On the deaths of Alex Odeh, Leon Klinghoffer

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Two Americans died at the hands of terrorists last week. One death received great attention; the other was barely noted. Leon Klinghoffer, the retired New York businessman killed by the Achille Lauro hijackers, became known overnight.

We learned of his early years with immigrant parents who owned a New York hardware store, of his hard work and success in business, of his closeness to his family and circle of friends, of his charity and his dedication to Jewish causes.

Klinghoffer’s death and events that followed brought on an international crisis, soured relations between the United States and several friendly nations, dimmed hopes for progress toward peace in the Middle East and caused the Italian government to fall. Alex Odeh, 41, was the West Coast regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

Last week a Los Angeles television station broadcast a short snippet from a long interview with Odeh. In the half-minute chosen for broadcast, he defended the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Yasir Arafat. When Odeh opened the door to his Santa Ana, Calif., office the next morning, a bomb exploded. Two hours later he was dead.

News of Odeh’s killing came in short wire-service stories that gave the barest sketch of his life. Reaction was confined mostly to the Arab-American community, a situation that frustrates people like Noha Ismail, Minnesota’s ADC coordinator. In a letter on this page she challenges Americans for their seeming indifference to this terrorist act.

By all accounts, Odeh was a gentle, soft-spoken man, a poet, a college teacher and a defender of the Palestinian people. David Habib, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the ADC, said Odeh had devoted his life to fighting ignorance about the Middle East and discrimination against Arabs in the United States.

Odeh saw in callousness and insensitivity a challenge to work harder, not an excuse to get angry. “He was so used to it,” Habib said. “He just understood.” Odeh was born to a Roman Catholic family in the Palestinian village of Jifna, near Jerusalem. His father, a retired grocer, still lives there.

Odeh studied at Bir Zeit University and Al-Najah University on the West Bank and at the University of Cairo. He moved to the United States in 1972 and received a master’s degree in political science from the University of California at Fullerton in 1978. He taught Arabic and Middle East history at California colleges.

He was a member of an academic senate and the Los Angeles County Human Rights Commission. Odeh jealously guarded the too-little time he had for his wife, Norma, and his three daughters, Helena, 7; Samia, 5, and Susan, 2. Friends said the family particularly enjoyed the parks near their Orange County home. Odeh apparently earned a modest salary and carried no life insurance.

His death leaves his wife and daughters with very little. Leon Klinghoffer and Alex Odeh, both Americans, one of Palestinian heritage, one of Jewish, both victims of the terrible violence that dominates the Middle East. Noha Ismail is right: Americans should be outraged at both deaths; they should mourn both victims.

Cite this clipping

"On the deaths of Alex Odeh, Leon Klinghoffer," Star Tribune, 19 October 1985. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1985-024. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1985-024

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Two Americans killed in one week, and the papers that said so