A woman who committed heinous acts of terrorism years ago and who became an Obamacare navigator years after that had become known, is finally getting locked up. Dominating the news this week are the words of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, who has been caught on video admitting that Democrats had to use deception to help pass the legislation. In several instances, Gruber referred to the American people as “stupid”, which was the apparent reason for the deception. A side story to that has to do with a woman who used to be an Obamacare navigator. Well, she’s also a terrorist whose past clearly must have been known by whomever granted her navigator status. She’s finally getting locked up.
According to the National Review’s Jillian Kay Melchior:
Forty-five years ago, Rasmieh Yousef Odeh participated in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem that killed two men in their early 20s and wounded several more. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had hidden a bomb in a box of sweets at a grocery store, and when it detonated, it left Eddie Joffe so charred that his brother struggled to identify the corpse. His parents grieved for the rest of their lives, Eddie’s brother Basil told me.
Some small measure of justice was served yesterday, when a federal jury convicted Odeh for lying on her U.S. immigration papers in 1995, then again on her citizenship papers in 2004. The 67-year-old, deemed a flight risk by the judge, will remain behind bars until her March 10 sentencing. She faces up to 10 years in prison — which could be a life sentence, given her age — as well as possible deportation and loss of citizenship.
But Odeh’s story has several other disturbing twists, all worth noting.
First, it’s unnerving that it took the federal government nearly two decades to discover that it had allowed a known terrorist into the United States. Odeh had been convicted in Israel and sentenced to life in prison, though the government released her after ten years as part of a prisoner swap.
In the United States, Odeh was hardly discreet about her violent past, agreeing to be interviewed for a 2004 documentary, Women in Struggle, which won awards at the San Diego Film Festival, the AlIsmailia Film Festival in Egypt, and the Kazan Film Festival for Muslim Countries.
About the bombings, the documentary’s overall tone is unapologetic. Odeh discusses how her decade in Israeli prison fueled her “hatred against those who were responsible. Why? I am not responsible. The occupation is.” In the same documentary, a woman named Ayesha said that Odeh, who is either her close friend or a relative, “was [even] more involved than I was” in the bombings. Ayesha also described her disappointment that a second bomb was defused before it could explode; they had hoped it would detonate five or six minutes after the initial bombing and slaughter the responders.
Second, it’s troublesome how, even after the documentary’s release, Odeh — by then a vocal activist in Chicago’s Arab-American community — received certification to work as an Obamacare navigator, and on top of that, received it in one of the states that actually bother to run background checks on in-person counselors. Though a simple Google search would have revealed her shady past, the Illinois Department of Insurance quietly revoked Odeh’s certification only after it became aware of the immigration-fraud investigation. It’s not clear what would have happened if, for example, an Israeli American had gone to her seeking help with signing up for Obamacare, but imagine the possibilities.
It would be nice to see if the same people who hired Odeh have the same reaction to this news that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has to the news about Gruber. Today, Pelosi says she doesn’t know who Gruber is and that he didn’t help write the Obamacare law:
Of course, that’s a far cry from what Pelosi said about Gruber in 2009: