Scene of Merah terror murders in Toulouse
Scene of Merah terror murders in ToulouseIsrael news photo: Flash 90

A meeting at the University of Toulouse intended to express support for the PFLP terrorist organization has been cancelled by administrators, according to a report Friday morning by the AFP news agency.

It is not clear where the meeting was to take place, nor at which of the university's 22 institutions of higher learning. Established in 1229, the University of Toulouse is a consortium in Midi-Pyrenees and comprises  the fifth largest university area in the country. The featured speaker at the gathering in the southern French city was to be a representative from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).  

The university was the scene of an attack on an Israeli delegation in late April by a group of chanting, shouting protesters calling for the extermination of Jews. The incident took place about a month after the murder of a rabbi and three young children at a Jewish day school in Toulouse. The attackers ripped down the Israeli flag from the delegation's stall at the Le Mirail campus, in the area where Toulouse terrorist Mohamed Merah grew up.

PFLP members broke a PLO agreement to end terrorism outside Israeli-held territory in 1976 and hijacked an Air France flight bound for Tel Aviv, together with West German radical leftists from the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The terrorists landed the plane in Entebbe, Uganda and were subsequently eliminated in the famous raid by Israeli commandos who stormed the airport on the Entebbe tarmac and freed the hostages. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's older brother Yoni Netanyahu, an IDF officer, was the sole casualty in Operation Entebbe.

The terrorist organization is the second-largest member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the entity which two weeks ago received upgraded  nonmember observer state status on behalf of the Palestinian Authority at the United Nations. The Fatah faction, led by PA Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas, is the largest member in the umbrella organization.

Formed in 1967 following the Six Day War, the PFLP has sought to topple conservative Arab states, destroy Israel and apply Marxist doctrine to the "Palestinian struggle," with support from the Soviet Union and China. On its English-language website, the PFLP quotes a statement from “Comrade Ahmad Sa'adat, imprisoned General Secretary of the PFLP,” sent from Hadarim Prison, explaining the organization's current views.

PA Arabs, according to Sa'adat, have “no choice but the choice of resistance.” He accuses Israel of “aggression” in an “ongoing series of systematic attacks” which include “the expansion of settlements, division of the West Bank into ghettos and cantons... isolation and Judaization of Jerusalem, confiscation of land, demolition of homes and displacement of our people through assassinations, mass arrests and daily settler assaults on our people.” He also claims these actions are being taken under “international cover which is provided by the major imperialist powers,” in particular the United States.