Bombing death links ‘gentle’ man to anti-Arab violence

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SANTA ANA, Calif. — He was the gentlest of men, his friends and relatives said, a poet who spent what free time he had with his wife and three small daughters, enjoying the parks near their Orange County condominium and snapping dozens of pictures of his girls.

He had received threats, to be sure, but he was an American now in a free and mostly peaceful country, and he only occasionally took precautions, such as carefully checking his mail. What worried him were his trips back to his village on the Palestinian West Bank, where his 80-year-old father told of Israeli soldiers harassing the men in the cafes.

So when Alex Odeh, West Coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, approached the door of his second-floor office here Friday on a beautiful, smog-free morning, thoughts of violent death were probably far from his mind.

According to authorities here and his relatives, a tripwire attached to the door apparently set off the bomb that tore through the lower part of his body. The explosion was so great that it showered the palm-lined street below with concrete, torn curtains and glass, and slightly injured seven people in adjoining offices or on the street.

Two hours later the bald, soft-spoken 41-year-old author and college instructor was dead. Emergency surgery had failed to save him.

In the wake of his death has come a wave of indignation from Arab Americans across the country who are convinced that ignorance and insensitivity within the U.S. government and the American news media had helped inspire Odeh's killers, as yet unidentified.

In the view of both Odeh's closest friends and harshest critics, a key trigger to the attack was an interview he gave a local television station the day before the blast and the way the station edited the interview to match heightened public interest in the Palestinian terrorist hijacking of an Italian ocean liner.

In the few seconds of an interview broadcast Thursday night on KABC-TV, Odeh suggested that the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Yasser Arafat, had no role in the hijacking.

“The media ought to give the PLO and Arafat recognition, inform the public about the PLO as a political organization and Arafat in particular as the chairman of the PLO, who is a man of peace,” he said.

In segments of the interview that were not broadcast, according to ADC Los Angeles chapter President David Habib, Odeh “condemned the hijacking of the ship, condemned terrorism around the world ... yet they decided to broadcast a little part that seemed to show Alex Odeh and the ADC are a pro-Arafat organization.” A KABC spokeswoman declined to comment.

When a relative later expressed fear of reaction to the interview, Odeh reportedly asked, “Why are you worried?”

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The paper is taken from Maria's slide label, not from a masthead: no masthead or folio appears on the clipping. It is the only clipping on that slide and the only label, so the mapping is unambiguous. Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: UNCONFIRMED — Maria's label says The Sacramento Bee; no masthead or folio appears on this scan

Cite this clipping

"Bombing death links ‘gentle’ man to anti-Arab violence," The Sacramento Bee, 14 October 1985. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1985-038. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1985-038