The City of Johannesburg, South Africa, has decided to rename the street on which the U.S. consulate is situated after a notorious Palestinian terrorist who tried to hijack a commercial flight in 1970 before being subdued by passengers.
Leila Khaled was a terrorist affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). She and a partner attempted to hijack a flight from Amsterdam to New York. They were thwarted when the pilot sent the flight into a nose dive, throwing the hijackers off their feet. The passengers then subdued Khaled; her partner was shot by an air marshal and died. Khaled was arrested by the United Kingdom but was released after a deal in which the PFLP freed hostages it had taken on other hijacked flights, after segregating the Jewish passengers from other passengers.
In the years since then, Khaled has become a heroine to the pro-Palestinian movement, despite (or because of) her past.
Khaled has been particularly popular in South Africa, where the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has enthusiastically embraced the Hamas cause and has demonized Israel. The ANC proposed the name change last year — after the Hamas terror attack on Israel, in which 1200 people, most of them civilians, were brutally murdered.
The City of Johannesburg — the country’s economic center — is controlled by the ANC, and soon complied:
The U.S. Consulate is located at 1 Sandton Drive; it would be forced to change its address to 1 Leila Khaled Drive, meaning that it would have to promote a Palestinian terrorist hijacker in all of its publications and correspondence.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.