One step forward for Rasmea

SUPPORTERS OF Rasmea Odeh are planning another national call-in day for Monday, August 18, to demand that federal prosecutors drop all charges against the Palestinian community leader, building on an important positive development in the case last week.

On August 11, Judge Paul Borman announced he would step down from presiding over the Odeh case, reversing a previous ruling less than two weeks before when he denied a defense motion calling for him to recuse himself.

With his announcement that he would step down, Borman admitted the crux of the defense case--that his longtime financial and political ties to Israel "could be perceived as establishing a reasonably objective inference of a lack of impartiality in the context of the issues presented in this case," as Borman himself wrote in his court order.

Borman has been "a lifelong supporter and promoter of Israel and has deep ties to the state of Israel spanning over 50 years," Odeh's lawyers wrote in their motion. He has donated millions of dollars of his own money to the state of Israel and associated causes. There was no way Borman could remain neutral and detached given the facts of the Odeh case, which very much revolve around Israel's undemocratic and violently repressive policies.

ODEH WAS arrested last October by Department of Homeland Security agents on trumped-up charges of immigration fraud. She is accused of having failed to disclose a previous conviction on her U.S. citizenship application, filed in 2004. This "conviction" came nearly half a century before, handed down by an Israeli military tribunal.

Odeh was tortured by Israeli soldiers--who sexually humiliated and threatened to rape her, as she detailed in the film Women in Struggle--into confessing to being connected to two bombings in Jerusalem. This coerced confession was the basis of the "conviction"--Odeh spent 10 years in an Israeli prison before she was released as part of a prisoner exchange.

As the whole world has come to learn in the past several years, a conviction by a military kangaroo court in Israel is proof of nothing whatsoever. According to the Palestinian Authority, some 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israel since 1967--roughly 20 percent of the population.

Yet this is why the federal government is targeting Odeh today--the FBI said in a statement that the conviction on "terrorism" charges in Israel half a century ago would have been a sufficient reason to deny her application for citizenship in 2004.

The persecution of Rasmea Odeh is all the more galling today after her two decades in the U.S., spent advocating for women and the Arab American community. She has worked as a lawyer, and is well known in the Chicago area for the leading role she has played in the Arab American Action Network, which offers literacy, domestic violence prevention, and other programs. Odeh was given an award last year by the Chicago Cultural Alliance for her work in support of immigrant women.

Supporters recognize that her arrest and prosecution today is part of the U.S. government's war on Arab Americans--and it plays a particularly ugly role now in smearing the Palestinian resistance to occupation after the Israeli government's savage war on Gaza this summer.

The August 18 call-in day will urge federal prosecutors to drop the charges right now. Next, supporters will gather in Detroit on September 2 to be in court with Odeh when there is a status hearing with the new judge.