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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (47986)	9/29/2002 2:18:13 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Nadine, 60 minutes should be interesting tonight... Yes, indeed, interesting stuff is coming to light from the raids in Ramallah. Incidentally, note the pattern of how this information hit the public, 1) debka reports an Israeli intelligence score that has been packaged and sent off to the Americans 2) two days later, Ha'aretz repeats the debka report 3) two days after that, stories appear in the WaPo/NYT poo-pooing and downplaying the new intelligence information. These stories are usually credited to anonymous sources in State and/or CIA. These stories don't mention the Israeli involvement in gathering the intelligence. 4) a few days or weeks after that, the intelligence, having been vetted by American intelligence, turns out to be 100% solid. (I don't think Shin Bet is beyond pushing puffed information, but the Israelis have a lot to lose here if they damage their credibility with the Americans). The story then moves slowly into the American limelight. This time, it's getting an extra push from 60 minutes. After all, we saw this movie once before, with the Karine A story.

To: greenspirit who wrote (47986)	9/29/2002 2:55:18 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

The father of an Israeli victim of terror muses on Israelis and the Stockholm Syndrome: On Sin, Syndromes and Self-Blame Frimet Roth 27 September 2002 Alarming illnesses are in the news these days. West Nile Virus has returned for the third consecutive summer and the threat of smallpox looms larger as the prospect of war with Iraq grows imminent. But there is another insidious ailment that concerns me even more. Many Israelis are already afflicted and have been wantonly spreading it far and wide. I’m referring to the Stockholm Syndrome, first recognized 29 years ago. In August 1973, two ex-convicts, armed with sub-machine guns, attacked a bank and held the six employees in an eleven by 47 foot bank-vault for six days. At the end of the face-off, the hostages astonished the authorities by declining to be rescued. Some testified on behalf of their captors at the subsequent trial, and even raised money for their legal defense. The bewildering finale came with the engagement of two of the female hostages to the robbers. Mental health experts who later studied the incident concluded that, far from being a fluke, it demonstrated behavior quite common among a wide range of hostages and prisoners. Battered wives, abused children, pimp-procured prostitutes, and prisoners of war have all exhibited symptoms of the Stockholm Syndrome. And so have some Israelis. Mental health experts have been intrigued for some time by our reactions to life while surrounded by Arab enemies. Some of them maintain that Israelis who blame themselves for Palestinian terror attacks are reacting in a predictable fashion. Like the original Stockholm hostages they; (i) perceive their very survival as being threatened by people capable of killing them; (ii) receive small kindnesses from those people; (iii) are isolated from outsiders so that only the oppressor’s perspective is available; and (iv) hold no hope of escape. In 1997, Dr. Kenneth Levin, an historian and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, expressed the following thought. “What is heard [in Israel] is widespread repetition by Israelis of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli indictments as well as utopian assertions of the good things that will come of Israeli reform… delusions about the wonderful things that will flow from penance and reform [which] require distorting or denying realities of the present [and]... ignoring or distorting the past.” israelnationalnews.com