A public policy group president expressed his outrage recently against Rep. Janice Danoff "Jan" Schakowsky (D-IL) after seeing her in a photograph standing next to a woman once convicted of a terror attack.
Paul Miller, executive director and president of the Haym Salomon Center in Northbrook, wrote an opinion piece for the Observer website in which he also lambasted the media in general for not taking issue with Schakowsky, who was appearing at an anti-travel ban rally in Chicago when the picture was taken.
Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian woman and former U.S. citizen, was tried and convicted for the bombing murder of Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe in 1970. A one-time director of the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network, Odeh was convicted for a second time in 2014 on related charges, including immigration fraud, and served jail time.
Miller wrote that Schakowsky also once featured UPI journalist and former White House correspondent Helen Thomas at a fundraiser.
“The late standard bearer of the White House press corps was notorious for her disdain for the Jewish state,” he wrote. “But I could never have imagined that the congresswoman, who represents one of the largest Jewish constituencies in the country, would be willing to share the stage with a killer.”
Miller also said that Odeh has become something of a poster child for progressives, who argue that she was a victim of Zionist aggression.
“Both Odeh and Jedda have blood on their hands – Jewish blood, to be precise,” he wrote. “This is what makes these more recent developments so troubling.”
Mahmoud Jedda, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, served 17 years in prison for planting bombs.
In October 2016, Joan McCarthy Lasonde, challenging Schakowsky for her House seat, also took umbrage at the implications of the congresswoman’s evident connection with Odeh.
Lasonde “demanded that Schakowsky resign based on her alleged complicity in what Lasonde referred to as ‘orchestrated political violence,’ ” the Observer reported at the time.
Miller also took aim at what he described as a media indifferent to the implications in the photograph.
"If a GOP official shared the stage with a convicted terrorist or notorious anti-Semite, The New York Times would feature the story on the front page for at least a week," he said. "But when Democrats consort with hate, it’s swept under the rug."
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