Corpus Christi Caller Times · 4 November 2001

CP-2001-014

Former Palestinian hijacker reflects on life

Leila Khaled, the ‘deadly beauty,’ says bin Laden does not represent her people’s cause

By Jonathan Curiel, San Francisco Chronicle, Amman

Transcribed from the clipping

“AMMAN, Jordan — Palestinian girls would carry her photograph and dream of being a revolutionary. Men would swoon at her looks, amazed that a woman so striking could use rifles and grenades. In the Arab world 30 years ago, Leila Khaled was treated like a celebrity for hijacking jetliners, a practice that led to a slew of sensational labels, including ‘deadly beauty.’ These days, Khaled is a 57-year-old mother of two who leads a relatively quiet life in Amman… ‘I feel sorry for the innocent people who were killed (on Sept. 11),’ says Khaled. ‘They were not involved. By comparison, when we hijacked planes, it was very well known that we wanted to keep (the passengers and crews) safe. We declared that.’ ‘Bin Laden,’ she says, ‘has no contacts with any Palestinian group… The Palestinian issue is important to Arabs and Muslims. That’s why he used it. But, practically speaking, he hasn’t done anything for the Palestinians.’… A year later, Khaled, after having plastic surgery to disguise her looks, boarded an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York… Khaled concedes that Israel has a right to exist within certain borders. But she insists that a state of Palestine must have East Jerusalem as its capital… The mother of boys 19 and 16, and the wife of a physiotherapist, Khaled says she doesn’t worry about her safety.”

Photograph caption

Leila Khaled is a 57-year-old mother of two living in Jordan. Thirty years ago, she was a celebrity terrorist who hijacked her first plane in 1969 for the Palestinian cause.

Context added by this archive

Thirty-one years after eight American papers ran one photographer’s account of a day with her under eight headlines about how she looked, a paper writes the phrase down: a slew of sensational labels, including deadly beauty. Four paragraphs later, in a subordinate clause, it records that before the second hijacking she had surgery to change her face.

Cite this item

"Former Palestinian hijacker reflects on life," Corpus Christi Caller Times, 4 November 2001. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-014. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-014

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