Marxist-Leninist Arab terrorist Leila Khaled (shown), most infamous for hijacking airliners, is on tour in South Africa promoting boycotts and sanctions against the State of Israel and raising funds for the cause. Among other controversial stops on her schedule, Khaled will speak to the veterans of the ruling African National Congress’ (ANC) terror wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, which was led by admitted Communist Party leader Nelson Mandela at the height of its bloody Soviet-backed terror spree across Southern Africa.
The hijacker’s tour has been well received among South Africa’s ruling establishment, which includes the ANC in a ruling alliance with the Communist Party (SACP) and a communist-dominated coalition of labor unions known as COSATU. However, Jewish groups, anti-terrorism activists, and elements of the increasingly embattled European-descent minority are starting to speak out.
Self-styled revolutionary “freedom fighter” Khaled is touring South Africa at the invitation of the local branch of what is known as the international “Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel. It aims to isolate the nation and destroy its economy. In a statement, BDS South Africa said Khaled’s visit was supported by a “significant number” of church leaders, government officials, trade unions, political parties, and more. Various Islamic organizations were also reportedly involved in organizing the controversial trip.
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In 1969, Khaled helped hijack a TWA flight from Rome to Athens, diverting it to Damascus. The plane was blown up after passengers got off. The next year, a grenade-wielding Khaled and another man tried to hijack an Israeli airliner flying to New York from Amsterdam. After shooting a crew member, Israeli marshals managed to foil the attempted hijacking. Khaled was released from prison in exchange for Western hostages seized in another hijacking.
The Marxist-Leninist terror organization to which Khaled belongs, the so-called “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP), remains designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government, the European Union, and Canada. From its earliest days, the outfit was backed by the mass-murdering Communist regimes ruling the Soviet Union and mainland China. It also has links to a wide range of Islamist dictatorships and terrorist organizations, and remains a key player within the formerly Soviet-backed Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Among other goals, Khaled’s PFLP hopes to eventually dismantle the State of Israel, opposing a so-called “two-state solution” and any negotiations with what it calls the “Zionist occupation regime.” After Israel is abolished as a nation state, the outfit hopes to impose communist tyranny on the Arabs and Jews that would live under its sought-after new regime. The PFLP organization is also suspected of links to the murder of four Jews in Jerusalem late last year, in addition to numerous other grisly crimes.
“There is a big connection between raising awareness and, at the same time, using all means of resistance, including armed struggle,” Khaled said in a recent interview with South African media about her trip, claiming not to be targeting Jews as a people but rather “occupiers,” whom she argues “stole” lands from the Arabs living there. “We have rung the bell already and the Palestinian issue is on the international agenda. It’s no more questioned. But the problem is that the world is not using all its means to help the Palestinians fight for their rights.”
Lest anyone believe that Khaled, who now lives in Jordan, has moderated her views, she reiterated her zealous desire for communist tyranny, which in the last century murdered an estimated 100 million to 200 million people not even including war. “I’m still a Marxist, very much so,” Khaled explained. In the interview, she also praised the murderous Castro regime and Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, claiming implausibly that the growing grassroots opposition to his brutal and failed rule was being “supported by the Americans.”
Critics of Khaled’s visit, meanwhile, including many South African Jews and Israeli authorities, were outraged. “She is a member of the politburo of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) organization that massacred four Jewish worshippers in West Jerusalem last month,” Deputy Israeli Ambassador to South Africa Michael Freeman told local media last month, adding that Khaled was a confessed hijacker who believed in using violence to advance her goals.
“When we are seeing the world protesting in Paris against terrorism, the visit of Leila Khaled goes against the values that South Africa and the world stand for,” Freeman continued. “The PFLP is responsible for some of the most gruesome terror attacks, including the murder of the Fogel family, where they decapitated a baby.”
While the Dalai Lama was barred from entering South Africa, apparently due to opposition from key ANC-SACP allies in Beijing, Khaled appears to have had no problem securing a visa. That is hardly surprising, of course, considering the longtime collaboration between Marxist-Leninist organizations and terror groups around the world. Indeed, one of the most important speeches Khaled will give on her trip is to the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK-Spear of the Nation) Military Veterans Association.
“This visit by comrade Leila Khaled would further contribute to serve the purpose to bolster solidarity with the Palestine people’s struggle for their birthright,” said Kebby Maphatsoe, the group’s chairperson, in a statement quoted by the South African media. “This is amid the racist oppressive Zionist Israel sympathizers’ noise against such planned visit.” Maphatsoe also claimed the visit would help “expose the wanton murder of Palestinians by the terrorist Israel Defense Force.”
Once led by Nelson Mandela, who after death was celebrated as a secret member of the Communist Party Central Committee by both the ANC and the SACP, the MK was almost immediately designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Among other reasons for the designation, the ANC group, backed by the most brutal Communist regimes on the planet and the Western globalist establishment, waged a relentless bombing and terror campaign that murdered thousands of civilians — mostly blacks.
Many of its victims were murdered in ways too horrifying to describe, such as the Winnie Mandela-promoted “necklacing” tactic. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee also found that MK’s use of torture against political enemies and even its own members was “routine.” The ANC, Mandela, and the MK all remained on the U.S. terrorist list until 2008.
The group of former ANC terrorists, who were long backed by Fidel Castro and communist regimes around the world in their bloody terror campaign for what they described as “liberation,” was eventually merged into South Africa’s military after more than two thirds of European-descent South Africans voted to voluntarily surrender political power. As The New American and numerous other sources have been documenting for decades, though, an end to the apartheid regime — under “separate development,” the African tribes living in Southern Africa were supposed to obtain self-government in their traditional homelands — was hardly the only goal of the bloody “struggle.”
Now, as the ruling ANC-SACP alliance makes clear, the “Second Phase” of its Communist International-hatched “National Democratic Revolution” (NDR) to finalize the imposition of Marxist tyranny on South Africa is officially underway. According to Genocide Watch and other experts, the ANC-SACP regime has also been linked to ongoing preparations for genocide against white South Africans. Despite a ban on “hate speech” in South Africa, even South African President Jacob Zuma, for example, openly sings “struggle” songs promoting the extermination of European-descent South Africans.
In Zimbabwe, Marxist dictator and Zuma ally Robert Mugabe unleashed one of his ethnic cleansing campaigns against whites in 2000 after having previously attempted genocide against the black Ndebele. “Former” terrorist Mugabe reiterated his intention to demonize Israel and European-descent Africans last week as he took over leadership of the European Union-style “African Union.” He also promoted his “land reform” policies that brutally evicted thousands of white farmers (many murdered and tortured) to “redistribute” the farms to his cronies, contributing to the nation’s current dependence on international food aid.
Other Marxist and Islamist groups in South Africa also celebrated Khaled’s visit, echoing the contention that Israel is an “apartheid” state and that the Arab struggle against Israel is similar to the Comintern-backed ANC-SACP’s war. “The hosting of Comrade Leila Khaled in South Africa is a privilege for us South Africans,” said a statement released ahead of the visit by the Marxist-Leninist Congress of South African Students, which last year placed a pig head in a Cape Town kosher market to promote the BDS effort. “The Palesitnians [sic] and the Palesitnian [sic] children are our friends. The Palestinians stood with us during Apartheid and we now stand with them against Israeli Apartheid.”
The MK veterans’ group and other Marxist forces around the world also regularly compare Israel to apartheid South Africa, as do Islamist groups worldwide — some of which reportedly operate fairly openly across South Africa. A previous intelligence investigation into al-Qaeda activities in South Africa, though, was reportedly quashed “from the top” under circumstances that remain unclear, according to news reports.
Of course, Khaled is hardly the only controversial figure to be well received in Southern Africa in recent years. As The New American reported in 2013, amid a genocide alert for South Africa issued by the world’s top expert on the subject, the U.S.-based “New Black Panther Party” (NBPP), which openly promotes the extermination of whites and Jews in the nation (even women and children), also went on a “historic” trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Sources indicated that the genocidal black supremacist group received some sort of “training” from the Mugabe regime, though regime figures in Harare did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the issue from The New American. Apparently the links between NBPP and various Communist and racist extremists in Southern Africa run deep. Despite the escalating genocide warnings, Socialist International, the world’s most powerful alliance of socialist and globalist political parties, also held its 2012 Congress in South Africa, hosted by the ANC.
So far, outside of Israel and South Africa, the high-profile visit by Khaled has gone virtually unreported in the major media. The “former” terrorist is scheduled to be on tour across South Africa from February 6 until February 14. The ad for the BDS-sponsored fundraising tour proudly describes Khaled as a “plane hijacker and Palestinian freedom fighter,” which critics of the BDS movement say offers further evidence of the true nature of the effort to boycott and sanction Israel. Khaled is reportedly scheduled to speak in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Rusternburg, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Newcastle, Cape Town, Polokwane, and Nelspruit.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at
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