On this day, July 23^rd, in 1968, the "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine" (PFLP) hijacked an Israeli El Al passenger jet and forced it to fly to Algiers.  The Algerian government briefly took the three hijackers (2 "Palestinians", 1 Syrian) into custody, but then quickly released them.  They kept the passengers and crew hostage for 5 weeks.  The Israelis refused to negotiate with the Algerians, believing that it would only encourage further hostage-taking.  But the U.S. government pressured Israel to capitulate, and in a pattern that was to repeat itself many times in the following decades, the hostages were freed in return for the release of convicted terrorists held in Israeli prisons.

This was the first and last successful hijacking of an El Al flight.  El Al, and to a lesser extent all airlines, were forced to enact expensive security-screening procedures to end the string of Islamic hijackings and attacks on passenger jets that occurred on an almost monthly basis in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  It was then that the draconian ban on loaded handguns and hand-grenades in airline cabins was enacted, which was followed in the 2000's by bans on bottled water, baby formula, nail polish, and shoes.

Two points worth noting:  first, the relationship between Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic governments.  The terrorists play the "bad cop", offering the cover of plausible deniability for their dirty work, allowing the Islamic government to step in and play the "good cop" and offer to help resolve the situation, when in fact they are both working together, towards the same goal: the good of the ummah and the ascendancy of Islam.  Western governments choose to accede to the Islamic governments' wishes, in order to create a "good working relationship" with our "allies" in the "war on terror"; while the terrorists are fêted as heroes and given only token punishment (if even that) by the Islamic governments.  It is a well-scripted performance with which we continue to play along, decades later.

Secondly, the PFLP was created by George Habash, a "Palestinian Christian" (dismissively referred to as "Nasrani" by the Arabs, in reference to Nazareth).  Just as we see in other "Palestinian Christians" (Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, terror apologist Hanan Ashrawi, re-historian Edward Saïd, and the traitor/spy Azmi Bishara), there is a particular mindset that develops in Christians who live as dhimmis under sharia in Dar al-Islam; a certain loyalty is forcibly instilled in the Christians, in which their own identity is sublimated to that of their Islamic hosts'.  "Palestinian Christians" feel a kinship not with Egyptian Copts or Alabaman Baptists, but with "Palestinian" Muslims.  In a case of Stockholm Syndrome writ on a societal scale, their loyalty is to the Muslim overlords who grant them the right to exist for yet another day, Allah willing.