https://www.frontpagemag.com/rewarding-oct-7-will-globalize-oct-7/
On July 23, 1968, the era of terrorist airline hijacking and hostage taking went into full swing when terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked an El-Al flight originating in London’s Heathrow Airport and headed out of Rome on the way to Israel.
What became the world’s longest hijacking lasted for forty days. The PLO’s UN observer bragged that the hijackings had “awakened the media and public opinion much more” than its political propaganda. France paid a $7.5 million ransom and the hijackers were flown out to their destination of choice after Israel released 16 terrorists with blood on their hands.
Notes from the Johnson administration had initially expressed its concern “over serious blow(s) to international civil air transport which likely arise if hijacking of El Al aircraft permitted to stand… this incident, if not quickly redressed, might stimulate competitive hijacking attempts.”
And indeed it did.
The hijacking by a Marxist-Islamist group backed by the USSR and trained by its proxies in Egypt and Syria, spurred a new wave of Cuba hijackings by leftist sympathizers in the U.S, who had been briefly active earlier in the decade but whose attacks had fallen off, by the PFLP, by the North Koreans, the Japanese Red Army, Pakistanis and other members of the Red-Green Alliance. What had been the behavior of the occasional madman became a wave of terrorism.
The copycat leftist terrorists include a Black Panther who hijacked a TWA flight out of Oakland after murdering a police lieutenant and was able to live out the rest of his life in Cuba.
When PFLP terrorists were arrested, their allies attacked other airplanes, took more hostages and traded them for the hijackers. Governments that had formerly condemned the attacks, negotiated, made deals and paid out millions, freeing and financing the terrorists attacking them.
When Israel struck back at the states harboring the hijackers, it was condemned by the UN in resolutions like Resolution 262 while the State Department warned Israel that “we simply cannot have this kind of violence in the Near East.” Not by the terrorists hijacking Americans. By Israel.
On September 9, 1970, the PFLP hijacked four planes headed for New York City in the largest airplane hijacking campaign of the time that would prefigure and inspire September 11.
