Mumia's Terror Connection

It used to be that the cause of saving Mumia would attract relatively well respected people. I can recall meeting the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Ed Asner, Mos Def, and numerous others. Now, with the movement suffering the inevitable diminishing returns of a faux cause, things are getting a little tight.

Now the Mumia movement has, as one of its shining stars, a woman who has been convicted of aiding an Islamo-fascist terrorist group. The woman, a self-proclaimed "radical attorney" named Lynne Stewart, is facing twenty years in prison.

Before she goes, though, she is hitting the lecture circuit and stumping for Jamal.
Just this past weekend, Stewart was the featured speaker at a pro-Jamal event in San Francisco.

"Lynne will be the featured speaker at a 2-5 pm, Mission High School mass rally (18th and Dolores, San Francisco) for Mumia Abu-Jamal - celebrating Mumia's birthday. The rally includes a concert by Michael Franti. Pam Africa will also speak as well as Mumia's lead counsel, Robert R. Bryan and Bay Area National Lawyers Guild Executive Director, Carlos Villarreal. This will be the main event of Lynne's tour. Mumia will record greeting for the rally. $20; $15 for students and seniors."

But defending obvious cop-killers is not the only naughty thing that Stewart is interested in doing. It seems that she has joined in on the "War On Terror"...on the side of terrorists.

Recently, Stewart was convicted of providing material support to terrorism, conspiracy, and defrauding the government. She may well face up to twenty years in prison for her role in supporting Islamo-fascists terrorists, which for a woman in her sixties, amounts to a death sentence.

Stewart's criminality began in 1995, when Stewart defended and became friends with "the Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. According to prosecutors, Stewart, along with two co-defendants, passed messages from the sheik to his followers, who were members of an Egyptian terrorist group. This group was dedicated to, amongst other things, overthrowing the secular and nominally pro-western regime of Hosni Mubarak.

According to prosecutors, Stewart, in effect, allowed Rahman to perpetrate a "jailbreak" of sorts by creating a communications network allowing him to issue orders to his terrorist followers. The seven count indictment against Stewart alleged that she and her co-defendants did, in fact, "provide personnel." What this means in essence is that Lynne Stewart crossed the line from being legal counsel to Rahman, to being a member of his terroristic enterprises.

Not surprisingly, Stewart is an apparatchik of the International Action Center, a Stalinoid front group that prides itself on supporting some of the most vile regimes and individuals on the planet. It is also one of the few remaining groups to actively campaign for Jamal and has allowed its venues and programs to be forums for MOVE's inane sermons.

Apparently, it was Ramsey Clark, the founder of the IAC, who led Stewart to take on Rahman's case and it has been the IAC cadres who have most readily run to Stewart's defense. Much like with the case of Jamal, guilt, innocence, or evidence doesn't matter. What is important to those who defend Stewart is that she lays a claim to the sectarian left and espouses a kind of crude anti-capitalist ideology, never mind the thousands of pieces of evidence arrayed against her or that she openly advocates the destruction of the United States.

Lynne Stewart, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and those who share their ideology have allowed their contempt for injustice within this nation to side with those who want to destroy it. They have thrown their cards in with people who do not want the expansion of democracy, but seek the abolition of it and will use any method to achieve their malevolent ends.

But what allows for such a state of affairs to exist? What accounts for large elements of the far left in this country being so enamored by and willing to defend terrorists bent on installing the most despotic kind of regimes that the world has ever seen?

Author Paul Berman sums it up this way:

"What have we needed for these terrorists to prosper? We have needed immense failures of political courage and imagination within the Muslim world. We have needed an almost willful lack of curiosity about those failures by people in other parts of the world-the lack of curiosity that allowed us to suppose that totalitarianism had been defeated, even as totalitarianism was reaching a new zenith. We have needed handsome doses of wishful thinking-the kind of simpleminded faith in a rational world that, in its inability to comprehend reality, sparked the totalitarian movements in the first place...We have needed a provincial ignorance about intellectual currents in other parts of the world. We have needed foolish resentments in Europe, and a foolish arrogance in America. We have needed so many things! But there has been no lack-everything needed has been there in abundance."

Included, I would add, a lack of courage to stand up to such a threat even when it becomes apparent that it is one that we all must face.

Does the United States, along with other nations of Western Culture, have its blemishes, its flops, and its failures. Certainly, but at what price will we pay to buttress the cruelties of terrorism and tyranny?

Democracy is not a finished product, as the amendments of the Constitution have proven. With every growth in wisdom of the generations past of exposing injustices and biggotry, an new amendment appeared in the document that is the foundation of this country. With the Husseins of Iraq, the Melosovichs of the former-Yugoslavia, and the Kim-Jong Il of the slave-state of North Korea, there are no radifications. There are no protests. The only voice heard is of the state.

Is that the freedom that the radical left wants?