{"id":55175,"date":"2016-09-05T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2016-09-05T17:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55175"},"modified":"2016-09-05T22:28:16","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T03:28:16","slug":"heroine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=55175","title":{"rendered":"Neerja Bhanot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It was thirty years ago today that Neerja Bhanot won India&#8217;s highest honor for bravery in peacetime, the\u00a0<a class=\"mw-redirect\" title=\"Ashoka Chakra Award\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ashoka_Chakra_Award\">Ashoka Chakra Award<\/a>\u00a0when her jetliner, Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to the US, was hijacked by terrorists from Abu Nidal, who were specifically targeting Americans.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/f\/f5\/Neerja_Bhanot_%281963_%E2%80%93_1986%29.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"230\" height=\"291\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Neerja_Bhanot\">takes up the story<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Nimbus Sans L', sans-serif; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.625;\">After 17 hours, the hijackers opened fire and set off explosives. Neerja Bhanot opened one of the doors. Although she could have been the first to jump out of the aircraft and flee to safety when she opened the door, she decided not to and instead started helping the other passengers to escape. Neerja was shot while shielding three unaccompanied American children from a hail of bullets of the hijackers. Out of a total of 41 American passengers, two were killed during the hijacking. A child on board, then aged seven, is now a captain for a major airline and has stated that Neerja Bhanot has been his inspiration and he owes every day of his life to her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m including the story partly due to its historical value&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and partly to counter the notion that the cultural left continues to push &#8211; the idea that the individual is helpless in the face of adversity, to say nothing of aggression, without &#8220;the village&#8221; &#8211; the suffocating fog of government there to protect and validate them. \u00a0This thesis is trashed on a nearly-daily basis. \u00a0Faced with imponderable evil, against the most daunting odds, ordinary people do the most extraordinary things. \u00a0To attempt to has always been considered one of the greatest virtues of mankind.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m here, in part, to keep reminding you of that.<\/p>\n<p>So that, more importantly, you can remind others of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It was thirty years ago today that Neerja Bhanot won India&#8217;s highest honor for bravery in peacetime, the\u00a0Ashoka Chakra Award\u00a0when her jetliner, Pan Am Flight 73 from Mumbai to the US, was hijacked by terrorists from Abu Nidal, who were specifically targeting Americans. Wikipedia takes up the story: After 17 hours, the hijackers opened fire [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269,131,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grass-roots","category-war-and-peace","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55175"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60195,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55175\/revisions\/60195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}