The Palestinian terror group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is blaming Israel for blocking convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh from speaking at an event near Berlin.
“The Ministry of Strategic Affairs of the Zionist entity and the racist right-wing organizations which attack the Palestinian people in Germany, continue a campaign of defamation and misleading against the fighter and the ex-prisoner Rasmea Odeh upon her arriving to Berlin,” according to the PFLP’s official site.
The site added: “The social web platform which belongs the Ministry, published a series of funded and outrageous advertisements in German and English, celebrating the decision of German authorities to deport her from Germany and to attack Samidoun and BDS movement.”
Invoking the country’s Residence Act, the German government banned Odeh from engaging in political activities in the country and had her Schengen visa revoked, meaning that she will now have to leave Germany.
Berlin Mayor Michael Müller welcomed the decision of Berlin’s Interior Ministry.
“Anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic resentments, wrapped up in liberation rhetoric, have no business here. I am glad that we have found a way to stop this propaganda,” he said, reported the news site DW.com.
Odeh was scheduled to speak earlier this month at an event promoting the boycott of Israel at a community center in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.
She was convicted of a 1969 Jerusalem bombing that killed Jewish students Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe, and sentenced to life in prison, but was released during a prisoner exchange in 1980. She was convicted in 2017 of immigration fraud and last year deported from the United States to Jordan.
The PFLP is classified as a terrorist organization by both the United States and European Union
The Israeli and U.S. government, as well as German Jewish groups, had criticized Odeh’s planned appearance.
Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan said it was unacceptable that “terrorists who pretend to be human-rights activists abuse freedom of expression for terror and sedition.”
