Joseph Slaughter, a member of Columbia University’s top disciplinary body reportedly gave a lecture calling terrorist highjackings “spectacular.” According to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the English professor delivered a talk just two days after the anniversary of the October 7 terror attack during which he showed a video of hijackers “helping people off the airplane and taking them over to tables to eat.” Pointing this out, Slaughter said it is “important to try to conceive of a different structure of feeling.”
In the 1970s, Slaughter said, terrorists were not referred to as such; rather, they were called “liberation fighters.” The group he refers to is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and their plane hijackings in the early 1970s.
The Free Beacon reports, “He suggested those hijackings were peaceful, saying, ‘nobody dies except one of the hijackers.’ He also said the hijackings were part of a “national liberation imaginary” and lauded their terrorist perpetrators for feeding their captives.”
“I’d like to show you what a hijacking looked like in 1972. A PFLP hijacking, a Palestinian hijacking in 1972, where the PFLP hijackers, nobody dies except one of the hijackers,” he said, the Free Beacon continues. “What’s remarkable about the historical footage from this thing is the way that the PFLP hijackers are helping people off the airplane and taking them over to tables to eat.”
Before listening to his talk, Slaughter advised his students to read his 2018 paper titled ‘Hijacking Human Rights.’ In his paper, the Free Beacon reports, Slaughter wrote “that the use of violence in pursuit of the right to self-determination might still be part of the legitimate pursuit of decolonization.”
Columbia University has been a hotbed for radical anti-Israel protesters. The Free Beacon reports, Slaughter’s comments come weeks after the disciplinary body he sits on approved guidelines for school rules for the community at Columbia. Among their guidelines is one that says “student protesters are allowed to wear masks used to shield their identities and state that student groups ‘may not be sanctioned for the behavior of an individual.’”
