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.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious ruling) in 1989 calling for believers to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie due to the content of his novel, The Satanic Verses. Over the years, two of the book’s translators have been stabbed—one fatally—and numerous others have been injured or killed in attempts to follow the ayatollah’s writ. Last week, an American Shiite Muslim came closer than his many predecessors to killing Rushdie, stabbing him multiple times and leaving him in critical condition. Graeme Wood comments on those intellectuals in the West who have exuded sympathy for the stabbers:

In 1989, the reaction to the fatwa was split three ways: some supported it; some opposed it; and some opposed it, to be sure, but still wanted everyone to know how bad Rushdie and his novel were. This last faction, Team To Be Sure, took the West to task for elevating this troublesome man and his insulting book, whose devilry could have been averted had others been more attuned to the sensibilities of the offended.

The fumes are still rising off of this last group. The former president Jimmy Carter was, at the time of the original fatwa, the most prominent American to suggest that the crime of murder should be balanced against Rushdie’s crime of blasphemy. The ayatollah’s death sentence “caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author’s rights,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. Well, yes. Carter did not only say that many Muslims were offended and wished violence on Rushdie; that was simply a matter of fact, reported frequently in the news pages. He took to the op-ed page to add his view that these fanatics had a point. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” he wrote, “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Never mind that millions of Muslims take no offense at all, and are insulted by the implication that they should.

Over the past two decades, our culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding. The novelist Hanif Kureishi has said that “nobody would have the [courage]” to write The Satanic Verses today. More precisely, nobody would publish it, because sensitivity readers would notice the theological delicacy of the book’s title and plot. The ayatollahs have trained them well, and social-media disasters of recent years have reinforced the lesson: don’t publish books that get you criticized, either by semiliterate fanatics on the other side of the world or by semiliterate fanatics on this one.