On Thursday, Kyle Olson of Progressives Today blog spotlighted how CNN political contributor Marc Lamont Hill wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Leila Khaled, an infamous Palestinian terrorist, as he conducted an interview for Huffington Post Live. Hill's shirt includes a quote from Khaled, who hijacked airplanes as a member of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine: "Resistance is not terrorism."
The Huffington Post Live host wore the red short-sleeved shirt as he interviewed author Wendy Williams on May 7, 2014. Olson zeroed in on a controversy from earlier in 2014 involving college students who wore a black version of the same shirt to a conference sponsored by the liberal group J Street:
One of America's elite universities became the focus of attention today as photos emerged showing students apparently engaging in support for international terrorism during the past year. The two students, identified as Fadi AbuNe'meh and Taka Yamaguchi, were apparently leading activists with the campus chapter of J Street U, an organization that describes itself, inter alia, as "pro-Peace."
The allegations broke this morning when photos were discovered of the two students wearing the shirts at an event sponsored by J Street U last April. In coverage of the event, AbuNe'meh is quoted as a representative of the group. In AbuNe'meh's Facebook postings, shown below, when asked where they acquired the shirts, he pointed to a vicious anti-Israel website called existenceisresitance.org. That website also offers shirts with a map of the entirety of Israel drawn in with a keffiyeh pattern and the caption "Un-Occupy," calling for the elimination of Israel as a whole. The site describes the shirts explicitly as showing a picture of Leila Khaled.
After her second hijacking in 1970, Khaled has continued as a member of the PFLP, and currently serves on the Palestinian National Council.
