She’s been glorified in the leftist media as a revolutionary, the female Che Guevara. In reality, Leila Khaled, a failed bomber who cut her teeth on commandeering airplanes, is just an unrepentant terrorist with a wicked Jew-hating streak.
Fifty-one years after assuming the title of the world’s “first female hijacker,” Khaled should be locked up, shut down or on the run. Instead, she’s set to receive a place of honor this month at a woke American college campus (or is that redundant?). She is to speak at a virtual event at San Francisco State University entitled: “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled.”
Khaled’s transformation from Public Enemy to Justified Jihadist proves that all it takes to make that leap is a good public-relations strategy. This angers Jerry Richter, a New York City public-school teacher who, as a 9-year-old boy, was a passenger on a plane hijacked unsuccessfully by Khaled and an accomplice, a near-death trauma with which he still grapples emotionally.
“This event, coupled with the Holocaust, defined who I am today,’’ Richter, now 59, tells me.
In 1969, Khaled, now 76, was a 25-year-old self-styled freedom fighter who pledged loyalty to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union. A photograph of her in a kaffiyeh, brandishing an AK-47 rifle, was published widely.
She was part of a team of maniacs who forced TWA Flight 840 from Rome to Tel Aviv to divert to Damascus, Syria. No one was injured. That time.
