The infamous Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Japanese Red Army (JRA) terrorist Kozo Okamoto, who took part in a deadly terrorist attack on Tel Aviv’s Lod airport over 50 years ago, died on July 23, 2026 in Beirut.
The May 30, 1972, attack is known as the Lod Airport massacre.
The attack murdered 26 civilians, including 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico and Israeli civilians and another 80 people were wounded.
The leader and founder of the PFLP was Palestinian George Habash, who was himself raised a Christian but died a Marxist secularist.
There were three Japanese terrorists involved with the attack who were killed at the scene. The team included Okamato, Yasuyuki Yasuda, and Tsuyoshi Okudaira.
Yasuda was accidentally shot dead by one of the other attackers, and I’d bet that it was by Okamato.
Okudaira was killed by one of his own grenades, either intentionally or by accident. I go with the latter.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast… Of course, Palestinian Terrorist Organizations and others in the Middle East praised Okomato, including Al-Jazeera news agency.
Watch the video below, and you’ll see teary-eyed supporters praising him. Think about that, that Okamato went out and killed innocent civilians from different nationalities, mostly foreign Christians on a pilgrimage, and he is being praised by these people for what he did, being praised as a good person who did a good thing–no shame for the massacre he carried out, but praise for a man who carried out an extremely evil deed.
Do any of these Okamata supporters even acknowledge the massacre of innocent people, their deaths, the ramifications on their families, etc? No. Nothing. Zilch.
History has shown us that the sanctimonious and the self-righteous (who play on victimhood) have proven to be the most dangerous and deadly in history (e.g. nazism, Islamism, and, as in this case, communism/Marxism).
As an aside, if people support terrorism and massacring innocent people, they should never call out human rights and war crimes violations by their enemy, because they themselves do not believe in them; the rules go both ways, not just one way.
Okamato was nuts! IMHO. His craziness made him useful to the cause. I remember watching an interview with him after his release from Israel in 1985 in a prisoner swap, and you will see and hear the rantings of a madman.
Interestingly, Okamoto was legally found sane at his Israeli trial, but his defence lawyers argued he was mentally incompetent during his 1972 trial. The military court in Israel rejected the plea.
I wonder if those terrorism murdering-supporting people eulogizing Okamata are conveniently ignoring that while in Israeli prison, he requested to convert to Judaism? He even tried to circumcise himself with nail clippers.
Okamato was a mass murderer, a crazy person; he was no hero by any standards.
–RdM
LinkedIn Article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-mass-murderers-become-heroes-legacy-pflp-kozo-okamoto-de-melo-omt3c/?trackingId=eQf0ihxfYr3kQ7z6MuStZw%3D%3D