One of the organizers for the next women’s anti-Trump march is an illegal immigrant who was convicted of terrorism. According to the Daily Mail, Rasmea Yousef Odeh (shown), 69, is a former member of the Marxist-Leninist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who was convicted of killing two men in a bombing at an Israeli supermarket and is facing deportation for lying about her involvement in it in her citizenship application. Odeh and her fellow organizers are calling on women to take part in an anti-capitalist, feminist march next month to oppose President Trump and his “aggressively misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist policies.”
In an open letter to the British newspaper The Guardian, Odeh, along with eight other women, claim that the women’s marches on January 21 marked the beginning of a new age of feminism. The letter’s co-authors encourage women to take part in an “international strike against male violence and in defense of reproductive rights” on March 8. The letter calls upon women to “mobilize” and oppose capitalism and usher in a new and more “militant’ feminism, stating:
The kind of feminism we seek is already emerging internationally, in struggles across the globe: from the women’s strike in Poland against the abortion ban to the women’s strikes and marches in Latin America against male violence; from the vast women’s demonstration of last November in Italy to the protests and the women’s strike in defense of reproductive rights in South Korea and Ireland.
What is striking about these mobilizations is that several of them combined struggles against male violence with opposition to the casualization of labor and wage inequality, while also opposing homophobia, transphobia and xenophobic immigration policies. Together, they herald a new international feminist movement with an expanded agenda: at once anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist and anti-neoliberal.
The letter states that the organizers are taking their inspiration from the Argentinian coalition Ni Una Menos, which defines violence against women as physical, such as domestic violence, but also metaphysical, as in “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.”
The solution to this, according to the authors, is to do away with what they dub “lean-in feminism” and create in its stead a feminism that is militantly anti-capitalist and pro-abortion.
It makes sense that these organizers are asking women to shirk the old feminism since the original feminists were vehemently pro-life and therefore unwelcome in today’s Marxist feminist ideology. CNS News writes, “The suffragettes — Susan B. Anthony in particular — were fiercely pro-life, calling abortion a ‘crime against humanity,’ ‘feticide,’ and ‘child murder.’” But today’s feminist movement is so adamantly pro-abortion that Women’s March co-chairwoman Linda Sarsour told the New York Times that any group that wished to participate in the Women’s March had to be pro-choice.
Though the letter credits Trump’s election as the catalyst that mobilized this new feminist movement, it claims that capitalism has forged the need for such a movement, as women’s conditions of life have deteriorated in the last 30 years as a result of corporate globalization and financialization.
Yet the letter makes no such claims regarding women’s conditions in Muslim-majority nations. The writers purport to oppose “institutional, political, cultural and economic attacks on Muslim and migrant women,” but take no issue with the misogyny that is at the center of the Muslim culture and sharia law. Even the left-leaning Salon wrote a piece last October in which it noted that liberals have been largely silent on the misogyny in the Muslim world, in which women are subject to genital mutilation, arranged marriages, acid attacks, and many more horrors.
Meanwhile, while the letter claims to oppose violence, Odeh’s terroristic actions show otherwise, as she was convicted in 1970 of planting four bombs in Israel, two of which detonated. One of the bombs killed two men at an Israeli supermarket and another detonated at the British Consulate in Israel, though no one was injured.
She served 10 years in prison before being freed in an exchange program for Israeli prisoners. She came to the United States in 1995, and received her American citizenship in 2004; however, in 2013 she was indicted on immigration fraud charges for failing to disclose her criminal record on her citizenship application.
“An individual convicted of a terrorist bombing would not be admitted to the United States if that information was known at the time of arrival,” the Michigan attorney general told ABC at the time.
She has won the right to a new trial, which is set for this spring, according to the New York Post.
As noted by the Daily Mail, Odeh has become “leftist cause célèbre.” In 2013, for example, Odeh was given the Outstanding Community Leader Award by the Chicago Cultural Alliance. And protesters have pleaded for justice on her behalf throughout her immigration trial.
The New York Post also notes that two other signees on the letter are heroes of the far Left. Angela Davis is a former leader of the Communist Party USA and a long-time supporter of the Black Panthers, who was acquitted in 1972 after three guns she bought were used by a 17-year-old to shoot up a courtroom, killing a judge. And Tithi Bhattacharya defended Maoism in the Global South as offering “real protection to the oppressed” in an article for the International Socialist Review.
Clearly, not one of these women is opposed to violence as long as it is in the name of their pet causes. And yet they somehow feel they have a right to speak out against violence. The letter itself calls for disruptive behavior, encouraging women to block roads, bridges, and squares, and, true to the feminist belief system, asks women to abstain “from domestic care and sex work.”
It makes one wonder whether the feminist movement is about women’s rights at all, or if the true intent of the movement is to push a radical, anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-male agenda. No better proof is needed than that someone such as Odeh is the movement’s leader.
