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The Achille Lauro Hijacking And Terrorism Revisited
Just as Leon Uris' Exodus was presented as a historical document on film and television, so NBC similarly attempted to present its Feb. 13 revisit to the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking. Yehiel Aronowicz, around whom the character of the captain of the Exodus was constructed and who was taking his degree in business administration at Columbia when the novel was published, said about the Uris story: "The novel is neither history nor literature."
The same is true of the two-hour NBC production heralded on the cover of the Feb. 11-17 TV Guide with these words: "Survivors reveal: Our life and death struggle with Arab terrorists." The film is not a documentary. The interviews, selected to damn the PLO, were principally with the murdered Leon Klinghoffer's two daughters, neither of whom had been on the cruise ship, their friend Charlotte Spiegel, and Philadelphia Judge Stanley Kubacki.
The four Palestinian hijackers were shown quarreling violently amongst themselves, snarling at the passengers, and mumbling some unintelligible political justification for their action, which only made their cause look worse. Yet, in its account of the hijackers leaving the cruise ship in Port Said after safe conduct had been negotiated for them by Mohammed Abbas, head of a Palestinian splinter group within the PLO, The New York Times had them waving goodbye and some of the just-released passengers waving back.
The film conveyed the impression that the Palestinians had planned to seize the ship. In fact, their design was to remain on board until the ship reached the Israeli port of Ashdod, where they were to disembark and seize Israelis to exchange for Palestinians in Israeli jails.
Not shown on television was the fact that the hijackers had left the door to their cabin ajar, and a waiter had seen them cleaning their guns. They took him...