To the Editor:

Joseph W. Bishop, Jr. [“Carter’s Last Capitulation,” March] disputes the description of the militants as “students,” as “super-Muslims.” Having met with the leaders of the students inside the embassy in March of last year, and having recently received a letter from one of the former hostages (John Limbert), I can assure you that the dominant consciousness inside the embassy was Islamic, and that, furthermore, these were in fact students. Mr. Bishop, motivated as he is by a compulsive hatred of anything that asks the United States for an accounting of its actions (for instance, the illegal overthrow of the Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, the training of SAVAK, the admission of the Shah into the United States against the express wishes of a whole nation), must perforce insinuate that the motives of the students were not those they professed; i.e., that they were instruments of the Soviet Union (which is why, he claims, they did not invade the Soviet embassy).

Mr. Bishop then alleges that “Kidnapping diplomats and holding them hostage by authority of the host state’s government was something new, never done even by Hitler or Stalin. It is hard to imagine a more flagrant violation of the law of nations” (emphasis added). . . .

It is precisely because Hitler could honor this international law and yet systematically work for the destruction of all Jews that proclaims the purely arbitrary character of such a law; the inviolability of a diplomatic agent does not in and of itself constitute something sacred; this, as any other law, must be understood always within a context. . . .

I submit that under cover of diplomatic immunity far worse crimes can be committed . . . than the seizing of diplomatic personnel. If the Soviet Union had somehow managed to interfere with the democratic process in the United States and put into power someone hated by the American people; then, when that dictator had been expelled, the Soviet Union welcomed him into its country—over the cries of the Amercian people, who had paid the price of 75,000 martyrs; and then a group of revolutionary students had seized Soviet diplomats within the United States suspected of plotting yet another coup d’état—would the American people feel there could be “a more flagrant violation of the law of nations”?

The crimes under consideration here are not restricted to those of the students (that they committed an outrageous act against international law is uncontested; it was precisely this disregard for such laws that created the powerful reaction it did: Hitler murdering Jews—that is one thing, but seizing hostages? Not even the Fuehrer himself would stoop to such a crime). The crimes committed—and the only really significant moral question (once we have put aside the legalistic one)—pertain to both parties: in the sum total of events since the intervention of the United States in 1953, was there any justification for the Muslim students to commit yet another crime, to add to those already adumbrated here?

Rightly or wrongly, the students perceived the United States as plotting to destroy the revolution for which thousands had given their lives. They also were convinced that this act would boldly proclaim to the world the limits they would go to demonstrate the intensity of their feeling. And in the Quran, filled as it is with the exhortation to fight against evil and resist oppression, the students sensed some intuitive and Allah-blessed justification for their act.

As a precedent, the seizing of diplomats augurs badly for the future of international relations; but the uniqueness of the circumstance and psychology of this event must be thoroughly understood, especially by those persons and groups now perceiving the menace to the world as Soviet totalitarianism. Mr. Bishop is not likely to pay much attention to the historical record of Shi’a Islam, with its succession of martyrs, its ritualistic view of reality; nor is he likely to want to understand the difference between a “monstrous crime” commited in the name of Marxist-Leninism and one commited in the name of Allah. But the difference might be worth contemplating by readers of COMMENTARY, for the magazine, in its honorable and brilliantly positioned argument against liberalism and the Left, has utterly ignored a mythopoeic instinct (like the Ayatollah’s Islam) which, while fervently anti-Communist, ends up quarreling with American foreign policy with an even greater intensity than with the Politburo. . . .

Robin Woodsworth Carlsen
Victoria, British Columbia

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Joseph W. Bishop, Jr. writes:

There really is not much to say in reply to Robin Woodsworth Carlsen’s rather silly letter, because it has very little to do with my article. I merely expressed doubt that all of the terrorists were what they said they were—I didn’t claim to know what they were—and I find nothing in Mr. Carlsen’s diatribe to dissipate that doubt. As for their status as students, Mr. Carlsen doesn’t explain how they found time to attend classes or take examinations.

I certainly neither expressed nor felt any “compulsive hatred of anything that asks the United States for an accounting of its actions” in Iran or anywhere else. I don’t claim to have any hard information on that subject and I very much doubt that Mr. Carlsen has much either. Whatever the United States may or may not have done could not excuse what the government of Iran did. If it really believed that embassy personnel were spies and counterrevolutionaries the obvious and proper remedy was to expel them. Nor do I perceive what “the historical record of Shi’a Islam” has to do with the case.

Neither COMMENTARY nor I have ever had a good word for Hitler. But he too has nothing to do with the case. The fact that his outrages were on a far larger scale does not excuse the Iranian outrage. Mr. Carlsen’s argument is essentially that kidnapping should not be condemned because so many murders have been committed.

The hypothetical tale about Soviet diplomats seems equally irrelevant, for the simple reason that Mr. Carlsen’s hypothetical American revolutionary students would not be agents of the government of the United States, but simply terrorists. (Terrorists may sometimes have just causes, but that does not make diplomats, any more than schoolchildren, fair targets.)

The main thrust of my piece was to condemn the Carter administration for capitulating to terrorism. Mr. Carlsen apparently has no ideas about this important issue. But his mental processes are so muddled and emotional that there seems no point in arguing with him.