PFLP poster, Beirut, 1970: “Patrick Arguello — Symbol of International Solidarity With the Palestinian Struggle.” Provenance [here](https://www.abebooks.com/PALESTINE-POSTER-ENGLISH-PATRICK-ARGUELLO-SYMBOL/31542012987/bd). Reproduced for news reporting and commentary.
Long before Hamasniks disrupted U.S. colleges and Chicago leftist Elias Rodriguez gunned down two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, UCLA grad Patrick Arguello was hijacking an airliner for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a Marxist-Leninist group that participated in the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2003 and has long been designed a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the US.
But a disturbing number of young Americans now designate Arguello and the PFLP as heroes.
About an hour into El Al Flight 219's flight from Amsterdam to New York on Sept. 6, 1970, Patrick Arguello stood up. He was 27, born in San Francisco, [a magna cum laude UCLA graduate and Fulbright scholar](http://unretiring.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-friend-fulbright-terrorist.html), and carried a pistol, a grenade and forged Honduran passport. Beside him, posing as his bride, was the notorious Leila Khaled of the PFLP with two more grenades, whose pins she pulled with her teeth.
They demanded entry to the cockpit, but [the Israeli pilot had other ideas](https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-to-defeat-airplane-terrorists-from-the-only-pilot-who-ever-foiled-a-skyjacking/). He threw his Boeing 707 into a dive, plunging 10,000 feet in a minute and knocking the hijackers off their feet. A steward attacked Arguello empty-handed and was shot. An Israeli sky marshal shot Arguello during the struggle (he died after the plane landed) and Khaled was overpowered and tied up with neckties.
Arguello was not a Palestinian nationalist and had no personal stake in the conflict. He met Khaled about a week before the operation and knew her only by a cover name. He, like many young American leftists and the groups to which they belonged, started to support Palestinian terrorism during the 1960s.
In specific, Arguello was a Sandinista, a member of the communist guerrilla movement seeking to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. In 1970 the Sandinistas and other communist groups were shopping for training. As Arguello's brother later described the arrangement to [PBS's American Experience](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/hijacked-american-hijacker/), the Palestinians told the Nicaraguans, “In order for us to help you, you need to carry out certain missions for us” — and, as he put it, “you don't get something for nothing.”
Arguello trained in camps near Amman, Jordan, in the spring of 1970 before joining Khaled for the mission — one piece of [a coordinated plot to seize four airliners bound for New York the same day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings).
Leila Khaled is still alive, and unrepentant. Asked about the Oct. 7 attack, she said it [“was a must, it had to happen”](https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/october-7-proved-the-importance-of-the-struggle-to-the-world-an-interview-with-palestinian-icon-leila-khaled/), and laid out the program without euphemism: “We have one path, and it leads to Palestine: armed resistance … the most important is the weapons.” In July 2024 she traveled to Nicaragua to [visit Arguello's monument and the school named for him](https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:154124-leila-kahled-visita-el-monumento-del-heroe-internacionalista-patricio-arguello-ryan) in La Paz Centro, telling the children there that “Patricio gave his life so you could sit in classrooms.”
Arguello is also praised as a martyr by some U.S. leftists. In July 2025 Liberation News, the paper of the U.S.-based Party for Socialism and Liberation, [described him](https://liberationnews.org/nicaragua-a-revolution-that-lives/) as “a Sandinista martyred in the Palestinian struggle.”
Some US campus groups now support the PFLP. Last December Vassar's Students for Justice in Palestine advertised a teach-in on the group — “We will discuss how the Palestinian resistance group's historic example can inform our organizing today” — but the college [shut it down](https://miscellanynews.org/2025/12/10/news/admin-cancel-vsjp-teach-in-on-pflp/). The college’s director of student engagement wrote that “it is unlawful to knowingly provide any support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” In March 2024 Columbia students hosted a “Resistance 101” session at which a speaker referred to “my friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP.” The university [called it “an abhorrent breach of our values”](https://forward.com/fast-forward/600394/columbia-suspends-students-hamas-praised/) and suspended four students. The PFLP is Marxist and Hamas is Islamist; on U.S. campuses, as in Gaza, that has not kept them apart.
Five days after Arguello died, President Nixon [announced the response](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-announcing-program-deal-with-airplane-hijacking): “we will place specially trained, armed United States Government personnel on flights of U.S. commercial airliners.” He directed the Department of Transportation to “extend the use of electronic surveillance equipment and other surveillance techniques to all gateway airports,” and he put Defense and Transportation to work on “whether certain metal detectors and x-ray devices now available to the military could provide immediate improvement in airport surveillance efforts.”
Every airport screening line in the world descends in part from what Patrick Arguello and his accomplices did in 1970.
But how many new Patrick Arguellos are now looking for new ways to attack America and Israel?
Mark Sauter is co-author of McGraw Hill's university textbook, [Homeland Security: A Complete Guide](https://amzn.to/3STRHdE).