The PLO’s envoy to the United Kingdom commemorated a Palestinian terrorist over the weekend accused of orchestrating a 1972 attack that killed over two dozen of people at Israel’s international airport.
“Rest in eternal power and peace Ghassan Kanafani,” Husam Zomlot wrote in a Twitter post published on Saturday.
Kanafani was a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist organization until the Mossad killed him in Beirut on July 8, 1972. Photographic evidence linked Kanafani to the May 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which terrorists recruited by the PFLP gunned down 26 travelers, including American citizens from Puerto Rico.
“Palestinian diplomat celebrating the terrorist responsible for the 1972 massacre at Ben Gurion Airport which took the lives of 17 Puerto Rican pilgrims, a Canadian tourist and 8 Israeli civilians,” Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, director of policy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, responded. “Sick. But not surprising.”
In 1973, Lod Airport was renamed in honor of Israel’s first prime minister.
Saturday’s tweet was not the first instance of Zomlot’s extremist positions causing controversy. In February, the PLO representative refused to condemn an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that left seven Israelis dead, while describing Islamic Jihad terrorists as “refugees” who were “ethnically cleansed.”
He then proceeded to describe Israel as a “colonizer,” “occupier” and “besieger.”
In the past, the Palestinian envoy has also been accused of denying the Holocaust, downplaying rocket attacks on Israeli civilian communities, and defending the Palestinian Authority’s “Pay-for-Slay” policy, in which it pays monthly stipends to terrorists and to the families of slain terrorists.