‘I Never Thought This Could Happen in America’ : Widow of Slain Leader Prays Killer Is Captured

When Norma Odeh was told on Oct. 11 that her husband had been killed by a bomb exploding in his Santa Ana office, she insisted that the victim could be someone else and demanded to view the body.

Although her husband had been receiving nerve-jangling death threats since he took charge of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee on the West Coast five years ago, the 28-year-old widow said she had never believed that they would be carried out in a land where freedom of speech is revered.

“I never thought this could happen in America,” she said in an interview in the couple’s home in the Orange.

Breaking her self-imposed public silence following her husband’s death, Norma Odeh called her husband “a man of peace”--the same words he had uttered about Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat on local television the night before his death.

“I am angry, very, very angry that something like this can happen in the United States,” Norma Odeh said. “Around the world, people look at America as a land of freedom, where people can speak freely. . . .

“I pray to God they catch those people who did this to Alex. It wasn’t even his time yet.”

Odeh, 41, a Palestine-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, took the full force of the explosion unleashed at 9:11 a.m. as he opened the door to the committee’s second-floor regional office on East 17th Street. His death at 11:24 a.m. of severe injuries to his lower body came less than 12 hours after he appeared on the late night news program of Los Angeles television station KABC, Channel 7.

It was the second time in recent months that a regional office of the Washington-based national organization had been the target of a bombing. On Aug. 16, a 12-inch pipe bomb exploded outside the committee’s offices in Boston, seriously injuring a police officer.

An FBI spokesman said Friday that the Jewish Defense League is suspected in the Santa Ana bombing as well as in two similar East Coast bombings. League leader Irv Rubin has denied responsibility and threatened the federal law enforcement agency with a slander suit, even as FBI officials said Saturday that no arrests were imminent.

As the charges and counter-charges swirl around her, Odeh’s widow still reels at talk of her husband’s death and is distraught about her family’s future.

“I was dependent on Alex in everything. How am I going to support these children?” she asked, gesturing to their daughters, Helena, 7, Samia, 5, and 18-month-old Susan, a pale red-eyed toddler clinging anxiously to her mother’s black mourning dress.

No Presidential Letter

“What makes me more angry is that President Reagan never sent any message, nothing,” she said. “We read in the newspapers that he was going to send a letter of condolence to me. But I never received anything.”

Norma Odeh rankles at the national attention paid the widow of the American killed in the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro.

“Reagan sees Mrs. Klinghoffer,” she said of the widow of Leon Klinghoffer, who was shot and killed, then pushed overboard in his wheelchair by hijackers. “It’s as though her husband was something and mine wasn’t. . . . No one had ever heard of Mr. Klinghoffer before. A lot of people knew Alex.”

A published poet and part-time Arabic instructor at Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, Odeh often wrote letters to the editor and articles defending Arab-Americans and, at times, the PLO.

Odeh also was president of the Arab American Organization Council, which represents some of the estimated 150,000 Arab-Americans in Southern California, and served on the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission.

As regional director of the anti-discrimination committee, a five-year-old national service organization, he viewed his role as a watchdog speaking out against racism and discrimination and championing human rights. Administrative aide Hind Baki, who normally would have been the first to open the office door in the morning, said she viewed the committee’s role as that of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People or the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Contributor to GOP

Odeh also was a “regular contributor” to the Republican Party, his wife said, showing the gold ‘medal of merit’ engraved with President Reagan’s signature. Sent last summer, the blue velvet case was inscribed: “Presented in appreciation for your support as a member of the Republican Presidential Task Force.”

“If he thought so much of Alex, why doesn’t he say something to us?” Norma Odeh asked.

“He should have shown at least a little bit of compassion. Maybe it’s because we are Palestinians.”

Norma Odeh said she wants to see “whoever did it punished . . . and I think the proper punishment is death, but I would not take the law into my own hands.”

Sami Odeh called his elder brother “a true humanitarian” who was “opposed to terrorism and violence in any way, shape or form.”

“Alex believed violence is a way of solving problems between animals,” said the 35-year-old real estate agent, who emigrated with his brother from their home town of Jifna on the West Bank in Israel to the United States in 1975. “Any time we human beings resort to it, we descend to the level of animals.

“Alex believed in communication and dialogue. He understood that the best way to solve problems was to talk about them with the people involved. He had built bridges to all kinds of communities in this way.”

Sami Odeh of Orange said his brother became politically active because of the repression he experienced following the 1967 Six-Day War between Egypt and Israel, when the young Cairo University graduate was not allowed to rejoin his family on the West Bank.

Sami Odeh said his brother, since emigrating to this country and receiving a master’s degree in political science at Cal State Fullerton in 1978, was devoted to three things: His family, the problem of the Palestinian refugees and the “overall negative image of Arab-Americans.”

“The Arab is always portrayed as the villain, the bad guy,” said Sami Odeh, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1979. “Palestinians are usually referred to as terrorists. When Israelis conduct raids in my country, they are called commandos. These words have very important, very different connotations.

“Alex and I believed it all started with the second world war and our government’s blind determination to support the state of Israel and ignore the plight of the Palestinians,” he said.

Relatives Can’t Understand

“People say things about Arabs that they would never say about another minority group,” said Lisa Odeh, Sami’s American-born wife. “When I say my husband is Palestinian, they react as if my husband is a terrorist.”

None of Alex Odeh’s relatives can understand why there isn’t more outrage on the part of U.S. authorities about the terrorist act that killed him. “To the people in the Middle East, things like this make it look like America is dancing on their tombs,” Sami Odeh said. “I believe my brother’s killing should have been denounced as strongly as the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. Whoever killed Alex made an assault on the rights of every American. It is an assault on the right of free speech of us all.

“If this is tolerated, we are all going to suffer for it. If we tolerate this kind of terror, all people will soon be scared to open their offices for fear of retaliation,” he said.

But Alex Odeh had dismissed the threats of violence made anonymously against him during the years he worked for the committee.

They started about five years ago, said Norma Odeh. When she would answer the phone, there would be a voice whistling an eerie tune, but no words uttered. When her husband answered, a voice threatened his family’s safety.

“Alex told me it was a man’s voice that would say, ‘If you don’t shut up, you might lose your wife and children,’ ” she said

By April of 1984, the calls were coming to the office or home on a daily basis. For months, she would not leave the house without calling to tell him exactly where she was going, when she would arrive and when she would be home. Once, when an anonymous caller telephoned friends in San Diego to say something had happened to him, she said it turned out to be a false alarm.

‘Very, Very Afraid’

“I was very, very afraid. . . . I tried to tell him to do other things, not to get involved in politics. I was afraid for him. But Alex said many times, ‘If they want to kill me, let them. I’m not afraid to die. I have never said anything to hurt anyone.’ ”

After awhile, after they changed their home phone number, the threats diminished and the fear subsided.

“It’s a natural reaction. After so many threats and nothing happens, you just discount them,” she said. “But now, they ended up silencing him forever.”

Norma Odeh finished her high school education in this country at the insistence of her husband, who saw her in Jifna in 1975 and immediately asked her mother for the 18-year-old girl’s hand in marriage. Although she attended college briefly, she said she has never worked and has no plans to do so, at least until her daughters are older.

As one who lost her own father at the age of three and whose mother put her in a boarding school so that she could support the family, Norma Odeh said she knows how much her daughters will need and rely upon her now that their father is gone.

“It’s OK if they call me daddy,” she said, vowing never to remarry and to wear black for a full year beyond the 40-day mourning period traditional for Lebanese Catholics.

Meanwhile, she tries to hide her grief, swiftly averting her eyes as she recalled his last words, “Goodby, sweetheart,” spoken as he kissed her on the cheek and left for work on the morning of Oct. 11.

“I’ll cry in my own room, or at his grave if I am alone,” she said, “but I don’t want my kids to see me cry.”