San Francisco Examiner · San Francisco, CA · 12 October 1985
CP-1985-019
Arab activist killed by Santa Ana bomb
EXAMINER NEWS SERVICES
Transcribed from the clipping
SANTA ANA — Arab and Jewish organizations condemned a bombing that killed an Arab-American civil rights activist as the FBI began to investigate whether a terrorist group committed the attack. The bomb yesterday ripped apart the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s local office, killing the group’s West Coast leader, Alex Odeh.
Odeh had called PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat “a man of peace” in an interview the night before. The 41-year-old Odeh was regional director of the committee, a 13,000-member organization of Arab-Americans that fights discrimination against people of Arab descent. Eight other people were injured in the blast, police said.
Seven received hospital treatment and all were released yesterday from Western Medical Center. Odeh, a Palestinian-born naturalized U.S. citizen, died at the hospital about 2½ hours after the 9 a.m. blast. No one claimed responsibility for the attack and no one has been arrested.
Attorney Richard Ayoob, a director of the National Association of Arab Americans, said Odeh was “very committed to the idea of dialogue with the leading Jewish organizations. . . . It would be hard for me to think anyone would harm a hair on his head.” • Alan S.
Katz and Adrian Scharlach, regional presidents of the American Jewish Congress in Southern and Northern California, respectively, condemned the attack in a joint statement. “We extend our condolences and sympathies to the families of Alex Odeh and those wounded by this inexcusable act of terrorism,” the statement said.
“No political disagreement, no matter how critical or deeply felt, justifies attacks on those engaged in peaceful and lawful pursuits.”
Cite this clipping
"Arab activist killed by Santa Ana bomb," San Francisco Examiner, 12 October 1985, p. A-10. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1985-019. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1985-019
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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