In 1969, Rasmea Odeh and another terrorist placed a bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket, which killed two and injured nine; four days later, the duo managed to carry out an attack on the British consulate before being arrested. In the past months, Odeh has floated to the top of the American radical left, emerging as a leader of the anti-Trump women’s March on Washington and subsequently as a key figure in the March 8 “worldwide women’s strike,” and most recently speaking to a conference of Jewish Voice for Peace, where she was greeted with enthusiastic applause. Ruthie Blum comments:

Luckily for Odeh, . . . the Jewish state that she and her radical leftist ‎buddies in the U.S. Jewish community would see eradicated let her out of jail as part of a prisoner ‎exchange. Still, she has expressed no gratitude to the liberal society that set her free in 1980, or to the ‎one that has enabled her since then to roam around freely, spewing her vitriol and inciting violence. ‎On the contrary, the proud member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who feels no ‎remorse for the innocent boys she killed, also defied the country that took her in as an immigrant—concealing her terrorist past in order to enter the United States.‎

Not only that. Last month, Odeh’s three-year battle with the U.S. government, which was sparked by ‎her being convicted of immigration fraud, came to a happy end with a plea bargain according to which ‎she would be stripped of her American citizenship and deported, but serve no jail time. ‎. . . It is bad enough that Odeh spent only ten years in an Israeli prison. Worse still that she is getting off the ‎hook for her subsequent crime. But the fact that she has been elevated to some kind of sainthood, ‎lauded by feminist, black, and other self-described human-rights activists is as shocking as it is ‎shameful. . . .

Odeh, who was twenty-one when she played a key role in the terrorist attack, failed to mention that if not for ‎Israeli policy, she would have spent the rest of her life behind bars. Instead, she has been a liberated ‎woman since the age of thirty-two. The now-sixty-nine-year-old also left out the fact that the U.S. justice system—yes, in Trump’s America—can take credit for her ability to trade jail for Jordan, where she will ‎undoubtedly be hailed as a heroine. ‎

Good riddance, Rasmea; too bad you can’t take your [Jewish] sycophants with you. But, as you surely know, ‎Jordanian law forbids Jews from becoming citizens.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.