Zionists hijacking a plane is somehow not terrorism

In yesterday's New York Times, the newspaper published an Op-Ed piece, entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny," heaping praise upon a group of Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, who attempted to hijack a plane and make their way to sweet Israel, where they could then join in the tyranny.

I could get into a lot of details, but I will keep it fairly short. My main point is this: if you replace "Jew" with "black" and "Soviet Union" with "United States of America" in the article, there is no way that the Times or any other mainstream paper would ever touch such a writing. Instead, we see the lionization of these beacons of freedom.

The article leaves out the part where they planned to take the plane by deadly force and had a bunch of weapons on them, as I found in December 18th, 1970's Times:

Subdue the pilot, nice. The author, and the editors at the Times, portray the attempted hijacking as not only harmless but absolutely morally right. There are no questions here; these people were deeply oppressed and had no choice but to hijack a plane at gunpoint. Beyond these barely implied exaltations of the hijacking, the Op-Ed makes no analysis of the event, focusing instead on the road to liberty and freedom the failed hijackers paved for Soviet Jews and other disgruntled anonymous citizens. I bet Palestinians wish they would at least put a couple of toll plazas on that road.

Finally, the author seems to glibly proffer the idea that the would-be hijackers were only going to take a twelve-seat plane, so what's the big deal? It seems that this isn't entirely accurate, as according to an interview with two of the then-recently freed hijackers in April 30th, 1979's Times, there were sixteen of them, not twelve:

It's not so much the devout Zionism that gets me here; it's much more the hypocrisy and inconsistency of what is terrorism and what is not. Generally, Zionists cannot be terrorists, according to the mainstream Western, and particularly American, media. They do whatever they want, with very minimal constraints. They can take over and kill a bunch of people on a ship in international waters that was to be delivering humanitarian aid to oppressed people, they can blithely kill countless innocent people (including those hot-button women and children) and they can run an apartheid-style occupation for decades. Do they get sanctions? No, they get rewarded like no other, calling anyone who acts to oppose any of this a terrorist. And here we see them still glorified for it all in the country's most revered and supposedly "liberal" newspaper.