Show your support for Rasmea

SUPPORTERS OF Rasmea Yousef Odeh, the Palestinian-American community activist who will be put on trial on trumped-up allegations of immigration fraud, are planning a national call-in day for Tuesday, June 10, to demand that the federal prosecutor drop all charges against her.

Lawyers for Odeh report that they were notified by Judge Paul Borman that her trial date had been moved forward from October 21 to September 2. "This gives us six less weeks to organize to support Rasmea, but we'll be ready nonetheless," Zena Ozeir, one of the coordinators of the Rasmea Defense Committee, said in a statement. "With mobilization from Chicago, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, and all parts Midwest, we will fill the courtroom every day of the trial."

Odeh was arrested at her home in the Chicago suburbs last October by Department of Homeland Security agents. Authorities claim that Odeh failed to disclose a conviction--nearly half a century ago by an Israeli military court--on her U.S. citizenship application.

In 1969, Odeh was put on trial for alleged membership in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a supposed connection to two bombings in Jerusalem. Odeh maintains she was tortured into confessing to the false charges--in the documentary film Women in Struggle, Odeh recounted being sexually humiliated and threatened with rape at the hands of Israeli soldiers. After spending 10 years in prison, she was released as part of a prisoner exchange.

Given the systematic denial of Palestinian rights by Israeli authorities, conviction by a military kangaroo court is proof of nothing. Roughly 20 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank have ended up in an Israeli prison at one time or another.

But this is exactly why the federal government is targeting her now. According to an FBI press release, Odeh's conviction on so-called terrorism charges would have been sufficient reason to deny her citizenship application in 2004.

The arrest of the 66-year-old Odeh is all the more outrageous given her history as a community advocate. Having come to the U.S. as a lawyer in 1995 and gained citizenship in 2004, Odeh is known in the Chicago area for her work with the Arab American Action Network, a community group that offers literacy programs, domestic violence prevention and other programs to empower the Arab American community. Last year, the Chicago Cultural Alliance gave Odeh an award for her work in support of immigrant women.

Odeh's arrest is one more face of the U.S. government's persecution of Arabs and Muslims as part of the "war on terror." The same federal prosecutors who have targeted her headed up the case against the Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Islamic charity in the U.S. before a Bush administration order shut it down, and the grand jury investigation into 23 left-wing activists in the Midwest.

But Odeh's supporters intend to be heard. The call-in day protest on June 10 is directed at Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. As the Rasmea Defense Committee stated in its suggested message to McQuade: "These charges are a political attack on her as an individual, and on the collective Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities across the U.S. I stand in unequivocal support of Rasmea and demand that these charges be dropped immediately!"