This is how a terrorist’s obituary reads in the L.A. Times:

George Habash, the founder of Arab nationalism and architect of the infamous airline hijackings of the 1960s and ’70s that brought the search for a Palestinian homeland terrifyingly close to home for millions around the world, died Saturday in Amman, Jordan.

. . . .

With a wave of airline hijackings and the headline-grabbing seizure of a French airliner at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) inspired an image of ruthlessness in a Western psyche unattuned to the violent politics of the Middle East.

Stupid Westerners! We’re so unattuned to the violent politics of the Middle East that we consider airplane hijackers to be ruthless!

For millions of young Arabs, Habash represented the voice that said no to Western intervention in the Middle East and to the Arab regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt, that had allowed U.S. interests to dominate the region. He saw the Palestinian cause as part of a global struggle, and defended international terrorism as a way of drawing attention to it.

As my tipster (initials J.D.) wrote me: “I was educated in a California public school, so we never got to the part where we learned that American hegemony in the Middle East in the 60s and 70s was a foregone conclusion.”

The obit goes on to give us this stirring justification for terror:

“I believe that 6 million Palestinians, if they say we want only self-determination, they will get it,” he told The Times in a 1991 interview. “Imagine. Six million saying daily, daily, daily, ‘We want self-determination, we want self-determination.’ And expressing this by all means. I see it very clearly, that we will succeed. Why not?”

The “expressing this by all means” part is the part I don’t like to imagine. But that’s probably just my “Western psyche” talking.

You know, I hope we do catch Osama bin Laden, just to see what kind of obituary the L.A. Times will write for him.

UPDATE: Power Line has more on Habash.