Pro-Palestine Group Withdraws Support for Event Featuring Hijacker

People take part in a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally outside the Houses of Parliament in London, as MPs debate calls for a ceasefire in Gaza on Feb. 21, 2024. Lucy North/PA Wire

A pro-Palestine group has withdrawn sponsorship for an event in the UK that was set to feature a speech delivered by airplane hijacker Leila Khaled who recently called Hamas terrorists “freedom fighters.”

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) said in a statement on Tuesday that its West Midlands branch had agreed to “withdraw its sponsorship of the event” at which Ms. Khaled was set to deliver a speech via videolink to a venue in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, on Friday.

The PSC said it “has repeatedly stated our firm belief that international law is the framework within which we must judge any use of force. International law makes clear that an occupied people have the right to resist, including through the use of armed resistance. It also makes clear the illegality of the use of force against non combatants.

“All events supported by any of our nearly 100 affiliated local branches must respect these principles.

“An event was scheduled to take place later this week, originally with the sponsorship of a local branch in the West Midlands where the framing of the event did not clearly fall within the framework of the principles outlined above. On that basis the branch has agreed to withdraw its sponsorship of the event.”

The group continued: “The priority of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) is to work tirelessly for an immediate ceasefire, in order to stop what the ICJ [International Court of Justice] has accepted as a plausible case of genocide. We will not allow those who oppose peace and justice for the Palestinian people to divert us away from this urgent priority.”

Khaled Called Oct. 7 Hamas Terrorists ‘Freedom Fighters’

Ms. Khaled, who currently resides in Jordan, was involved in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA flight heading to Tel Aviv and in 1970 attempted to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam, the latter incident part of the international hijacking crisis known as Black September.

Last month, the 79-year-old Palestinian told Australian socialist newspaper Green Left that the terrorists who attacked Israel on Oct. 7 were “freedom fighters,” and claimed that they “did not attack ordinary people,” alleging Hamas had attacked “military settlements.”

“Neither Israel nor the Western media could prove that there were massacres,” she claimed, despite media widely reporting the official death toll to be 1,200 people.

Ms. Khaled is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which according to the United States’ National Counterterrorism Center’s Counterterrorism Guide “combines Arab nationalism with Marxist-Leninist ideology and is focused on destroying Israel and removing Western influence from the Middle East.”

The PFLP has been designated as a terrorist organisation by nations around the world including the United States and Canada. It is not proscribed in the UK but subject to financial sanctions. The UK has banned the separate, but similarly-named, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

The group was one of several international terrorist organisations staging anti-U.S. attacks that had the support of the Soviet KGB during the Cold War.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign

The PSC is one of six pro-Palestine organisations—along with the Palestinian Forum in Britain, Stop the War Coalition, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Friends of Al Aqsa, and the Muslim Association of Britain—that have been coordinating pro-Palestinian protests in London since October.

In February, Downing Street criticised the PSC for beaming “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” onto the Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben.

The controversial slogan is believed by some to be genocidal, with Conservative backbencher Andrew Percy saying last month that it “denies Jews self-determination in their homeland, calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and, more importantly, it is chanted by people and promoted by groups who are in many cases openly anti-Semitic and who call for Jews to be wiped out.”