Brainwashing or Awakening?

Robert Stethem, the 23-year-old Navy diver murdered on TWA Flight 847, rests in Arlington National Cemetery alongside many other recent American victims of Middle East terrorism. The other TWA hostages are back with their loved ones. For many, the intensity of the experience will create turning points in their lives and enhance their personal empathy and compassion for others.

The media, which were solicitous and genuinely helpful in getting the hostages back safely, won't be available to most of them any more. In fact, some of the hostages have found that the media can turn very hostile. It began even during their captivity, when some hostages ventured the hope that the U.S. would support their captors' demand that the 766 Lebanese in Atlit prison in Israel also be released. Media hostility increased markedly when some American hostages, whose kidnappers included relatives of the detained Lebanese, said they now had a better understanding of their captors' concerns.

Major networks and local news stations began interviewing psychiatrists, suggesting they explain the "Stockholm syndrome," which got its name from the woman hostage in a Swedish bank who emerged so sympathetic with her captors that she eventually married one of them.

When the majority of the hostages went right on saying after their release that instead of talking about retaliation, we should try to understand the Middle East problems that led to their ordeal, the word went out from media front offices to television and newspaper editors: Cool it with the hostages.

Nevertheless, some of the Flight 847 hostages will want to emulate Jeremy Levin, the Cable News Network correspondent who escaped from his Shiite captors a few months earlier, and who has tried to tell his countrymen what he has learned about contemporary Middle Eastern history by playing an unwitting role in it.

Since it would be embarrassing to the network and offensive to the hostage to keep a psychiatrist standing by to tell him he must be crazy whenever he tries to share his new insights, we won't be seeing much of the hostages for a while.

It's long been obvious, however, that Americans—erudite or unlearned, Christian or Jew, young or old—who are exposed to the Arab world for as little as a few weeks or months experience a revelation. All that they thought they understood from the U.S. media is called into question by the realities they see for themselves. It's safe to say that 19 out of 20 return home firmly convinced of one thing: The U.S. must adopt an even-handed Middle Eastern policy.

When a country with such power as we have "tilts" to one side or another, it quite literally destabilizes the entire region. Even many Americans who are exposed only to the Israeli perspective return calling for an even-handed U.S. policy—both for the good of the U.S. and for the long-term good of Israel.

That sounds a lot like what we've just heard from our "brain-washed" compatriots. If by now they have been preceded by tens of thousands of American diplomats, servicemen, businessmen and educators returning from the Middle East with virtually the same insights, how is it that so little has penetrated the American collective consciousness?

Why is it that a Jimmy Dell Palmer, who called himself "an ordinary American citizen who knows very little about the problems in Beirut" has to be kidnapped and terrorized before he even becomes aware that there is a problem, or that a Robert Stethem must die before his grieving family becomes aware that grieving Middle Eastern families hold Americans responsible for their bereavement?

The answer lies partly in the Israel lobby's power in Congress, but chiefly with our media. Virtually all of it is firmly controlled by people who either put Israel's interests—as they perceive them—before America's, or who refuse to acknowledge that there are times when Israeli and American interests must differ.

Why didn't Americans know the Flight 847 kidnapping was a direct reaction to Israel's Operation Iron Fist? In that operation, earlier this year, Israeli troops made a series of dawn raids on Shiite villages in southern Lebanon. They shot down any young men who tried to escape, and rounded up hundreds of others as hostages to prevent further harassment of Israel's occupying forces. Israel barred the western media from the area andwhen two members of a CBS camera crew tried to approach and film one such "Iron Fist" raid, they too were killed in what the Israelis claimed was a case of mistaken identity and other correspondents who saw the incident called deliberate harassment.

When the Israelis withdrew into Israel they carried more than 1000 Lebanese and Palestinian hostages with them. Our government, to its credit, noted at the time that this was a clear violation of international law. To its discredit, however, our government went right on bestowing nearly $5 billion on Israel this year in combined military and economic assistance. In short, we continued to tilt toward the Israelis, implicitly assuring them they could continue violating international law without losing U.S. support.

It is the inconsistency between our talk supporting international law, and our actions underwriting Israeli violations of it, that the Shiite terrorists have so forcefully brought to our attention. So long as we appear to sponsor terrorism by Israelis, we can expect to suffer terrorism at the hands of their victims.

This is the insight the hostages will want to share when they are invited to tell Americans about the horrors they have experienced. But the moment they seek to talk about why they suffered, or what they learned, they will be politely cut off by the moderator, or gently diverted by an "expert" they had hardly noticed sitting at the moderator's side. He will be someone who has seldom left the comfort of a Washington desk or a university professorship. His foreign experience, if any, will likely be in totally different areas of the world.

On the rare occasions when a network invites a seasoned, independent Middle East observer or a retired diplomat with both the requisite Middle East experience and the freedom to speak his mind, he too is chaperoned by one of those ubiquitous Washington or New York "personalities," unencumbered by first hand Middle East experience, but accomplished at keeping any conversation from straying beyond symptoms to causes.

It's called maintaining "balance," but it is only applied when someone who knows the Arabs and their concerns at first-hand is interviewed. "Balance," it seems, is not necessary when friends of Israel are interviewed.

So welcome to the club, hostages. You've had a terrifying glimpse of the awful fate that awaits so many other Americans if we proceed on our present suicidal, and highly immoral, course. Our media are now dedicated to preventing you from sharing this insight with your countrymen. If you persist in making your views known, experts will explain that you have been brainwashed. They are absolutely right. Like most Americans, you were successfully brainwashed about the Middle East right up until June 14, the first day of your intensive, working-level, introductory course in Middle Eastern realities.

—Richard Curtiss