Iowa results... And 2 murder suspects living in the open
Iowa Democrats released final (?) results of their caucus today, with the party’s lawyer saying that even if demonstrable math errors exist in the results -- which they do -- the party will not correct them. Certifying knowingly false election results is arguably against federal election laws, and the Iowa Democratic Party is playing with fire here, but it’s claiming that it would actually be a crime to fix the results and make them right. Somehow Sanders won the popular vote by three percentage points but lost the national delegate race by two. The best place to follow the details of how this is going down is the Twitter account @Taniel. The New York Times has found reporting errors in one in six precincts. The Sanders campaign is asking for a “partial recanvass” of the voting.
A new Intercept investigation, by David Sheen, has identified two prime suspects in the assassination living openly in Israel. The story of their (so far) evasion of justice is worth the read.
Alex Odeh was born in 1944 in British Mandate Palestine to a Christian family in the West Bank village of Jifna, near Ramallah, just four years before the founding of Israel. He immigrated in 1972 to the United States, where he became a spokesperson for the Arab American community, challenging negative portrayals of Middle Easterners and Muslims, which were back then at least as commonplace as they are today.
Odeh, the Southern California regional director at the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, was known for his efforts to build bridges between Jews and Arabs, but his outreach was rejected by nationalist elements of the Jewish community, which saw him as an emerging threat.
ADC had become a target of the Jewish right after it began challenging the pro-Israel consensus in the U.S., organizing demonstrations against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In 1984, ADC members were regularly receiving threatening phone calls from an individual or individuals identifying as the leader of the Jewish Defense League, an anti-Arab movement led by Rabbi Meir Kahane. Physical attacks began the following year, after the ADC began taking out advertisements in the Washington Post attempting to convince American voters and public officials that Israel should no longer receive annual allotments of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid.
On October 11, 1985, Odeh was scheduled to speak at Congregation B’nai Tzedek, a Reform synagogue. As he entered the Santa Ana, California office of the ADC that morning, however, a bomb exploded. He died on the operating table two hours later. It was the second bomb attack in just as many months against the ADC.
Hours after Odeh was killed, his slaying was justified by the Jewish Defense League. “I have no tears for Mr. Odeh,” said Irv Rubin, then the national chair of the JDL. “He got exactly what he deserved.”
No arrests were made. In April 1994, when Odeh would have celebrated his 50th birthday, the city of Santa Ana erected a statue of him to commemorate his life and his work. Two years later, the statue was defaced, and a few months later, it was again desecrated by vandals who doused it in buckets of blood-red paint.
That same year, the FBI announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Odeh’s killers. It has so far gone unclaimed.