NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 10, 2006
Leila
Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of “9/11”, when four airliners were hijacked, and three of them flown into iconic American buildings. The fourth was brought down in a Pennsylvanian field by the heroism of passengers. Like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the event is beginning to fade into history.We could also observe the 36th anniversary of another event, which I recall from when my soi-disant "career" in journalism was just beginning. Palestinian terrorists hijacked four New York-bound airliners over Europe, on Sept. 6th, 1970, taking one to Cairo, and two to Jordan, where they were later joined by another airliner, hijacked out of Bombay. The original fourth, an El Al flight out of Amsterdam, made an emergency landing at Heathrow after the hijackers were overpowered. It was a fine El Al moment: the pilot nose-dived, and an armed steward shot the male hijacker while he floated around the cabin. His female companion was tackled before she could reach the flight deck, or detonate either of her grenades. That woman was Leila Khaled -- poster girl for leftwing brats on Western college campuses through the 1970s. (Students in the next decade would prefer the nude Nastassja Kinski, entangled with a python.) Leila wore a ring made from a grenade clip, with a bullet instead of a jewel. She had the fashion sense to don the full Palestinian keffiyah. And she was beautiful, as only an Arab woman can be -- both before and after the plastic surgery she endured, to change her identity between her two essays in airliner hijacking. The first had been a TWA flight from Rome the previous year, stepping off in Damascus, beyond the reach of civilized law. The intention had been to murder Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli ambassador to the United States, but he’d changed flights and was not aboard. The hijackers settled for blowing the nose off that Boeing, after releasing the passengers. In Black September, the next year, they graduated to blowing up the whole planes, sans passengers; later still, to blowing them up with their passengers; and finally to flying them, with passengers, into office buildings. After Leila’s second essay -- the failed attempt on El Al -- she was taken into custody. In a memoir, she fondly recalled the British immigration official, who began his polite interrogation of her at Ealing police station with, “Why have you arrived in this country without a valid visa?” She found her female British gaolers charming, too, but could enjoy their company for only a few days, before she was released in exchange for the safety of the passengers her colleagues had abducted to Dawson Field, the old RAF aerodrome in the Jordanian desert. Leila went on to become a member of the Palestinian National Council. She was a Marxist, incidentally, not an Islamist. One almost pines for those good old days -- for the Marxists were mostly crazy, but they were partially sane. One wonders what we’ll be faced with, after the Islamists. If there is an after. The last I heard of Leila Khaled, she was giving an interview to the progressive British daily, the Guardian, while revisiting London, a few months before 9/11. She and her interviewer agreed that airliner hijackings were a thing of the past. Perhaps because it was released a few months after the Black September operations, I used to think Eric Clapton’s lovelorn guitar-riff masterpiece, “Layla”, was written to commemorate his unrequited passion for this Palestinian terrorist. But no, it was written earlier for some blonde bimbo from the London fashion runways of the 1960s. To whom Mr Clapton was later unhappily married. (Having been dumped by the Beatle, George Harrison, the blonde in question later found happiness with a man who did not play guitar.) There was something so evanescent in the revolutionary gestures of my babyboom generation, and likewise in our professions of romantic love. In the last couple of weeks, prominent Islamofascist nutjobs around the world, from Ayman Zawahiri in frontier Pakistan, to President Ahmadinejad in Tehran, to Adam Gadahn, wherever, have been issuing demands to the “tranquilized inhabitants of the human farms” (that would be us), to convert to Islam promptly. Or else. Such generous offers to the infidels are the traditional precursors of major Islamic onslaughts. Perhaps we’ll find out what they had in mind tomorrow morning. Perhaps it will wait to some other day. Perhaps they will finally exhaust our patience with romantic fanaticism. I can at least hope. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top