The New York Times Celebrates Reem Assil's Antisemitic Cafe in Oakland

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Algemeiner.}

Reem Assil Grinning Before an
Ideological Murderer
Photo by: Cece Capiro

The New York Times "Travel Section" has a piece by Rebecca Flint Marx entitled, An Arab Bakery in Oakland Full of California Love.

In truth, Reem's flatbread café is not a very loving place for Jewish people because it publicly celebrates the murders of college students Eddie Joffe and Leon Kanner.

Or, at least, it is not loving towards those of us who care about our families and friends in the land of our ancestry.

The very title of Marx's piece is a form of journalistic deceit.

"An Arab Bakery in Oakland Full of California Love"?

Perhaps I am a tad biased.

I don't know how I could not be, given that I am the guy that Reem Assil dragged into the legal system for speaking the truth about the hatred she spreads through the veneration of the murderer Rasmea Odeh.

To be blunt, Reem's bakery is defined not by love but by the other side of that coin.

In a run-down section of Oakland - within spitting distance of the Fruitvale BART Station where Oscar Grant was shot dead on New Year's Eve, 2009 - Reem Assil spreads malice toward the Jewish people... but, apparently, according to the New York Times in a loving way.

The floor-to-ceiling mural of the murderer and antisemitic anti-Zionist Rasmea Odeh is the point of contention.

Marx, in an act of journalistic malpractice - even for a food writer - described Odeh as merely some  "controversial Palestinian activist" until an editor, after a response by angry Jews, no doubt, added the caveat:

In 1970, Ms. Odeh was convicted by Israeli courts for her role in the murder of two students. In 2014, she was convicted of immigration fraud in U.S. federal court and was deported to Jordan in 2017.

Indeed.

Yet, somehow, the New York Times still features the piece under the headline, An Arab Bakery in Oakland Full of California Love.

Furthermore, Justin Phillips of the San Francisco Chronicle tells us that Reem Assil continues meteoric rise with new fine-dining restaurant at Jack London Square.

The truth is that Rasmea Odeh is a confessed and convicted murderer in an Israeli court case observed by the International Red Cross  as William Jacobson, Cornell University Professor of Law and proprietor of the Legal Insurrection website, clearly outlines in this video.

Many years after the murder her partner, Aisha Odeh, confessed to the crime in a proud manner on Palestinian-Arab television and revealed Rasmea's role in those murders. She claims at the 1:35-minute mark, "Rasmiyeh Oudeh was more involved than I was..."

She is the convicted killer of Hebrew University students Edward Joffie (21) and Leon Kanner (20) in the 1969 terrorist attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The PFLP is also the organization responsible for the flinging of 69-year-old, wheelchair-bound, Leon Klinghoffer off of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985 into the Mediterranean Sea on his wedding anniversary.

Odeh was released in 1980 from an Israeli prison as one of 78 other Palestinian-Arabs in return for a single Jew.

She then lied her way into the United States where - much to my astonishment - made a name for herself as a "progressive-left feminist" organizer in Chicago and an eventual associate of that faux-icon of human liberation, Linda Sarsour.

The United States government, meanwhile, recently deported Odeh to Jordan not because she kills people, but because she falsified her papers into the United States by forgetting to the mention the fact that she kills people.

Reem Assil - with a big smile on her face and in an "Oaklandish Warriors" t-shirt in the photo above - is, thus, glorifying an anti-Jewish genocidal racist killer.

This woman is Americanizing - with the t-shirt and baseball cap - violent hatred toward Jews.

She is attaching Arab-Palestinian malice toward Jewish people onto good old-fashioned sports Americana with a young hipster look and that is a terrific tactic if what you are after is the normalization of racist bigotry.

On a culinary level, Reem's joint is a small step above your average food truck - and therefore it is hard to imagine just why the New York Times, of all places, would take notice - but her flatbread has significance on a political level because she breaks fresh ground in the San Francisco Bay Area in terms of spreading antisemitic anti-Zionism.

Reem Assil, in her reverence for Rasmea Odeh, is helping to make Jew Hatred cool and is doing so on a day-to-day retail level.

The heartlessness, within living memory of the Holocaust, is difficult to fathom.

Marx tells us that, according to Assil, social justice "has always been a core component of Reem’s."

This is false.

Whatever the quality of Assil's flatbread the very last thing that her joint has to do with is social justice.

Assil is not so much serving flatbread to the Oakland public as she is serving up violent political malice toward Jewish people.

The mural of Rasmea Odeh puts every Jew passing by on notice.

It reminds me just a tad of 1930s Berlin.

It is like walking by a giant Nazi Swastika every time that I enter the Fruitvale BART Station.

"California love"?

I certainly hope not.

The Times should be ashamed of itself.

What a disgrace.