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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JUNE 28, 1985
PAGE 11
Such � cold-blooded policy would set off . eries of protest in
every humanitarian quarter. The U.S. Constitution does not apply
in Israel, but we would hear that the proposed executions would
violate due process of law: they would be cruel and unusual: they
would amount to� post facto punishment. We would be "lowering
ourselves to the level of the terrorists.-,, We would be mur
derers. Afrof°'that. Bu�i�uch a policy were adopted and en
forced, •••it just might put an end to the kind of savagery we
witnessed with the hijacking.
Make no mistake: We find ourselves in a virtual state of war. War
is inherently cruel. War is inescapably unjust. During World
War II, the Germans indiscriminately bombed targets in England;
the Allies retaliated with the saturation bombing of German
cities. Innocent and unoffending human beings--as innocent and
unoffending as American passengers on a jet plane--died in those
raids of 40 years ago.
Americans, wrote George Will in the June 21 LOS ANGELES TIMES, "are not
nearly angry enough"--especially over the cruel treatment dished out to
that unfortunate passenger aboard TWA Flight 847, Robert D. Stethem, a U.S.
Navy man who was kicked so often every rib was broken, shot in the head, and
then his body dumped from the plane onto the tarmac like a piece of garbage.
Is anyone capable any more of showing righteous indignation at sue
out
�? Or have the millions of staged murders on television so sate the
piiblic that the real thing no longer inspires revulsion? To quote
• ill:
ABC's Peter Jennings says that television has "got to be very
careful not to feed the publi'
c anger." Have the networks decided
on the appropriate American mood and their responsibility for
fine-tuning it? Americans are not nearly angry enough. about the
sava �e beating and murder of the sailor who followed Major Arthur
D. Nicholson Jr. to Arlington Cemetery. [ Nicholson was killed by
Soviet guards in East Berlin. l Intelligent behavior flows not
from keeping one's passion and rationality separated, but from
reasonably relating a proper passion (in this case, cold fury) to
action.
It is getting late in World War III for Americans to heed Douglas
MacArthur's warning that all military failure is explicable in
two words: "too late." Too late perceiving, too late responding
to, threats. The President says that he does not want to jeopar
dize the lives of today's hostages. He is too late. TQ.. 's hos
tages are, to some extent, victims of yesterday's �11acc
re
sponses by him to terrorism, emphatically including
e non-re
sponse to the truck bomb that blew U.S. forces out of Lebanon.
All the while the news media hypes the event, concentrating on the "human
side" of the story as if a hijacking (and murder) were some sort of live
soap opera. Columnist Joseph Kraft wrote, in the June 20 SAN DIEGO UNION:
Journalism, almost as much as government, experiences anguishing
difficulties in coping with terrorism. For the professional im
pulse is to draw close to the event the better to extract its
human interest. But yielding to that instinct helps the terror-