Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacker Leila Khaled. Photo: Sebastian Baryli via Wikimedia Commons.

Eventbrite has removed a San Francisco State University-sponsored event featuring Leila Khaled — a member of US-designated terrorist organization Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — from its platform for violating its terms of service.

The move comes after The Algemeiner reported that SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diaspora Studies (AMED) program was planning an April 23 Zoom webinar, facilitated by the Eventbrite platform, featuring Khaled as a speaker.

“Eventbrite is committed to empowering event organizers to gather for their chosen purpose, so long as they don’t violate our Terms. Due to one of the speaker’s affiliation with a foreign terrorist organization, this event violates our Terms of Service, so we have removed it from our platform,” an Eventbrite spokesperson wrote in an e-mailed response to The Algemeiner.

The April 23 event, “Whose Narratives? What Free Speech for Palestine?”, is co-sponsored by SFSU’s AMED program and moderated by the university’s Professor Rabab Abdulhadi, who has previously been criticized by Jewish groups for her rhetoric against pro-Israel students. It marks the second attempt by the organizers to host an event with Khaled as a speaker. In September 2020, an online seminar featuring Khaled — who took part in the hijacking of a Tel Aviv-bound commercial flight in 1969 — was dropped by Facebook and the videoconferencing provider Zoom, and was taken down from YouTube after partially airing.

Asked about the April 23 event, a Zoom spokesperson told The Algemeiner that the company was “reviewing the facts of this event to determine if it is consistent with our Terms of Service and Community Standards and will decide on an appropriate course of action after that review.”

Khaled played a pivotal role in two airplane hijackings in 1969 and 1970 as a member of the PFLP, and she is considered by the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence agency to be part of the present Jordanian command of the organization. The terrorist group — which is founded on a Marxist-Leninist ideology and has been involved in suicide bombings, shootings, and assassinations, among other terrorist attacks — is dedicated to the removal of Western “imperialism” and capitalism from the Middle East to create a “democratic Palestine.”

The April 23 webinar is also co-sponsored by the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), and will also feature Professor Sean L. Malloy from University of California (UC), Merced and the original panelists of the September event.