Al Jazeera reports: “Biden appears to have rejected a request by Shireen Abu Akleh’s family to meet with him during his visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank this week, as pressure mounts on the United States to ensure accountability for the journalist’s killing by Israeli forces.”
But Abu Akleh is hardly the first U.S. citizen that the Israeli military has killed. The Intercept just published the piece “No Path to Justice: Israeli Forces Keep Killing Americans While U.S. Officials Give Them a Pass” about peace activist Rachel Corrie who was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving a bulldozer in 2003.
DAVID SHEEN, realdavidsheen@gmail.com, @davidsheen
An independent journalist, Sheen just wrote a pair of pieces: “Alex Odeh Assassination: New Testimony Could Finally Bring Jewish Defense League to Justice” and “As U.S. Refuses to Act, Suspected Alex Odeh Assassins Enjoy Influential Role in Israeli Politics” for MintPress.
He writes: “Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh was brutally murdered in public. Odeh, the regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), was killed when a bomb exploded as he entered the ADC’s Santa Ana, California offices on October 11, 1985.
“It is widely believed that the culprits were Robert Manning, Keith Israel Fuchs, and Baruch Ben Yosef (also known as Andy Green). The trio were members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a Jewish supremacist domestic terrorist group that had repeatedly harassed and threatened Odeh. From 1984 until his death in 2002, the group was led by the notorious militant Irv Rubin. Manning is currently serving life in prison for the murder of another individual. Fuchs and Ben Yosef, however, fled to Israel and live there freely to this day.“Law enforcement officials told me that the FBI has always considered the three men its top suspects. But despite significant evidence of the trio’s guilt, the bureau has never pressed for charges. Many have alleged high government interference. According to active agents still assigned to the case, pressing charges against Manning, Fuchs, and Ben Yosef would require testimony from a witness who heard at least one of those very men discussing their own involvement in Alex Odeh’s murder.“We now have it.”
Sheen reports that he has interviewed a former assocate of Ben Yosef and Fuchs who is willing to testify as to their guilt of the murder of Odeh. But the FBI has yet to question this individual.
Sheen traces the lack of prosecution to decisions taken initially by Rudy Giuliani (who was District Attorney of the Southern District of New York following Odeh’s murder when Fuchs and Ben Yosef were in New York) — and, in the years since, to the State Department.
He also notes that Ben Yosef and Fuchs have groomed two far right successors who entered the Israeli Knesset in March 2021 — Itamar Ben Gvir and Simcha Rothman.
Sheen also states that “since the Jerusalem Post’s February 1994 profile … titled “Apocalypse Now” — no Israeli news outlets have noted that terrorist-turned-attorney Baruch Ben Yosef and two of his Kahanist comrades are suspected of murder in the United States.”
