Obama administration releases terrorist Lynne Stewart for “jubilant return home”

[NOTE: For an earlier report on Lynne Stewart and other extremist lawyers associated with the “Center for Constitutional Rights,” see the Capital Research Center publication Organization Trends, September 2006, at http://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/pubs/pdf/v1185995388.pdf.]

After serving four years of a 10-year sentence, the terrorist Lynne Stewart is a free woman, thanks to the Obama administration.

Stewart was convicted in 2005 of aiding the terrorist activities of Al Qaeda’s spiritual leader, Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh.

Specifically, she helped Rahman in his effort to overthrow the pro-U.S. leader of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, and replace his government with an Islamofascist one. That goal—arguably the highest realistic aspiration of Al Qaeda—was briefly achieved, with the support of the Obama administration, in 2011-2013.

After the Obama administration’s “compassionate release” of Stewart, who’s dying of cancer, she returned to New York City, to the cheers of her supporters. She got a “jubilant welcome home,” as the leftist “Democracy Now!” noted in a story celebrating her release (http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/2/exclusive_dying_lawyer_lynne_stewarts_jubilant).

Her release, it so happens, came the same week that Al Qaeda took control of the key Iraqi city of Fallujah. It came the same week that the New York Times, so as to downplay Al Qaeda’s successes (and help the current administration and the 2016 campaign of Hillary Clinton), made a hilariously inept attempt to blame Al Qaeda’s 9/11/12 Benghazi attack on anger over a YouTube video.

Together with recent events in North Africa, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, these developments are signs that the Terror War is, indeed, being won.

Just not by us.

====================

Before her conviction and disbarment, Stewart was known for her representation of violent extremists and cop-killers. For example, she represented Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, the Weather Underground terrorists convicted of three murders in connection with a Brink’s robbery. (While the couple served their sentences, Boudin and Gilbert’s child was raised by fellow terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who helped Barack Obama in the early stages of his political career. Gilbert remains in prison; Boudin is now an adjunct professor at Columbia University.)

David Horowitz, the former leftist who now monitors leftwing activities, has called Stewart a “Progressive icon.” She was, and is. George Soros’s Open Society Institute donated $20,000 to her legal defense fund. When she was sentenced, the Clinton-appointed federal judge overseeing her case, John George Koeltl, rejected the 30-year sentence that prosecutors recommended based on sentencing guidelines. Instead, he sentenced her to 28 months based on her long record of support for Progressive causes: “Ms. Stewart performed a public service, not only to her clients but to the nation. She’s made an extraordinary contribution,” Judge Koeltl said. Ben Johnson of the National legal and Policy Center wrote in 2010 about the reaction to Stewart’s lenient sentence (http://nlpc.org/stories/2010/07/21/soros-investment-terror-lawyer-backfires):

Stewart greeted her sentence as “a great victory. . . . I am very grateful to the judge that he gave me time off for good behavior, and he gave it to me in advance of the sentence, when he said that my extraordinary work meant that I could not get a sentence that the government wanted.” She further belittled her jail time, saying, “I can do that standing on my head.” She vowed throughout, “I would do it again.”

As the appeals process unwound, she remained free on bail, where she received numerous awards and speaking engagements. More than half of the City University of New York’s graduating law students of 2003 had voted Stewart the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year. In 2007, Hofstra University Law School invited Stewart to speak at a conference on legal ethics. Stewart continued to give lectures and teach-ins all over the country. She became the subject of at least two documentaries: Lynne Stewart: The Struggle Continues (2006) and Lynne Stewart: An American Story (2009). Just before being ordered to (finally) begin serving her jail time last fall, the listeners of New York’s WBAI-FM, a “progressive” radio station operated by the Pacifica Foundation, elected Stewart to its board. (WBAI Chairman Mitchel Cohen objected for logistical reasons: by then, Stewart was already in jail.)

An appeals court overturned the lenient sentence and ordered that she be re-sentenced based on stricter criteria. She then drew the 10-year sentence based on her obvious lack of remorse (“I can do that standing on my head”) and the fact that she committed perjury during her trial. But that sentence ended after four years due to a request for “compassionate release” from the Obama-appointed director of the Bureau of Prisons, a request passed through the office of Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, former chief counsel to Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

====================

The Stewart case highlights the danger of a Red-Green coalition: an alliance of Marxists in all their variations, including radical environmentalists, with theocratic Islam. (Despite the post-2000 association of red with Republicans and blue with Democrats, the color red is traditionally linked to the Left. Green is traditionally the color of Islam, and is now the color of environmentalism.) What the various shades of extremism have in common is hatred of the individualist values associated with the United States.

Writing in The National Interest Summer 2006, Paul Hollander examined this connection in the Stewart case:

Following 9/11, the “root-cause” school held the United States responsible for the terrorist attacks it was subjected to and simultaneously became a champion of Arab-Islamic causes. Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer who belongs to this school, is best known as the unsuccessful defender of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of the global jihad, sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for conspiring to wage a terrorist war against the United States. Like the late William Kunstler, she became “a movement lawyer” who “didn’t just defend the legal rights of her clients; she also advocated their politics”, as George Packer noted in the New York Times Magazine. She became Rahman’s lawyer at the urging of Ramsey Clark, who also deserves our attention on similar grounds. Subsequently, Stewart was indicted for helping Rahman communicate from prison with his followers. In Stewart’s eyes, Packer wrote, Rahman was “a fighter for national liberation on behalf of people oppressed by dictatorship and American imperialism. She came to admire him personally too . . . .”

Stewart indeed got involved in the case of the Blind Sheikh at the behest of Ramsey Clark, a former U.S. Attorney General, and Abdeen Jabara, former head of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. (William Kunstler, who was Stewart’s mentor, and his partner Ron Kuby had also represented Abdel-Rahman, as well as El-Sayyid Nosair, the Al Qaeda assassin of ultra-Zionist leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. Nosair’s murder of Kahane is considered the first Al Qaeda attack in the U.S.)

As noted above, Stewart was famous for her work for clients who were members of terrorist and hate groups. Those clients included Larry Davis, acquitted of attempted murder after he wounded six policemen in a shootout; and Richard Williams, who conducted what he said was a war against capitalism by setting off bombs at offices and military sites, and Mazzin Assi, who tried to firebomb a synagogue in the Bronx. Her firm also represented Moataz Al-Hallak, a suspect in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa.

She represented mobsters such as “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, who was underboss of the Gambino mob. In a separate case, she spent years fighting a criminal contempt charge after she refused to testify about her fee arrangement with another mobster. A witness told authorities that Stewart was working for higher-ups, in the mob, not for her client, presumably in order to prevent him from turning state’s evidence, so they secretly appointed a “shadow counsel” to represent the mobster behind Stewart’s back.

Abdel-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of planning to bomb the UN, FBI headquarters in New York, and the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, and other landmarks, and conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
A year and a half after Abdel-Rahman’s conviction, the government limited the Blind Sheikh’s ability to communicate from his prison cell to the outside world. The justification was simple: that, like a Mafia don, he retained the ability to command his followers. This restriction was accomplished through what is known as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs).

After the Sheikh’s followers in the Islamic Group murdered 58 tourists in Luxor as part of an effort to secure his release, the SAMs were further tightened. He would “not be permitted to talk with, meet with, correspond with, or otherwise communicate with any member, or representative, of the news media, in person, by telephone, by furnishing a recorded message, through the mails, through his attorney(s), or otherwise.”

Beginning in 1998, Abdel-Rahman’s lawyers were required to agree not to “use [their] meetings, correspondence, or phone calls with Abdel Rahman to pass messages between third parties (including, but not limited to, the media) and Abdel Rahman.” And the following year, the lawyers were required to sign a statement that they would follow the SAMs. Stewart signed such an agreement, in particular agreeing “that she would ‘only be accompanied by translators for the purpose of communicating with inmate Abdel Rahman concerning legal matters’ and that she would not ‘use [her] meetings, correspondence, or phone calls with Abdel Rahman to pass messages between third parties (including, but not limited to, the media) and Abdel Rahman.’”

After 9/11, the restrictions were tightened even further by Attorney General John Ashcroft. On November 9, 2001, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent what The Washington Post called a “furious” letter protesting Attorney General John Ashcroft’s decision to monitor conversations and mail between prisoners and their lawyers.

The new rule allowed such monitoring for up to a year if the attorney general certifies that there is a “reasonable suspicion” that the contact may be used to “facilitate acts of terrorism” or violence. Leahy wrote that there are “few safeguards to our liberty that are more fundamental than the Sixth Amendment,” which protects the right to counsel. “When the detainee’s legal adversary – the government that seeks to deprive him of his liberty – listens in on his communications with his attorney, that fundamental right and the adversary process that depends upon it are profoundly compromised.”

The president of the American Bar Association complained that “these new rules run squarely afoul of the Fourth and Sixth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.” The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires warrants, issued “upon probable cause,” for searches.

Of course, this rule did not affect the Lynne Stewart case, which involved communications that had already taken place. But the Stewart case certainly provided support for advocates of the new rule.

In any event, the concern over the restrictions was overblown with regard to prisoner like the Blind Sheikh, in part because they did not apply under after his conviction. Long before Stewart committed her crimes, her client’s appeals had run out. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel applies to “accused,” not convicted, and, although our system provides a convicted criminal with ample access to his attorney, that access may be subject to reasonable restrictions such as the SAMs.

All such restrictions on prisoners’ ability to communicate were intended to prevent a terrorist from continuing to run his operation from behind bars, in the style of a Mafia don. In this case, Ahmed Abdel Sattar (who would be a co-defendant in Stewart’s trial) received messages from the Islamic Group and relayed them to Mohammed Yousry (also a co-defendant), who acted as Stewart’s interpreter when she visited her client in prison in Minnesota. Yousry passed the messages to Abdel-Rahman and got his response, while Stewart pretended to discuss legal issues with the Blind Sheikh.

According to the government’s affidavit, Abdel-Rahman was told during a prison conversation in July 2001 that the bombing of U.S.S. Cole, in which 17 U.S. sailors died, was done as part of a scheme to free him. According to a Justice Department press release, “[Mohammed] Yousry told Abdel Rahman that [Ahmed Abdel] Sattar had been informed that the U.S.S. Cole was bombed on Abdel Rahman’s behalf and that Sattar was asked to convey to the United States government that more terrorist acts would follow if the United States government did not free Abdel Rahman. While Yousry was informing Abdel Rahman about this scheme, Stewart actively concealed the conversation between Yousry and Abdel Rahman from the prison guards by, among other things, shaking a water jar and tapping on the table while stating that she was ‘just doing covering noise.’”

That was the procedure: While Yousry and Abdel-Rahman would have their conversations, Stewart would pretend that she was talking and Yousry was translating. She would pretend to take notes on her legal pad (in which, at one point, she concealed a smuggled letter to the Sheikh). They laughed about the “fine acting job” she was doing in fooling the guards, and Stewart joked, “I can get an award for it.” Abdel-Rahman bragged about his “trained doves” who carried his messages for him.

During one visit, Stewart applauded the efforts of Abu Sayyaf, a Philippine affiliate of Al Qaeda, which was conducting a kidnapping campaign in an effort to free Abdel-Rahman.

After one meeting with the Sheikh, Stewart issued a press release that effectively called for renewed violence by his followers in an organization called the Islamic Group. Abdel-Rahman’s message was that he no longer approved of the Islamic Group’s ceasefire with the Egyptian government. Stewart, at Abdel-Rahman’s instruction, also refused to deny that he had issued a fatwah calling for the killing of Jews around the world. (One had been issued in his name, and by refusing to renounce it, the Abdel-Rahman/Stewart team in effect endorsed it.)

Based on Stewart’s press release, a conversation with a Cairo journalist conveying Abdel-Rahman’s views (which she admitted), and her behavior during her jailhouse visits – behavior caught on tape – Stewart was indicted on charges of providing material support to terrorism, conspiracy, defrauding the U.S. government, and making false statements in violating the SAMs she had signed.

She then embarked on a series of interviews and speeches. Her remarks in those forums, together with past remarks and her attempted explanations for those comments during the trial, doomed her.

During Abdel-Rahman’s 1995 trial, she told an interviewer, “I don’t believe in anarchistic violence but in directed violence,” she said. “That would be violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism and sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions, and accompanied by popular support.” The Islamist movement, she said, “is the only hope for change there, the one that gathers the imagination of the people, that motivates them.”

After her indictment, she declared that “I believe in self-determination. His [Abdel-Rahman’s] is one way to lift off the yoke of imperialism. If the next step is worse, then the people will rise again. It’s a process of development.”
An interviewer noted: “It’s a little frightening that left-wing political prisoners are conflated in the government’s eyes with right-wing Moslem fundamentalists.” To which Stewart replied: “I don’t think it’s quite fair to say right-wing, because they are basically forces of national liberation.”

In a speech to the National Lawyers Guild convention, Stewart included mass murderers Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro, along with Castro’s sidekick Che Guevara, on a list of “modern heroes,” and she quoted Che: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” She then declared: “We have in Washington a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politics in all corners of the globe.” (During the Cold War, the National Lawyers Guild was the U.S. legal arm of the Communist Party, a violent extremist group that murdered well over 100 million people.)

In an interview with the Marxist publication Monthly Review, Stewart said, “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution. The CIA pays a thousand people and cuts them loose, and they will undermine any revolution in the name of freedom of speech.”

To make it even easier for the prosecution, Stewart reprinted many such comments from speeches and interviews on LynneStewart.org, her own Web site.

Not surprisingly, she was confronted with those statements during the trial. Under cross-examination, she said violence was essential to dismantling institutions that perpetuate “sexism and racism.” She said her philosophy included fighting “entrenched ferocious capitalism that is in this country today.”

“I believe that entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence,” Stewart said. She said her definition of “entrenched institutions” includes the former Board of Education of New York City, and that while she deplores “wanton massacres,” nevertheless “you can’t always single out the combatants from the non-combatants.”

“I believe,” she said, “in the politics that lead to violence being exerted by people on their own behalf to effectuate change.”

“People get killed, sometimes it’s completely unfair, but others doing the attacking, they see their lives as completely unfair,” Stewart said. “I’m saying some people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something is wrong with the world but I don’t see an easy solution to the problem.”

As noted by Dan Richman of Fordham Law School, “There were no great issues of fact. It was pretty well conceded by the defense lawyers that she had these contacts with the sheikh, that she did pass messages out from him to the outside world, that she did make certain representations to the government, saying she wouldn’t pass messages, and it all became more a matter of interpretation and intent.”

Stewart’s own statements had made it easy for the jury to interpret her actions and determine her intent. As a result, the great debate that many had expected – over the Sixth Amendment in an Age of Terrorism – never materialized.

Mimi Wesson of the University of Colorado law school told National Public Radio: “Certainly at the outset of this prosecution, many in the criminal defense community expressed the fear that it was intended as an effort to chill the efforts of zealous defense attorneys. As the trial has unfolded and the evidence has been disclosed, I think that fear is less than it was at the outset. The evidence suggested that Ms. Stewart, many believed, really had exceeded the boundaries of zealous advocacy and crossed over the line into aiding her client’s efforts to continue communicating with terroristic organizations in Egypt. So under the circumstances, although some are still characterizing it as a persecution of a devoted attorney, others are willing to see it as a warning only that attorneys who represent defendants accused of terroristic crimes should be careful to observe the limit of their professional role.”

Stewart certainly made it easier for the jury to determine her intent, by giving interviews in which she declared her support for terrorism – and then posting those interviews on her own Web site, L:ynneStewart.org. Her defiance and willingness to stand by her beliefs may have won her some fans – after her indictment, law students at the City University of New York named her Public Service Lawyer of the Year – but it was a disaster for her defense.

What was her explanation for helping Abdel-Rahman smuggle messages? Again, her own words did her in. The idea, she said in court, was to maintain the Blind Sheikh’s viability as a political figure, in hope that the political situation would change someday – say, with the coming to power of an Islamist government in Egypt. Then he might be released.

That is consistent with that she told Greta Van Susteren in an interview on Fox News, in which Stewart explained: “The sheikh is facing life in prison. His only hope of ever getting out of prison is if the political conditions in Egypt change . . . If his party were to sweep into power and Mubarak was sent to where he should go . . . if he was swept away and the Sheikh’s people were in power, you don’t think they’d trade somebody to get him out?”

Van Susteren: “Absolutely not.”

Stewart: “Oh, I don’t agree with you.”

In its coverage of the Stewart trial, the New York Times noted: “While the government regarded Mr. Abdel Rahman as a dangerous terrorist, [her attorney] Mr. Tigar said, to Ms. Stewart he was ‘an old man’ held in conditions of cruel isolation in a federal prison in Rochester, Minn. Mr. Tigar compared the sheik to Nelson Mandela and Menachem Begin, political leaders who were treated as terrorists at one time in their careers.” Prosecutor Anthony Barkow told the jury: “She thought she could blow off the rules that apply to everyone else because she’s a lawyer.”

After the jury deliberated for 13 days, it found Stewart guilty on all counts. Her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, were also convicted on all counts.

The Stewart case raised several questions of importance in the fight against terrorism.

 ARE TERRORIST LAWYERS LAWYERS OR TERRORISTS?

The case highlighted the fact that the same lawyers often are involved in one terrorist-related case after another.

Michael Tigar, for example, represented Lynne Stewart at her trial. Tigar, who first came to prominence in the 1960s as a supporter of Fidel Castro, had a record of representing members of violent hate and terror groups:

* Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was one of the Chicago Eight who were accused of plotting to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Seale had declared: “If the police get in the way of our march, tangle with the blue-helmeted motherf—–rs and kill them and send them to the morgue slab.”

* Angela Davis, a college professor in California, went into hiding after a gun registered to her was used in an attempted courtroom escape in which a judge and three others were killed. After she was captured, Tigar won her an acquittal. In 1980 and 1984, Davis was the vice presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA.

* Francisco “Kiko” Martinez was a lawyer and a member of the Crusade for Justice, a radical Chicano group based in Denver. In 1973, Martinez was indicted for allegedly mailing three letter bombs, to a policewoman, a school board official, and a motorcycle shop. One bomb had his palm print on it. Martinez fled to Mexico. In 1974, Martinez’s brother and five other activists died in explosions that, police said, were the result of the victims’ mishandling of explosives. In 1980, after traveling to Cuba and back to Mexico, Martinez tried sneaking back into the U.S. under an alias, an act that eventually led to a perjury conviction (later overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). The letter bomb indictments led to a mistrial on one charge, for which he was not retried due to judicial misconduct; an acquittal on a second charge; and a dismissal, due to lost evidence and a witness’s death, on a third charge. Tigar claimed that Martinez had fled the country to avoid “police terrorism.” Government officials suspected that Martinez received training from the Soviets.

* Terry Nichols was convicted in the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Nichols was an avid reader of anti-Semitic publications such as Willis Carto’s Spotlight. Many believe Nichols, a frequent visitor to an Al Qaeda hotbed in the Philippines, may have been working with Islamic extremists; former CIA Director James Woolsey has suggested as such, and former terrorism czar Richard Clarke has publicly acknowledged the possibility.

In a book published by the Marxist Monthly Review, Tigar praised a concept of international law that, Tigar said, “owes a great deal to Soviet theorists such as G. I. Tunkin” among others. He has worked closely with the Institute for Policy Studies, a pro-Soviet think tank in Washington, D.C.

Rather than ostracize lawyers who represent terrorists and the like, the legal profession often honors them. For example, the group California Attorneys for Criminal Justice conducted a survey to name the Lawyers of the Century. On that list, lawyers who represented members of hate/terror groups accounted for five of the top six positions. Gerald F. Uelman, law professor at Santa Clara University, noted in a law review article that surveys of death penalty lawyers and of Arizona criminal defense lawyers put Clarence Darrow, Stewart’s mentor William Kunstler, and Stewart’s lawyer Michael Tigar – all of whom made a habit of representing members of hate/terror groups – among the top ten choices for Lawyer of the Century.

2007’s National Defense Strategy, a Pentagon document, referred to America’s enemies “using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” As The Washington Times noted in an editorial, the first two are references to “lawfare” – the use of law and the courts to achieve military objectives. “The sad truth is that our enemies know we’re a law-abiding people, and that this at times can make us vulnerable.” At which point does one conclude that a lawyer is not just representing the downtrodden and the unpopular, but that he is deliberately aid the cause of terrorism and hate groups?

 HAS THE SO-CALLED ‘RADICAL LEFT’ IN EFFECT MERGED WITH RADICAL ISLAM?

As noted above, some call it a “Red-Green alliance” – a joining of the Left (onetime pro-Soviet Marxists and anarchists and their younger counterparts) with the Islamofascist movement.

After all, the groups share several important qualities, including opposition to U.S. cultural and military dominance, to the existence of the State of Israel, and to globalization and free markets. And, some argue, they need each other if they are to have a chance to succeed.

Writing in Commentary, Joshua Kurlantzick suggested that the Internet had made it easier for Islamists to link up with their new allies. “Before the advent of today’s computer technology, the hard Left in Europe and the U.S. would have had no idea how to seek out Islamist sympathizers. A generation ago, it would have been necessary for the two groups to occupy the same physical space – an unlikely prospect, given that traditional Muslims living in Arab-French suburbs, for example, rarely mingle with the college students who frequent Left Bank cafes. The Internet has opened a door between these disparate environments.”

The New York Sun editorialized: “On the face of it, [hard-line Islamists and the American ‘radical left’] ought to have nothing in common. The former believe in the recreation of a global Caliphate, whereas the latter claim to be in favor of the separation of church and state. Our home-grown left, like many others not of the left, staunchly upholds the rights of homosexuals; the mullahs want them put to death. Our feminists want to expand the scope of a woman’s ‘right to chose’; but many Muslim fundamentalists [sic] – as per Algeria – would give women the option of only the veil or decapitation. These two separate groupings do, however, have one overwhelming point of agreement about the contemporary world: that America is, in the words of the KGB’s old training manual, ‘Main Enemy.’”

Besides, the supposed inconsistency between the positions of the anti-American Left and its allies is greatly exaggerated. The anti-American Left supports Castro, who puts gay people in concentration camps. It supports the PLO against Israel. And it supported the Ayatollah Khomeini against the Shah of Iran. (Jimmy Carter’s UN ambassador, Andrew Young, declared that the Ayatollah would “be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic” regarding the Iranian revolution. After all, Young noted, a “fundamentalist Islamic state” in Iran was “impossible” because “too much Western idealism has infiltrated that movement.”)

In a 2005 report, I noted several signs of a Red-Green alliance:

* The Muslim Students’ Association has a seat on the steering committee for International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), the organizer of the largest “peace” demonstrations since the beginning of the Iraq War. ANSWER was formed by International Action Center, an organization founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. IAC  supported dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic, Kim Jong-Il, and Saddam Hussein. MSA also forged ties with such groups as the Nicaragua Network, the Mexico Solidarity Network, the Black Radical Congress, and the Young Communist League.

* In February 2003, a million people attended an “anti-war” demonstration in London co-sponsored by the “left-wing” Stop the War Coalition and the pro-Islamofascist organization known as the Muslim Association.

* Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun (and sometimes described as a guru of Hillary Clinton) was banned from addressing an “anti-war” rally in San Francisco because he supports Israel’s right to exist.

* In Britain in early 2003, socialists, Communists, Maoists, Castroists, Trotskyites, and radical Laborites formed a joint steering committee with Islamofascists such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Chaired by a Communist (a former Soviet “journalist”) and co-chaired by a representative of the London Council of Mosques, the steering committee included 18 types of Marxists, eight Islamofascists, and four so-called Watermelons (“green on the outside, red on the inside”) environmentalists.

* In France, left-wing anti-globalization groups helped lead protests of the ban, directed at Muslims, on headscarves in public schools.

* In 2004, the Left and Islamofascists worked together in elections in Britain, France, and Belgium, sometimes running joint lists of candidates. “Europe’s moribund extreme Left has found a new lease on life thanks to hundreds of young Muslim militants recruited from the poor suburbs of Paris and the Islamic ghettos of northern England, wrote Amir Taheri in the Jerusalem Post.

* In July 2004, London Mayor Ken Livingstone, known as “Red Ken,” hosted Imam Yusuf Qaradawi, an Al-Jazeera founder. Qaradawi has referred to murder-suicide bombings in Israel as “martyrdom operations” and talked of the inherent “iniquity of the Jews as a community.” He supported the stoning of homosexuals and adulterous women. Livingstone, a member of Great Britain’s then-ruling Labor Party, praised Qaradawi for speaking “unacceptable truths.”

* In September 2004, Hezbollah hosted a conference in Beirut themed “What’s Next for the Global Anti-War and Anti-Globalization Movements?” Members of leftwing groups such as CorpWatch, Focus on the Global South, and the socialist network ATTAC participated. Immediately following the conference, a delegation from the American Presbyterian Church (a splinter Presbyterian group formed in 1979) met with, and praised, Hezbollah.

* Melanie Phillips, columnist for Britain’s Daily Mail, denounced the indoctrination of Arab and Muslim youth in the hatred of Jews. “Yet,” she wrote, “not only are ‘anti-racist’ left-wingers silent about the terrifying nature of such mass brainwashing] in dehumanising hatred, but they have entered into an unholy alliance with radical Islamists, marching with them shoulder to shoulder on anti-American demonstrations among shouts of ‘Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas.’” Phillips noted that officials of the then-ruling Labour Party had attacked leaders of the Conservative (Tory) opposition in anti-Semitic terms, calling the shadow home secretary a “Fagin,” depicting Tory leader Michael Howard on a poster as a money-grubbing Shylock, and planting an article in the Muslim Weekly implying that Muslims shouldn’t vote for Howard because he was Jewish.

Regarding the Muslim underclass in Europe, French Trokskyite leader Olivier Besanconneau asked: “Are these not the new slaves? Is it not natural that they should unite with the working class to destroy the capitalistic system?” In turn, Islamist leader Abu-Hamza al-Masri declared: “We say to anyone who hates the Americans and wants to throw the Jews out of Palestine: ahlan wa sahlan [welcome]. The Prophet teaches us that we could ally ourselves even with the atheists if it helps us destroy the enemy.” In 2002, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, urged Al Qaeda supporters to seek allies among “any movement that opposes America, even atheists.”

In his book Revolutionary Islam, Carlos the Jackal (Ilich Ramirez Sanchez), the most notorious international terrorist of the Cold War, claimed to have advised bin Laden to forge an alliance with “all guerilla, terrorist, and other revolutionary groups throughout the world, regardless of their religious or ideological beliefs.” He added, “Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the US.”

====================
Today, Lynne Stewart is a symbol of the depths to which people can be driven by anti-American hatred. And her release is an indication of the level of seriousness with which the Obama administration treats the effort to defeat Islamofascism and its allies, which is to say: not serious at all.