a Palestinian teen broke into the home of a Jewish family celebrating Shabbat, and stabbed 3 of them to death. They are celebrating in the streets of Gaza, laughing and dancing and giving out candy.
What Reem’s California Bakery is doing is no different.
The Reem’s story gets more and more insidious. The J has written about the vigils at Reem’s- and the subsequent attacks on participating members. Reem’s has ratcheted up the pressure campaign, and is taking the participants to court in an effort to silence their voices. The Legal Insurrection website writes about it here: http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/08/reems-oakland-bakery-seeks-ct-order-halting-protests-over-terrorist-mural/ and concludes “The case also raises serious constitutional and free speech issues, as the bakery owner seeks to punish protest, to halt or move continued protest, and a prior restraint of speech.”
How sad that you dont know the history of Rasmea and yet you politicize her story in such a vicious way. She was absolved by the UN and experienced unspeakable torture in Israel. She contributed so much, major, as a community organizer in Chicago for over 20 years. We here worked very hard during her unjust deportation and miss her greatly.