Rasmea Odeh Speech At Northwestern Draws Protest From Hillel — And J Street
The Northwestern University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine is hosting the Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh — sparking a protest by Hillel that has been joined by the school’s J Street U chapter.
The Monday SJP event in titled “When They Come for Rasmea Odeh, They Come for All of Us” and organizers say Odeh will speak about “her struggle and the larger struggle for Palestinian Liberation,” from SJP read.
Northwestern’s Hillel says it will a candlelit vigil nearby, which the J Street group will join.
“Our goal is not to protest free speech, but instead to mourn the victims of the convicted terrorist who is speaking on our campus,” a statement from Hillel read.
Rasmea Odeh was convicted by a military court of a 1969 bombing that killed two and served 10 years in Israeli prison. (Her defenders maintain she was tortured into confessing.) When applying for U.S. citizenship in 1995, she covered up her conviction and is now being deported.
Odeh has become prominent amidst anti-Trump protests and played a key role in the giant Women’s March on inauguration weekend.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO