Ex-Jewish Defense League bomber’s parole a ‘gut punch’ for Palestinian Americans

Nearly 40 years ago, long before the latest conflagration between Israel and Hamas militants, a bomb ripped through the Santa Ana office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, taking the life of the group’s regional director, Palestinian American activist Alex Odeh.

The FBI labeled the bombing a terrorist attack and early on identified the Jewish Defense League as “the possible responsible group.” At the time, the JDL was the focus of numerous state and federal investigations and had gained notoriety as an underground network of radical militants, espousing a violent form of Jewish nationalism that mainstream Jewish leaders rejected.

The FBI never formally charged anyone in Odeh’s death, but for years the agency’s investigation focused on Robert Manning, a burly ex-boxer from Los Angeles, and his wife, Rochelle, both JDL adherents.

With the Odeh probe still underway, Manning was convicted in 1993 of an unrelated murder: a 1980 mail-bomb attack that killed Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary. Manning was sentenced to life in prison. And in the ensuing decades, the Odeh case largely went cold.

Since becoming eligible for parole in 2001, Manning tried — and failed — seven times to win release. He appealed the most recent rejection, and on Oct. 3, an appellate board overturned the decision in accordance with a federal law that mandates parole for inmates who have served 30 years of a life sentence and are deemed unlikely to reoffend.

Now 71, Manning is on track to be paroled in July from a federal penitentiary in Phoenix.

The appellate board found that Manning’s “almost spotless record during his 32 years of incarceration made it unlikely he would reoffend.”

Among Arab American leaders, news of Manning’s parole has aggravated the painful wound of Odeh’s still unsolved death..

"..and for some, has reinforced a belief that the American judicial system let them down. “It was a gut punch,” said Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights group created in 1980 to combat anti-Arab stereotypes. “If Manning was truly reformed, then he would cooperate and give law enforcement names of the individuals he worked with or the individuals that he knows were involved in the Odeh assassination. He’s done none of that.”

The poor oppressed adherents of the Religion of Peace, along with those in the fake news media are upset that a killer's getting parole? Yet the same libs and Hamas symps thought it was all sh*ts and giggles when the killer of Meir Kahane, El Sayyid Nose Hair was initially acquitted of his murder. Fortunately he was convicted in US District Court for that and his role in the 1993 WTC bombing, and is still, miraculously in prison.
Nor did they seem upset over fmr SF DA Chesa Boudin's (named for a cop killer, btw) mommy and daddy getting paroled after serving time for their involvment in the Brinks murders in NY in 1981. And let's not get started with the "mostly peaceful" protesters upset over the death of Fentanyl Floyd, most of whom got slaps on the wrists, if any punishments at all.
br> Don't know about anyone else but I'm outraged that a statue of Gen Robt E Lee was melted down but not this propagandist Alex Odeh

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