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bWorld’s editor, some of the militants brandished lead pipes bas they have on other occasions.” bThe Times’ anger was irrelevant; Black Panthers, Weath- bermen, and other “progressive” militants never merited bsuch fury. bOn June 15th a wave of arrests occurred in the Soviet bUnion. Among those taken into custody were twelve Jews bcharged with attempting to hijack a Soviet airliner at the bLeningrad Smolny Airport and fly it to Sweden. While most bof the Jewish groups angrily denounced the charges as “lies” band the plot as a “frameup,” JDL pointed out that once bagain the Establishment had taken the wrong line. The bpoint was not whether the plot was real or not; what would bthe Establishment say, we asked, if it were found out that the bJews really had meant to hijack a plane? What mattered was bthat Jews who wished to leave the USSR and could not, bbecause of Kremlin tyranny, had every right to seize a Soviet bplane and try to escape. bThe Establishment, always respectable and always inca- bpable of differentiating between truth and falsehood, had balways been unable to distinguish between good and bad bwars, between justified and unjustified terror. bWhile all the Jewish groups went through the prescribed britual of sending out mimeographed protests to the news bmedia, twenty-seven JDL members seized the 19th and 20th bfloors of an office building in Manhattan housing the offices bof the Soviet trade mission, the Amtorg Trading Corpora- btion. These offices, the scene years earlier of a spy scandal binvolving Gerhard Eisler, might still have contained in- bteresting files because the officials inside fought furiously bwhen they were ordered to leave the offices. Part of the breason, of course, might have been the fact that JDL people bjammed all elevators and made the Soviets walk the twenty bflights down. One of the Soviets put up a particularly stiff bfight and slid down at least one flight of stairs. bWithin minutes of the occupation, which lasted more than btwo hours, the area swarmed with newsmen and police and bSoviet diplomats were flying on their way from Washington bto New York. Soviet anger, which had been growing with b
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