Two Americans killed in one week, and the papers that said soTwo Americans killed in one week, and three papers said so themselves · October 1985 to July 1986
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October 1985 to July 1986
Two Americans killed in one week, and the papers that said so
On 10 October 1985 Alex Odeh went on local television in Southern California and said two things. One was that Yasser Arafat was “a man of peace.” The other was that the hijacking of the Achille Lauro was indefensible. The second was cut from the broadcast. The next morning he opened the door of his Santa Ana office and a bomb trip-wired to it killed him. He was 41, a poet, a father of three daughters, and the West Coast director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Leon Klinghoffer had been murdered aboard the Achille Lauro three days earlier. What happened next is not something this archive counted — it is something American papers wrote down themselves, in their own voice, within five weeks: that one of the two deaths had become a national event and the other had barely registered. Two of them were the New York Times, counting its own pages.
“Arab activist killed by Santa Ana bomb.”
San Francisco Examiner, the day after. “Arab and Jewish organizations condemned a bombing that killed an Arab-American civil rights activist.” The paper prints the line he had given an interviewer the night before: Arafat was “a man of peace.”
CP-1985-019“His friends and relatives say he was the gentlest of men, a poet who spent what free time he had with his wife and three daughters.”
The Courier-Journal of Louisville. “He had received threats, but he was an American now in a free and mostly peaceful country. He only occasionally took precautions, such as carefully checking his mail.” What worried him were the trips home to the West Bank, where his 80-year-old father told him about Israeli soldiers.
CP-1985-021“Finally, the West should recognize the evil nature of the PLO.”
Star Tribune, a syndicated column. “If nothing else, the Achille Lauro incident should have opened the West’s eyes to the true nature of the Palestine Liberation Organization.” Alex Odeh is not in it.
CP-1985-008“His only crime was to be an Arab.”
The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. “Leon Klinghoffer has been mourned and eulogized across the United States. But what about Alex Odeh?” The Klinghoffer family had personal phone calls from the president. Odeh “drew sparse media attention and perfunctory condolences from the White House.”
CP-1985-023“On the deaths of Alex Odeh, Leon Klinghoffer.”
The same paper, the following day, in its own voice. “Two Americans died at the hands of terrorists last week. One death received great attention; the other was barely noted.” Then everything the country had learned about Klinghoffer, listed: the immigrant parents, the hardware store, the closeness to family, the charity.
CP-1985-024“Most of your front page and several inside pages on Oct. 12 were given over to the aftermath of the Achille Lauro hijacking… On an inner page, it was recorded that the Santa Ana, Calif., offices… had been bombed, killing Alex Odeh.”
A letter to the New York Times, printed by the New York Times, counting the paper’s own pages back to it. “Pity and horror are rightly awakened by the cruel murder of Mr. Klinghoffer, an elderly and health-impaired American. Equal pity and horror should be felt by all of us to the murder of Mr. Odeh, a man in his early prime — and, if it matters, an American, too.”
CP-1985-027“In the same week that Leon Klinghoffer was murdered in the Mediterranean for the crime of being Jewish, Alex Odeh was murdered in California for the crime of being an Arab.”
The New York Times, five weeks after. The piece records that the Anti-Defamation League denounced the Odeh killing immediately, as “domestic terrorism which cannot be tolerated,” and that “a disturbingly different judgment” came from elsewhere.
CP-1985-029“Arab-Americans protest FBI handling of Alex Odeh bombing murder case.”
Los Angeles Herald Examiner, from a congressional hearing. The FBI’s director of investigations blamed the bombing on “very few individuals” in Jewish extremist groups and said the case had the highest priority in the domestic terrorism program. “We have suspects in this case,” he said, and would not say when there might be arrests. That is where these clippings end.
CP-1986-022“Let tears be shed for Alex Odeh.”
The Plain Dealer again, nine months on, and this is where the editing comes out: the day before he was killed Odeh had said on television that Arafat and the PLO were not behind the hijacking, and “statements Odeh made denouncing the hijacking and terrorism in general were cut from the broadcast.”
CP-1986-023This archive was built by searching for particular events, so the number of clippings it holds about either man measures collecting and nothing else. No count here establishes how much coverage either death received, and none is offered. The claim is narrower and it belongs to the papers: within five weeks of 11 October 1985, the Star Tribune, the Plain Dealer and the New York Times each printed the disparity as their own subject, and one of the three was being shown its own front page by a reader. Whether anyone was ever charged in Alex Odeh’s killing is not something these clippings answer. In July 1986 the FBI said it had suspects.