Loading ...Activists and Family Members Keep the Memory of Alex Odeh Alive, 30 Years After His Unsolved Assassination
If you were able to identify your and others’ misfortunes
I would have brought out an extraordinary human being of you
–from a poem by Alex Odeh
On the morning of Oct. 11, 1985, Norma Odeh made breakfast for her husband, Alex, in their Orange home. The night before, KABC-TV Channel 7 had interviewed Odeh, West Coast regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and one of the U.S.’s most prominent Arab-American activists. The interviewer wanted his opinions about the Achille Lauro hijacking and the subsequent killing of 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer that had happened just a couple of days before.A camera crew filmed Alex at the ADC offices in Santa Ana. He condemned the hijacking, as well as terrorism in general. But he also claimed the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) wasn’t responsible for the attack and called Yasser Arafat “a man of peace” for helping to secure the release of hostages.
“After he came home, we watched it together,” Norma recalls. “I hope to God nobody does anything to you,” she told him then. Alex’s sister also phoned him with her worries after seeing the news segment. He moaned to his wife about how KABC had simplified his nuanced statements into a soundbite about Arafat, then went to bed.
The interview was still on Norma’s mind the next morning when Alex kissed her goodbye. A long day awaited him, including a speech at Congregation B’nai Tzadek, a Jewish synagogue in Fountain Valley.
Odeh arrived at the ADC’s second-story offices in Santa Ana around 9 a.m. His assistant usually opened up in the morning, but she was running errands that day for an upcoming banquet. As Odeh turned the doorknob, a rigged 30-pound pipe bomb exploded, blowing off his legs. Shards from the shattered windows rained onto the street. Only the concrete floor saved the debris-strewn office from total obliteration. Paramedics hoisted Odeh’s charred body onto a stretcher and rushed him to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana; doctors pronounced him dead roughly two hours after the attack. He was 41 years old.
Around the time Odeh passed away, Norma was visiting a friend. The woman was sobbing uncontrollably on the front porch of her home, saying a bomb had struck an office in Santa Ana, perhaps the ADC, and someone had been killed–only she didn’t know who. Norma’s heart sped as rapidly as her thoughts as she raced to where her husband worked. “I couldn’t believe what I saw,” she says. “The police wouldn’t let me in and told me Alex was at the hospital.” She drove to Western Medical Center, where Alex’s brother, Sami, delivered the bad news.
Odeh’s assassination barely made a blip in national headlines, lost in the aftermath of Klinghoffer’s murder. Multiple law-enforcement agencies, including the Santa Ana Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), gathered at the scene of the crime. No group took credit for the bombing, and law enforcement eventually lagged on the case, never making an arrest or publically naming suspects. Odeh’s murder remains unsolved 30 years later.
But if Odeh’s killers were banking on his death and the passing of time to silence the activist, it didn’t work. Monuments to Odeh were erected from Santa Ana to Palestine, and a new generation of Arab-American activists have embraced Odeh as their movement’s first martyr.
“I want people to know what my father stood for,” says Helena Odeh, one of Alex and Norma’s three daughters and the only one old enough to have any memories of her father, including of that terrible day. “He wouldn’t rest until there was peace between Arabs and Jews, but [he] passed away before that could happen.”
Source: blogs.ocweekly.com