PFLP terrorist Leila Khaled. Photo: Twitter.

A May 8 incident at San Diego State University (SDSU) highlights a trend of glamorizing Palestinian terrorists on college campuses, SDSU English Professor Peter C. Herman wrote Saturday at The Times of San Diego.

He pointed to an email from SDSU’s Women’s Resource Center that included the slogan “From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” and a photo of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist Leila Khaled clutching an AK-47. Khaled hijacked two airliners in 1970. Khaled and the PFLP have been active in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to economically and politically strangle Israel. Khaled remains a member of the PFLP’s political bureau.

PFLP terrorists also gained notoriety for the 1976 hijacking of a Paris-bound Air France flight that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda. The group also claimed joint responsibility with Hamas for a deadly East Jerusalem attack in 2017 that left an Israeli female police officer dead and several others wounded.

Coming so soon after last month’s Poway synagogue shooting near San Diego, the email’s imagery “seems especially shocking,” Herman wrote. “But how are we to respond to a glorification of violence in a university-sanctioned newsletter?”

He invoked a 1984 statement by Abu Iyad, leader of the Black September terrorist group responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, who told Radio Amman: “The Zionists took Palestine inch by inch. And we must retrieve it inch by inch. We believe that Palestine, from the river to the sea, is our country.”

The PFLP’s goal is Israel’s complete destruction.

SDSU’s Students for Justice In Palestine (SJP) chapter hosted now-deported PFLP terrorist Rasmea Odeh via video conference in 2015. Odeh played a key role in a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two students.

And what’s happening at SDSU isn’t isolated.

The Temple University SJP chapter posted the same image of Khaled on its official Twitter page in March 2016, in celebration of International Women’s Day. Last summer, the same SJP chapter wrote a lengthy opinion piece supporting the PFLP. Chapter leader Brandon Do attacked Palestinians whom he claimed had sold out to Zionism following the 1993 Oslo Accords. He also praised PFLP founder George Habash, the “godfather of Middle East terrorism” for “raising the Arab world’s consciousness against Israel.”

It goes without saying that terrorists should be abhorred, not celebrated.

John Rossomando is a senior analyst at The Investigative Project on Terrorism.