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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.”
Slaughter’s remarks reflect the institutional support anti-Israel radicals enjoy at Columbia. They came just weeks after the university senate’s rules committee, which Slaughter sits on, approved guidelines “intended to promote a common understanding” of school rules “for the entire Columbia community.” Those guidelines, which Slaughter voted for and defended in a September interview with the Columbia Spectator, sent a clear message to unruly protesters—one of protection, not discipline.
The guidelines, for example, simplify the process by which student groups organize protests, requiring them to merely notify the school of an upcoming demonstration rather than submit formal registration. They allow students who receive interim suspensions to maintain “access to their housing, dining, or healthcare services.” They also note that 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.”
In addition to those guidelines, Slaughter’s committee is in the process of conducting a “comprehensive review” of Columbia’s Rules of Conduct, which will “continue into the 2024-25 academic year.”
Ari Shrage, the cofounder of the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, told the Free Beacon that the university’s board of trustees, which includes interim president Katrina Armstrong, should put Slaughter on leave.
“Joseph Slaughter is another example of a professor teaching hate and justifying violence. A week ago President Armstrong said that ‘we have zero tolerance for anyone promoting or calling for terror or violence.’ He should be put on leave immediately,” Shrage said. “If he is not, how much longer will the board of trustees allow these hollow words and no action? How much longer until parents start pulling their children out of fear of violence? Does someone need to get hurt before the school takes action?”
Though Slaughter referenced a string of PFLP hijackings that he said saw terrorists seize three planes in 1972 and reroute them to Jordan, it appears he was referring to the Dawson’s Field hijackings that took place two years earlier, in 1970. At that time, PFLP terrorists hijacked five planes between Sept. 6 and 9, three of which were forced to land in Jordan. They used explosives to destroy the planes after emptying them.
“Three airplanes are hijacked in 1972 to Jordan, nobody dies. The planes are blown up, everybody is returned home,” he said.
But those hijackings were more violent than Slaughter’s description. When terrorists seized one of the planes, hijacker Patrick Arguello attempted to detonate a grenade that failed to explode. He then shot a steward before an air marshal returned fire, killing him.
Slaughter also said the PFLP terrorists held hostages “for a 72-hour period where everybody is fed.” Though most of the 310 hostages taken during the Dawson’s Field hijackings were released during that timeframe, terrorists held 56 of them—all Jewish—for weeks. They were eventually exchanged for a captured hijacker and three PFLP terrorists imprisoned in Switzerland.
Ahead of Slaughter’s lecture, attendees were asked to read the professor’s 2018 paper, “Hijacking Human Rights.” In it, Slaughter notes that news coverage at the time seemed to acknowledge “that the use of violence in pursuit of the right to self-determination might still be part of the legitimate pursuit of decolonization.” He also writes that a “number of spectacular airline hijackings … provoked the development of a new international individualist discourse on terrorism.” The essay’s acknowledgments thank Rashid Khalidi, a retired Columbia professor who blamed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israeli “settler colonialism” and “apartheid.”
Slaughter nonetheless argued that he “did not, and do not, glorify airplane hijacking, by anyone.”
“Extracting those terms from the context in which they might appear in the essay would be inaccurate and blatantly dishonest,” he told the Free Beacon. “Far from being an endorsement of terrorism or violence, it is an effort to historicize the role that such violence (in the form of airline hijackings) played in transforming the international discourse of human rights in the 1970s.”
One student who attended Slaughter’s lecture disagrees.
“He was just like, ‘Yeah, they were doing this, but they gave them food,’” the student told the Free Beacon. “That was what he really emphasized. For some reason that justified it all to him.”
“It’s part of the whole thing to rewrite history from their perspective. If they can justify these actions, the things they say on campus will seem less radical,” the student continued. “I really hope this use of language and constant justification stops. That’s what I’m looking for, especially from the students and the teachers on campus.”
The glorification of airplane hijackings is nothing new at Columbia. In March, the anti-Israel student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest hosted a “Palestinian Resistance 101” event with designated terror financier Samidoun. The speakers included Samidoun leader Charlotte Kates and her husband, Khaled Barakat, a PFLP member. Barakat lauded airplane hijackings as “one of the most important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”
Shortly thereafter, student radicals launched the anti-Israel encampment that eventually led to the violent storming of a campus building. Photos suggest Slaughter participated in the encampment, the Free Beacon reported, and he has publicly defended its student organizers.
A Columbia spokeswoman told the Free Beacon that “promoting violence” is “antithetical to our values.”
“As we have said repeatedly, promoting violence or those who support violence and harm is antithetical to our values. We remain committed to our core mission of teaching, creating and advancing knowledge,” the spokeswoman said.
