If there was ever a reminder that Europe is losing its way, the appearance this week at the European Parliament by convicted Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled is surely it.
Khaled, a major operative in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was involved in a wave of hijackings of commercial airliners in 1969 and 1970, most notably a TWA flight from Rome to Athens and Tel Aviv, and an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City.
The PFLP, headed by George Habash, helped to invent modern terror. Its curriculum vitae is filled with enough hijackings, bombings (suicide and otherwise), drive-by shootings and kidnappings to fill a good-sized bookshelf. It has partnered with like-minded organizations, such as the Japanese Red Army and Colombia’s guerrilla army FARC, and though Marxist in orientation, the group has enjoyed a relationship with terrorism’s biggest backer today — theocratic Iran. The PFLP’s targets have invariably been civilians: in 2014, for example, its operatives attacked worshippers with axes and knives at a Jerusalem synagogue, killing four and wounding seven.
The PFLP has been on the European Union’s terrorism list since 2012 (decades after the organization came into existence). And yet, Khaled was a featured speaker this week on a program at the European Parliament, titled, “The Role of Women in the Palestinian Popular Resistance.” Khaled received a two-minute standing ovation, preceded by this introduction: “We…have a living legend here with us today, who we can call the Che Guevara of Palestine, Leila Khaled.” The Venezuelan ambassador, who was also present, was introduced as an “honored guest.”
Khaled’s speech was not about empowerment and opportunity. Instead, it was a nonstop screed filled with time-tested Palestinian canards about Zionism — and about Jews.
“The Holocaust,” she said, “is only pain to the Jews. They have monopolized the pain and have played the role of the victims. … [D]on’t you think that what happened in Auschwitz is comparable to what happens in Gaza today?”
The Zionist movement, she stated, “aligns with all the capitalists in the world,” and she added that “in the next 100 years, they [the Zionists] will be able to dominate the world economy.” (...)
The Khaled event at the European Parliament was not something hidden or unknown to those who peruse the international body’s weekly calendar. Someone made a decision to approve its being placed on the schedule. (...)
Yet with so many EU heads of government, foreign ministers and other officials proffering comments about the need to defeat the growing threat of terrorism on the continent, where are those voices expressing outrage over the invitation to a convicted terrorist — who remains a “member of the political bureau” of one of the deadliest of terror organizations — to speak at one of the EU’s central institutions
In trying to explain this, words like “hypocrisy” and “indifference” come to mind, along with simple political correctness. But it is more than that: Haven’t those in leadership positions in Brussels learned anything from decades of violence espoused by Khaled, her contemporaries and now, by Hezbollah, Hamas and ISIS? If nothing else, have they no self-respect?
The recent list of terrorist attacks in Europe is long, and growing. At the EU, some may have short memories, but surely the families of victims in Paris, Nice, London, Brussels, Copenhagen and so many other places, do not.read more
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Leila Khaled, a member of a terrorist group blacklisted by the EU, speaks in the European Parliament where she glorifies terrorism and trivializes the Holocaust
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