Occasionally I run across something in the Arab press that is so freaky and twisted I feel like I’ve been kidnapped by evil robots and dragged kicking and screaming into a different dimension. In this bizarre character study from arabia.com, written in June 2000, the author profanes the memory of Martin Luther King by using his most famous words to portray the “calm and charming” Leila Khaled: I have a dream. This recounting of her hijacking career is made even more appalling by the worshipful tone:

With the defeat of Arabs in the 1967 war, which resulted in the Israeli takeover of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Sinai, Khaled became increasingly frustrated. “I felt that I needed to do something tangible to attract the attention of the world to the Palestinian cause,” Khaled said. She left for Jordan to join the resistance. She was unaware of the role she was going to play and little she knew that her leadership was preparing her for the biggest gamble of her life: hijacking airplanes.

Khaled underwent intensive training by Wadi’ah Hadad who initially had doubts regarding the capacities of the 24-year-old woman. “He thought I wasn ‘t serious, because when he first told me about hijacking I burst out laughing as I imagined myself carrying the plane and people running after me!”

However, Khaled stunned her leadership along with the whole world. Her first hijacking took place on August 29, 1969. “The purpose was to liberate Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails and to tell the world that we are not only refugees but people with a cause and a lost land,” she explained.

Khaled’s mission was to take with another colleague a TWA from Rome that was coming from New York en-route to Athens and Tel Aviv.

Of her first hijacking, Khaled remembers a little girl wearing a ‘Let’s be friends’ t-shirt. “I was about to tell her not to go on that plane; I wanted to tell her that we wanted to be friends with the world, but it was the world that didn’t want to be friends with us.”

With a grenade in one hand and a pistol in another, the hijacking started at 33,000 feet. Accompanied by her colleague, Khaled pushed her way into the cockpit and asked the captain to change direction and head straight to Tel Aviv. With her hand-held grenade on his shoulder, the captain had no choice but to obey. Being tailed by two Israeli fighters, the plane never landed in Tel Aviv and was forced to land in Damascus. However, Khaled got a glimpse of her birthplace, Haifa, before the plane left Israeli airspace. “The young woman cried at that point,” the captain later told a press conference held at Damascus. The two hijackers were taken by the Syrian authorities, put under house arrest, and later set free quietly. “It was quite an ordeal,” Khaled said of her first hijacking.

>From that point, the face of Leila Khaled was all over the news. At first Leila refused to speak to the media since she was aware that this might hurt her chance of conducting another hijacking. But her leadership insisted that she do so, since this was part of the struggle and could change public opinion. Ghassan Kanafani coached her on how to deal with the media but the young woman never enjoyed it. “They would ask ridiculous questions like if I look in the mirror each morning or if I had boyfriends, something that made me furious,” she said. “I would just walk away.” The new heroine also received letters from admirers all over the world, some even proposing to marry her.

For her second and last hijacking, Khaled underwent a plastic surgery to change her features, which had become too familiar. Her next mission was to hijack an Israeli El Al flight en-route from Amsterdam to New York on September 6, 1970. However, the hijacking was a bloody experience. After taking the plane with a compatriot from Latin America, Israeli security guards were shooting in mid-air. “There was blood everywhere, Patrick, my compatriot, was killed, and I was badly beaten,” she remembers. The plane was forced to land at Heathrow. The freedom fighter spent 23 days of detention in Ealing police station in London before she was set free because of another hijacking by an ordinary Palestinian on the Dubai-Beirut route asking for her release.

This is the person that Britain lets attend meetings at the House of Commons, and give speeches at universities.