Free False Witness by Dorothy Uhnak Page A

them were shipped off to Bellevue very quickly. The fourth was more than a little scary. He brought in a carefully wrapped left foot in a serious state of decay—claimed he’d chopped it off some woman’s leg. Was it possibly Sanderalee Dawson’s? We turned him over to Chief Barrow’s people.
    Sanderalee Dawson’s nighttime slot was filled with endless discussions about what had happened to her, what was being done about it, who was behind it all. A roundtable discussion, being led by a pacifist intellectual black minister of somewhat tender years, was taken over by that instant media hero Dr. Regg Morris, he of the marvelous voice and flashing eye; he who had accompanied Sanderalee Dawson on her trip among the gallants of the PLO; he who loved her best and would have his revenge.
    “And it was nothing less than a Zionist attempt to silence Ms. Dawson,” he told us, speaking quickly, not pausing for breath, “and to so silence the freedom-loving peoples of the Third World and to wreak Israeli havoc and viciousness on the newly acclaimed spokeswoman of a people who have come to love her, to count on her, to recognize hers as a voice to the conscience of the world, and the perpetrators of this carefully calculated deed”—quickly, quickly, the man never seems to breathe—”have to know, have to know that force begets force, violence begets violence, destruction begets destruction, attack begets attack. The PLO is the military arm of that temporarily silenced voice of that purely beautiful black woman. Hold on there a minute, Reverend” (this to the hapless “leader” of the discussion group who was trying desperately to put in a word of his own), “you just hold on, you’ll get your chance to preach that old Zionist-implanted Christian propaganda: Turn the other cheek. Sanderalee Dawson don’t have no more cheek to turn, brother, and I surely ain’ turnin’ mine, no more, no way, baby.”
    New York–born, raised by an English-teacher mother and an attorney father, Columbia Teachers College–educated, he can “get down home” with the best of them when it serves his purpose.
    The horrified producers—mostly Jewish by birth or by association—were aghast at what passions they had loosed. The next night they tried for a learned discussion among psychologists and psychiatrists, to probe the sort of mentality that could perform so gross and dreadful an attack on a woman like Sanderalee Dawson. The wrong guests were placed together in a semicircle. The women ended up calling their male colleagues chauvinist pigs. The males maintained their smugly superior attitude and deferred to the biggest mouth among them, who declared: “All you women could go back for a little therapy to examine the reasons for your blatant hatred of men. Remember: ‘Lesbians are made, not born.’ ”
    The next night, the producers decided to run an old movie. But their ratings had never been higher and they were getting unbelievable press coverage. There was a gold mine under their feet if they could only decide how to get the stuff out.
    Two letter bombs were received at the office of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. One elderly black woman clerk lost the tips of the fingers on her right hand and her eyes were injured when her glasses shattered. The second bomb was a dud.
    A large box of honey candy was delivered to the New York home of the United States representative from the United Arab Republic. A telephoned warning from the “Never Again Committee of Ten” sent the bomb-squad detectives, wearing lead vests, into the mansion, and mobs of veiled women and dark-eyed children into the streets. But the bomb went off with a whimper rather than a bang.
    The evening television news shows at both six and eleven picked up and featured every incident that could possibly be connected, in any way, to the attack on Sanderalee Dawson. There were endless, earnest speculations, theories, opinions, outrages, pleas for calmness from