The Left's identification with murderous aggressors by James Lewis

Psychiatry is familiar with an odd syndrome called 'identification with the aggressor.' It's sometimes called the Stockholm Syndrome, after the behavior of air passengers taken hostage by PLO terrorists at the Stockholm Airport in 1973, who, when they were rescued, came out singing the praises of their murderous captors.

Recently we saw the same human oddity when two Fox News reporters were kidnapped in Gaza, and forced to convert to Islam at the point of a gun. After his freedom was bought (at a reported cost of millions of dollars), reporter Steve Centanni told the world that:
'I hope that this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover the story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful and kind hearted. The world needs to know more about them. Don't be discouraged.'
'Kind-hearted' and 'beautiful' are not the first words that come to mind to describe kidnappers who were quite ready to murder Steve Centanni only a day before. In psychiatric thinking the reporters 'identified with the aggressors' --- the terrorist kidnappers --- in a mental flip that allowed them to push away their realistic fear of dying to a distant imaginary cause. They no longer thought of themselves as helpless victims, having adopted the kidnappers' point of view.
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