Given the hothouse ideological atmosphere of today’s legal academia, it’s quite possible that administrators at Long Island’s Hofstra Law School had no idea that they’d touch off a furor when they invited Lynne Stewart, the disbarred felon and radical lawyer, to lecture on legal ethics. It’s not, after all, as if they were bringing in someone really controversial—someone, say, like Larry Summers or Donald Rumsfeld.
Stewart, recall, was convicted in 2005 of providing material support to terrorists after a jury found that she had conspired with her client, the bloodthirsty “blind sheikh” Omar Abdul Rahman, to smuggle out messages to his followers. (She remains at liberty while her case is on appeal.) The followers in question had committed such atrocities as the first World Trade Center bombing and the massacre of 58 Western tourists in Luxor, Egypt, as well as plotting unsuccessfully to slaughter thousands more New Yorkers by blowing up city landmarks. Secret prison wiretaps leave no doubt that Stewart broke the law in the manner alleged; in interviews she has forthrightly acknowledged her ideological solidarity with Abdul Rahman as a foe of American imperialism, and her support for “directed violence” against “the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions.”
None of which has deterred Stewart’s supporters from insisting that she’s (to quote an Arizona State law student) “a high principled idealist who was singled out for her willingness to advocate for unpopular and controversial clients.”
So was Adolph Hitler...
2 comments:
I call Godwin's Law on ya there. Can you please make a point or state your argument without resorting to the unhelpful, inaccurate, insipid Hitler comparisons? Please?
As a matter of principle, I don't give a rat's ass about Godwin's Law. The point that I am making by invoking Hitler – someone who I think we can both agree is not a good role model – is that he was also a “highly principled idealist.” The mistake that most people who are ignorant of history make is the juvenile assumption that people who do monumentally evil things are not idealists. On the contrary, only people who consider themselves idealists working toward the greater good can commit the monstrous crimes of history. Mere crooks and liars usually stop at penny ante crimes. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot were idealists all. The fact that their ideals led to deaths that can only be “rounded” in the millions does not make them any less idealists.
As for the rest of your “unhelpful, inaccurate, insipid” comment, you can put it where the sun don’t shine.
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