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