He Sits on Columbia’s Top Disciplinary Body. He Also Lauds Terrorist Plane Hijackings as ‘Spectacular.’
12th December 2024
As a member of Columbia University’s top disciplinary body, Joseph Slaughter helped draft guidelines meant to provide students with a “contemporary understanding” of school rules on campus protests. As an English professor, he delivered a lecture that lauded a string of terrorist plane hijackings as “spectacular” and “remarkable,” according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
During his Oct. 9 talk, titled “Hijacking Human Rights,” Slaughter referenced “pretty spectacular” footage of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) plane hijackings from the early 1970s. 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 told a crowd of mostly student attendees. “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.”
“This is a national liberation imaginary that is just so different from the moment that we are living in that it’s really, I think, important to try to conceive of a different structure of feeling,” he continued. “There is no place in the reporting in the 1970s where any of the people who are doing the hijackings are called terrorists. They’re called guerrillas, they’re called liberation fighters, they’re called liberation movements.”