in my humble opinion, the PLO still is to some extent nationalist rather than Moslem in orientation. Of course, terrorism is terrorism. The 1930 to 1949 Jewish groups fighting the British in the Palestine Mandate were democratic to some who would be labelled terrorists. In the Tamil LTTE case their cause was never spouted as religious but Dravida.
The PLO has only been even loosely Muslim in political orientation in the past few years. It had many Christian and openly atheist leaders for years, alongside Shiite and Sunni Muslims. Hamas was founded in no small part to give Sunni purists a political place to go.
Correcto. The PLO and sister groups (George Habbash's PFLP etc.) were always socialist and Arab nationalist in character, much like the United Arab Republic and its Ba'athists that preceded them (including Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, part of whose party Anwar Sadat was, too, before he was shown his danger [from the KGB and clients] by CIA agents and turned on the Soviets and Egyptian Communists who planned to knock Sadat off and turn Egypt into a full-blown atheist-communist "people's republic").