"The Chronological List of Islamic Terrorists Attacks"-1969

In my last blog, I covered the first event listed on the "Chronological List of Islamic Terrorists Attack" (the Robert Kennedy assassination) and revealed my motives to research the history behind these attacks. A myspacer used this list to justify our pre-emptive U.S. military action in the Middle East and I have recently noticed this list is posted on countless websites for the same purpose.

The second event on this list of chronological fear-mongering propaganda…

"Feb. 18, 1969 - Boeing 707 attacked at Zurich, Switzerland, killing the pilot and 3 passengers."

Hmm…and from Wikipedia…

Palestinians attacked an El Al plane at Zurich Airport killing the copilot and injuring the pilot. One Palestinian attacker was killed and others were convicted but later released.

…which is it then?? I wasn't able to find any details on this crime, other than one of the hijackers name was Amina Dhahbour, the first woman to participate in a foreign operation. Until I can find out more, I reject this as an "Islamic Terrorist Attack".

Next up on the timeline of terror…

"Aug. 29, 1969 - TWA 707 hijacked from Rome to Damascus, released with only wounded."

THE EVENT

Leila Khaled along with Salim Issawi hijacked TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Athens, diverting the Boeing 707 to Damascus. She claims she ordered the pilot to fly over Haifa, so she could see her birthplace, which she could not visit. No one was injured, although the aircraft was blown up.

THE BACKGROUND

Leila Khaled was born in 1944 in Haifa. When the Arabs rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, fighting broke out between the Arabs and Jews. Khaled's family fled to Lebanon in 1948, leaving her father behind until his home and business were seized, and he was deported to Egypt. Khaled recalls, "…a YWCA American girl, Jane Marlowe, came to live at our house in Sour for a week. She was placed in our home because my younger sister Khaledia had some relations with the YWCA and because most of us spoke English at home. Jane was a typical Yankee do-gooder who came to Sour to teach the "refugees" swimming, drawing, fun and games. Jane, like most American missionaries who come to the Arab world-whatever the garb they wear was a "pacifist" who advocated peace among the semitic brothers, thinking there was plenty of room for all of us in the region. We tried to tell her that the issue was not only territory, but imperialism and Zionism and whether the Arab and Jewish masses were going to determine their future for themselves or allow the vampires of American and Zionist high finance to determine it for them. Jane told us that the word "vampire" was a hyperbole and lectured us on the necessity of using analytical language rather than emotion laden-slogans She was not as perceptive and well-informed as she claimed and in a few minutes we discovered where her real, liberal sympathies lay. She referred to Fateh as a terrorist organisation that deliberately mined roads and killed Israeli school children. She showed how colour-blind and profound she was by telling us that Palestinians should live among their brothers in the Arab states and avoid being discriminated against in Israel. We smiled sardonically as Jane revealed her ignorance of the plight of the Palestinians. She was blissfully unaware that she was spouting the Zionist line about the Palestinian problem and advocating the "final solution" that the Zionists proposed for our eternal peace. Jane had read her New York Times well and pontificated "objectively" on the need for "peace and stability" in the area. She was a Catholic girl from the Bronx who knew what was good for Arabs and Jews."

At the age of 15, Khaled became one of the first to join the radical pan-Arab Arab Nationalist Movement, originally started in the late 1940s. The Palestinian branch of this movement became the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Khaled attended the American University of Beruit. She debated her American roommate Judy Sinninger, in 1962, when Kennedy threatened to invade Cuba unless the Soviet missiles were dismantled and removed from Cuba. "…She lectured me on American government, values, and social order, and I lectured her on the Arabs...I explained to Judy that we were not fighting just to expel the colonial and neo-colonial powers from our region only to offer our homeland on a silver platter to a new superpower. Judy was an imperial citizen, however liberal and idealistic she may have been. I was a Palestinian Arab woman without a homeland, living in exile in an American colony in Ras Beirut. She had everything to lose, I had everything to gain. One's social consciousness is indeed determined by one's social conditions."

"In late September, 1963, I departed for Kuwait with mixed feelings and without prospect of employment. For three months I was without work, waiting for a reply to my application from the Kuwait ministry of education…During the intervening three months I thought about the world situation and pondered the meaning of life, especially after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22. I do not know why the Kennedy assassination affected me emotionally. Kennedy was the president of the state that helped perpetuate my exile, a state that maintained and advanced the Zionist cause I hated. Kennedy was a sophisticated patrician, a class enemy, and he had given key posts in his regime to at least three dedicated Zionist Jews. He also approved the invasion of Cuba in April, 1961 by a pack of American-supported mercenaries. Yet I, the hardened Palestinian revolutionary, for some inexplicable reason, cried when I heard the news." "I watched the funeral on TV and saw Americans weep. Until then I had thought of the United States as a nation of monsters and scoundrels capable of perpetrating every conceivable crime…I wept for Kennedy perhaps because I somehow identified with the youth of America that loved and admired him dearly. Perhaps I may have believed, as Arabs did, that Kennedy was indeed going to work for the restoration of Palestinian rights, as the Kennedy Nasser correspondence later illustrated. I suspect that my tears were a natural human reaction, my prejudices couldn't stop them until it was too late. I am not sorry I cried."

After the landing of the high-jacked plane in 1969, Leila delivered this speech to the passengers:

"Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your kind attention and co-operation during the flight. I am captain Shadiah Abu Ghazalah. That's not my name; my name is Khaleda. Shadiah is an immortal woman who wrote: "Heroes are often forgotten, but their legends and memories are the property and heritage of the people." That is something historians and analysts cannot understand. Shadiah will not be forgotten by the Popular Front and by the generation of revolutionaries she helped mould in the path of revolution. I would like you to know that Shadiah was a Palestinian Arab woman from Nablus; that she was a schoolteacher and a member of the Popular Front underground; that she died in an explosion at her own home at the age of twenty-one on November 21, 1968, while manufacturing hand grenades for the Front. She was the first woman martyr of our revolution. I assumed her name on flight 840 to tell the world about the crimes the Israelis inflict upon our people and to demonstrate to you that they make no distinctions between men, women and children. But for their own propaganda objectives they repeatedly state in your press how we attack their "innocent" women and children and how cruel we are. I want you to know that we love children, too, and we certainly do not aim our guns at them. We diverted flight 840 because TWA is one of the largest American airlines that services the Israeli air routes and, more importantly, because it is an American plane. The American government is Israel's staunchest supporter. It supplies Israel with weapons for our destruction. It gives the Zionists tax-free American dollars. It supports Israel at world conferences. It helps them in every possible way. We are against America because she is an imperialist country. And our unit is called the Che Guevara Commando Unit because we abhor America's assassination of Che and because we are a part of the Third World and the world revolution. Che was an apostle of that revolution. We took the plane to Haifa because Comrade Salim and I come from Haifa. Both of us were evicted in 1948. We took you to Tel Aviv as an act of defiance and challenge to the Israelis and to demonstrate their impotence when the Arabs embark on offensive rather then defensive strategy. We brought you to Damascus because Syria is the pulsating heart of the Arab homeland and because the Syrians are a good and generous people. We hope you will enjoy your stay in Damascus. We hope you will go home and tell your friends not to go to Israel-to the Middle East war zone. Please tell your neighbours that we are a people like you who wish to live in peace and security in our country, governing ourselves. Please tell the Americans that if they hate war and the exploitation of others, they should stop their government from making war on us and helping the Israelis to deprive us of our land. Tell your people that coming to Israel helps her to deny our rights. Revolution and peace. Greetings to all lovers of the oppressed!"

Khaled has said in interviews that she developed a fondness for the United Kingdom when her first visitor in jail, an immigration officer, wanted to know why she had arrived in the country without a valid visa. She also developed a relationship with the two policewomen assigned to guard her in Ealing and later corresponded with them. Khaled continued to return to Britain for speaking engagements until as late as 2002. Khaled has said that she no longer believes in hijacking as a legitimate form of protest, though she is wary of the Arab-Israeli peace process. According to Khaled, "It's not a peace process. It's a political process where the balance of forces is for the Israelis and not for us. They have all the cards to play with and the Palestinians have nothing to depend on, especially when the PLO is not united." She has become involved in politics, becoming a member of the Palestinian National Council and appearing regularly at the World Social Forum.