All religions have a foundation myth.

The foundation myth of the religion of Environmentalism is man-made global warming.

Its Old Testament consists of the books of Karl Marx and the lesser prophets who came after him: eg Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao, Marcuse … Its New Testament consists of the Gospel according to Michael Mann and Al Gore, and the E-pistles  of the Climatic Research Unit Apostles.

This is part of an article on the (priestly and inquisitorial) powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, by Jonah Goldberg:

Tim Wirth, a former Senator and now chairman of the United Nations Foundation, once said: “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” New York Times columnist and prominent warm-monger Thomas Friedman has repeatedly said (most recently this week) that he doesn’t care if global warming is a “hoax” because even if it is, the fear of it will force us to do what we need to do.

And it just so happens that … global warming fuels nearly every progressive ambition. Wealth transfers from rich to poor nations: Check. The rise of “global governance” and the decline of American sovereignty: Check. A secular fatwa not only to erode capitalism but to intrude on every aspect of our lives (Greenpeace offers a guide to carbon-neutral sex): Check. Weaning us off of oil (which, don’t let the Goregonauts fool you, was a priority back when we were still worried about global cooling): Check. The checks go on for as far as the eye can see, and we will be writing them for years to come.

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Parents, beware of the history your children are being taught at school in America. In particular be on the alert for works by Howard Zinn. Here to explain why are two accounts of him and his aims:

From FrontPage, by David Horowitz:

Like [Noam] Chomsky, [Howard] Zinn has produced a corpus of work that is a cartoon version of American history in which the nation is pilloried as an evil empire. Zinn has even published a Chomsky-like tract of table talk on 9/11, blaming America and its alleged crimes in the Third World for the terrorist attack and characterizing the victim as a terrorist state. … His signature book, A People’s History of the United States is a raggedly conceived Marxist caricature that begins with Columbus and ends with George Bush. It has sold over a million copies, greatly exceeding that of any comparable history text. Like Chomsky’s rants, Zinn’s book has been embedded by leftist academics in the collegiate and secondary schools curricula. The New York Times Sunday Book Review gave it this imprimatur: “Historians may well view it as a step toward a coherent new version of American history.”  …

Like Chomsky, Zinn’s readership extends far into the popular culture as well. He was invoked as a “genius” by the lead character in the Academy Award winning film Good Will Hunting (the film’s co-writer and star Matt Damon grew up as a Zinn neighbor and enthusiast) and is an intellectual “guru” to movie and music celebrities. Both Chomsky and Zinn have been heavily promoted to rock music audiences by mega-bands Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam even while they are also icons of intellectual journals like The Boston Review of Books, which is edited by an MIT professor and Chomsky disciple.

The political agenda of A People’s History of the United States is already announced in its historical method. In an explanatory coda to his book Zinn explains to the reader that he has no interest in striving for objectivity, and that his intention is to view American history as a conspiracy of rich white men to oppress and exploit “the people.” The so-called “people” are naturally Indians and other minorities, especially blacks (“There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States”), women and the industrial proletariat.

Zinn begins his narrative not with the settling of North America, or the creation of the United States as one might expect, but with a long chapter on Columbus’s “genocide” against the native inhabitants, an event – which even if it had happened as Zinn describes it – was an act committed by agents of the Spanish empire more than a century before the English settled North America and nearly three centuries before the creation of the United States, which is also geographically well-removed from the scene of the crime. It is Zinn’s unintended way of announcing the tendentiousness of his entire project, which is really not a “history” of the American people, but an indictment of white people and the capitalist system.

From Townhall, by Michelle Malkin:

On Sunday, Dec. 13, the History Channel will air “The People Speak” — a documentary based on Marxist academic Howard Zinn’s capitalism-bashing, America-dissing, grievance-mongering history textbook, “A People’s History of the United States.” The film was co-produced and bankrolled by Zinn’s Boston neighbor and mentee Matt Damon. An all-star cast of Bush-bashing liberals, including Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, Bruce Springsteen, Marisa Tomei and Eddie Vedder, will appear. Zinn’s work is a self-proclaimed “biased account” of American history that rails against white oppressors, the free market and the military.

Zinn’s objective is not to impart knowledge, but to instigate “change” and nurture a political “counterforce” (an echo of fellow radical academic and Hugo Chavez admirer Bill Ayers’ proclamation of education as the “motor-force of revolution”). Teachers are not supposed to teach facts in the school of Zinn. “There is no such thing as pure fact,” Zinn asserts. Educators are not supposed to emphasize individual academic achievement. They are supposed to “empower” student collectivism by emphasizing “the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements.” School officials are not facilitators of intellectual inquiry, but leaders of “social struggle.”

Zinn and company have launched a nationwide education project in conjunction with the documentary. “A people’s history requires a people’s pedagogy to match,” Zinn preaches. The project is a collaboration between two “social justice” activist groups, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Rethinking Schools recently boasted of killing a social studies textbook series in the Milwaukee school system because it “failed to teach social responsibility.” A Rethinking Schools guide on the September 11 jihadi attacks instructs teachers to “nurture student empathy” for our enemies and dissuade students from identifying as Americans. “It’s our job to reach beyond this chauvinism.” And a Rethinking Schools guide to early childhood education written by Ann Pelo disparages “a too-heavy focus on academic skills” in favor of “social justice and ecological teaching” for preschoolers.

Teaching for Change’s objective, in Obama-esque fashion, is to train students not to achieve actual proficiency in core academic subjects, but to inspire them to “become active global citizens.” Today’s non-achieving aspirants are tomorrow’s Nobel Peace Prize winners, after all.

No part of the school curriculum is immune from the social justice makeover crew. Zinn’s partners at Rethinking Schools have even issued teaching guides to “Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers” — which rejects the traditional white male patriarchal methods of teaching computation and statistics in favor of p.c.-ified number-crunching:

“‘Rethinking Mathematics” is divided into four parts. The first part is devoted to a broad view of mathematics that includes historical and cultural implications. Part Two includes nine classroom narratives in which teachers describe lessons they have used that infuse social justice issues into their mathematics curriculum. Included here … an AP calculus lesson on income distribution. The third part contains three detailed classroom experiences/lessons. These include a physical depiction of the inequitable distribution of the world’s wealth, the results of a student investigation into how many U.S. presidents owned slaves, and a wonderful classroom game called ‘Transnational Capital Auction’ in which students take on the role of leaders of Third World countries bidding competitively for new factories from a multinational corporation. …

Our students will continue to come in dead last in international testing. But no worries. With Howard Zinn and Hollywood leftists in charge, empty-headed young global citizens will have heavier guilt, wider social consciences and more hatred for America than any other students in the world.

Obama is prepared to damage the economy even more than he has already. He threatens through his officials that if he doesn’t get his way with cap-and-trade, he will take steps that will ‘deter investment’. But then if he does get his way with cap-and-trade, the economy will be grossly harmed anyway. Whose economy is it that he’s threatening? Is it not the economy of the country he leads? So why would he want to wreck it?  The answer is not hard to find. Look to Copenhagen, where the rampaging Left is using false science to try and impose ‘world governance’.  This was to be the moment when international socialism triumphed. It’s been spoilt by exposure of the scientists’ deceptions. The global warmists/global government conspirers are fighting mad. They’ll wreck anything, everything, to achieve their hellish aim.

From Fox News:

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role over the process in a way that could hurt business.

The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Jackson, however, tried to strike a tone of cooperation in her address Wednesday, explaining that the EPA’s new powers to regulate greenhouse gases will be used to complement legislation pending in Congress, not replace it.”This is not an ‘either-or’ moment. It’s a ‘both-and’ moment,” she said. But while administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.

And it won’t be pretty.

“If you don’t pass this legislation, then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. “And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

Climate change legislation that passed the House is stuck in the Senate, but the EPA finding Monday was seen as a boost to the U.S. delegation in Denmark trying to convince other countries that Washington is capable of taking action to follow through with any global commitments.

The economic official explained that congressional action could be better for the economy, since it would provide “compensation” for higher energy prices, especially for small businesses dealing with those higher energy costs. Otherwise, the official warned that the kind of “uncertainty” generated by unilateral EPA action would be a huge “deterrent to investment,” in an economy already desperate for jobs.

“So, passing the right kind of legislation with the right kind of compensations seems to us to be the best way to reduce uncertainty and actually to encourage investment,” the official said.

Republicans fear that the EPA will ultimately end up stepping in to regulate emissions — though many oppose the congressional legislation as well. They had urged Jackson to withdraw the finding in light of leaked e-mails from a British research center that appeared to show scientists discussing the manipulation of climate data.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the “scientific fascism” ends.

Go, James, go!

From PowerLine:

The federal government is trying to take control over our lives via government medicine, cap and trade, and more. …

Having the far left in control of both the executive and legislative branches is a terrible thing, but on the plus side, it is clarifying: people actually have to think about where they stand on the big issue of freedom vs. socialism. Or, in other words, freedom vs. slavery.

The game isn’t over yet, but we have, roughly speaking, a first-quarter score, and so far freedom is ahead. Rasmussen finds that 76% of Americans favor a free market economy, compared to 10% who favor an economy managed by the government. More fundamentally than anything else, this explains why the Democrats face such an uphill struggle in their effort to remake America in a left-wing image.

Yes. But why didn’t enough people think about it before they put the socialists in power? If Republicans regain Congress in 2010 and the presidency in 2012, will they shrink government, reduce welfare dependency, and above all make the necessary changes in schooling so that new generations will grow up knowing the value of freedom?

Svetlana Kunin, a Russian immigrant, observes the damage that is being done to all that’s best in America by the rise of the left with its ‘political correctness’.  She writes in the Investor’s Business Daily:

I look at the people who support the transformation of America in disbelief: They are destroying the very land that gave them so much opportunity.

Groomed, well-fed and educated, comfortably living in a prosperous society, they need a mission to give meaning to their lives. These “fighters for the less-fortunate among us” glaze over the fact that hundreds of millions of people from around the world desperately try to come to this country for all it offers, regardless of their economic status, race, class, or gender.

Immigrants rightly see this country as the best place to obtain a decent life for themselves and their families.

When I immigrated to America in 1980, I was overwhelmed with the amount of food and goods available at any store, at the numerous charitable organizations helping the needy, and even the government programs that helped people to obtain necessary skills to find a job.

Later, I realized that the country was in the midst of a deep recession. Compared to where I came from, it seemed like the pinnacle of prosperity.

As a secular Soviet Jew, my first Christmas in America was amazing. The proud display of religious symbols was a celebration not only of the holiday, but of a population free to express their beliefs without fear of oppression. I understand why at the beginning of the 20th century Jewish immigrants in America wrote many beautiful Christmas songs; these songs were born out of grateful hearts. Churches and synagogues coexist without issues. Nobody is forced to practice or not practice a religion.

Soon, however, I noticed darker aspects underlying life in America. Political correctness had seeped into everything like cancer. Under the pretense of multicultural diversity, suppression and intolerance of uniquely American traditions such as liberty, private property, and e pluribus unum (out of many, one), became not only acceptable, but necessary in supposedly enlightened society.

Under the pretext of helping the needy, liberals eliminate people’s drive to better themselves and their families. Instead, they obsess about events of the past and exacerbate the victim mentality in the very people they claim to help.

The stranglehold of political correctness has only grown stronger. I see in today’s governmental policies a replication of the very things I escaped from.

In the USSR, representatives of the Communist party — partorgs (literally: party organizers) — were ingrained into every aspect of civilian, official and military life. These political organizers controlled public order by observing the behavior and speech of every citizen. …

Government-controlled medical care and poorly compensated medical personnel stimulated corruption at every level of service. People had to resort to bribery in order to get the help they needed, and underpaid medical personnel were open to the payouts. Those who could not pay had to beg for help. The only hospitals comparable to American hospitals were in Moscow and a few other cities, where government officials were treated. In the rest of the country, medical care was substandard. This was the reality of free health care for everyone. …

Read it all here.

To the older attendees it must feel like a ’68ers reunion, the UN’s change-the-climate conference. The failed Reds changed into victorious Greens, still wanting central control of the whole world. ‘They don’t think much’ could sum them all up.

By Jennifer Rubin at Commentary-contentions:

It’s quite apparent that many of the true believers don’t think much — or care much — about science or facts. (”A group called GenderCC (Women for Climate Justice) rejects using distractions like ‘numbers’ and ‘target dates’ to track and fight climate change, and doesn’t appear very interested in the environment itself. Instead, it hopes to implement ‘gender-mainstreaming’ and ensure that the U.N. guarantees the fullest participation of ‘feminist scientists’ at every level.”) There is a group pushing contraception and population “control” and one that wants to ”explore how thoughts affect matter and how a shift in consciousness can transform current deteriorating conditions.”

The religious-like fervor is hard to miss here. Facts and science don’t really figure when you’re shifting consciousness. What is interesting is the vicious antagonism displayed by the mainstream media when conservative gatherings like the Tea Parties are covered. They ignore those groups’ serious bent (posters displaying James Madison quotes never seem to make it into CNN coverage) and focus instead on the inevitable loony element that turns out for any mass movement. But when the confab is filled with, indeed dominated by, those indifferent to reason and obviously peddling a hippy-dippy agenda, the MSM is mute, playing along with the game that the confab is a serious exercise in science-based policymaking.

At last we atheists believe in the existence of a Savior of Mankind. We don’t know his name. We only know he’s a simple hacker.

He’s saved us from incalculable harm.

Or at least we hope he has.

When short-sighted capitalists and blind communist ideologues meet next week in Copenhagen, will they yet succeed in impoverishing and enslaving us in the name of saving the planet from global warming? Even though the hacker has revealed that the ‘science’ is fraudulent?

From Canada Free Press:

The upcoming Copenhagen meeting sponsored by the United Nations had hoped for a global redistribution of wealth over the next 20 years of between $6 trillion and $10.5 trillion, according to the draft treaty, to “Compensate for damage to the less developed countries’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees.” Third world governments see dollar signs.

In the U.S., the Treasury Department estimates that the president’s cap-and-trade approach would “generate federal receipts on the order of $100- to $200 billion annually.” The Congressional Budget Office reports that a 15 percent CO2 reduction would cost an average household $1,600 a year.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a bureaucrat’s paradise that exists solely to perpetrate the myth, while enjoying frequent meetings at exotic venues throughout the world.

Many governments maintain bureaucracies just to “study” the myth. In the U.S., it’s the Global Change Research Program. NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association], the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the National Climate Change and Wildlife Center of the USGS [US Geological Survey], and the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] are just a few other federal agencies feeding at the trough.

Over the last 20 years, the US government spent $32 billion on climate research, yet has failed to find any evidence that carbon dioxide emissions significantly affect temperature or represent a danger. Government agencies, the private sector, and universities were the recipients of this money. These organizations have a vested interest in maintaining the myth.

The feds also spent another $36 billion for development of climate-related technologies in the form of subsidies and tax breaks. Solar and wind-power generation of electricity can be a supplemental supply, but these methods could not compete with fossil fuels without a subsidy. These industries have a vested interest in maintaining the myth.

The ethanol industry is founded solely on the myth that we must reduce our use of fossil fuels, even though the U.S. has abundant supplies.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Bailout bill) contained $3.4 billion for research and experimentation in the area of carbon sequestration – burying carbon dioxide generated by fossil fuel plants. There are also, really wild schemes for geoengineering, schemes to block the sun with mirrors, or seed the atmosphere with sulfur to produce more clouds.

On the world commodities market, trading carbon credits generated $126 billion in 2008, and big banks are collecting fees, and some project a market worth $2 trillion. Al Gore’s venture capital firm, Hara Software which makes software to track greenhouse gas emissions, stands to make billions of dollars from cap-and-trade regulation. If the myth is destroyed, this market will evaporate.

Back in 2007, a coalition of major corporations and environmental groups formed the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) to lobby for cap & trade. The companies planned to profit (at least in the short term) from either the cap-and-trade provisions or from selling high-priced, politically-favored (if not mandated) so-called “green” technology to the rest of us — whether we need it or not, and regardless of whether it produces any environmental or societal benefits.

Corporate USCAP members include: Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar Inc., Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, DuPont, FPL Group, Exelon, General Electric, Lehman Brothers, John Deer & Co, PG&E Corporation, and PNM Resources. …

The vested interests are strong and many. Is the global warming industry “too big to fail?” It remains to be seen whether those interests, and [collectivist] political ideology will triumph over truth and common sense.

With his usual incisive clarity, Thomas Sowell asks:

Since this is an era when many people are concerned about “fairness” and “social justice,” what is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?

It would be fascinating to hear a redistributionist’s attempt to answer the question.

Barack Obama’s autobiographical book Dreams from My Father is a quietly self-vaunting ‘tell-all’ mixture of narrative, nostalgia, apparent confession, disguised complaint and unfocussed accusation. As the self-portrait of a young man it is fondly self-indulgent, allowing a few small warts – or perhaps one should say acne spots – to show, just enough to deflect accusations of self-flattery. It emerges from the narrative, rather than it is said, that the young Obama resented being black. He implies that someone must be to blame for his having to feel like that. The self-pity is kept, however, as subdued as the self-flattery.

The story wears a candid expression on its face, so to speak, but gives itself away by inevitably raising questions which beg for answers not given. For instance, and significantly, Obama does not say who paid him to work as a ‘community organizer’, or why. A man, an ‘organizer’, named Marty Kaufman phones him out of the blue, meets him at a coffee shop and offers him the undefined job for a rather low wage. What this man’s interest in the work might be is not explained, other than that he’s been vaguely idealistic ever since the student protest movement of the 1960s. One is left to assume that this fellow ‘in a rumpled suit’, although he shows no signs of having disposable funds of his own, is some sort of selfless philanthropist nobly intent on alleviating difficult living conditions for the poor black tenants of a crumbling building in a seedy area of Chicago.

Now the truth is out. David Horowitz is providing the answer.

Since taking office Barack Obama, who promised during his campaign to create a moderate, inclusive administration, has engaged in actions that have created division and fear because they are meant to radically change America, not improve on what has always worked.  As a result, David Horowitz writes in Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, “Many Americans have gone from hopefulness, through unease, to a state of alarm as the President shows a radical side only partly visible during his campaign.”

Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model provides an understanding of the roots of the current administration’s effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation by looking at the work of one of the President’s heroes — radical Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky.  The guru of Sixties radicals, Alinsky urged his followers to be flexible and opportunistic and say anything to get power, which they can then use to destroy the existing society and its economic system.  Alinsky died in 1972, but left behind an organization in Chicago dedicated to his malicious ideas.  This team hired Barack Obama in 1986 when he was 23 and taught him how to organize for radical transformation.

In this insightful new booklet, Horowitz discusses Alinsky’s work in the 60s — and his advice to radicals to seize any weapon to advance their cause.  This became the philosophy of Alinskyite organizations such as ACORN and to Alinsky disciple Van Jones, a self described “communist” who served as President Obama’s “Green Czar” until he was forced to resign when his extremist ideas became public.

After his analysis of Saul Alinsky, Horowitz points out what the grandfather of “social organizing” created “is not salvation but chaos.” Then he asks the crucial question: “And presidential disciples of Alinsky, what will they create?”

Lynne Stewart is to go to prison for 28 months.

A Clinton-appointed liberal judge considers that sufficient punishment for her crime, which was, in simple truth, treason against the United States of America.

Many on the left admire her. (It is the patriot Sarah Palin whom they hate and scorn.)

The following, from the Norfolk Crime Examiner, San Francisco, provides some details of the case and a profile of this despicable woman:

On Tuesday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ordered convicted criminal defense attorney Lynne Stewart to begin her prison sentence, as the court upheld her 2005 conviction for aiding imprisoned terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Despite the conviction for such a serious crime, Stewart had been allowed to remain free for the last four years, while her appeal was pending. During that time, she made speeches and numerous public appearances in which she often thumbed her nose at the country she betrayed, while describing terrorists as “liberationists.“

On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists and defrauding the federal government. Stewart was contacting al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Group) on behalf of Abdel-Rahman. In addition to master-minding the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center which killed six people and left more than 1,000 injured, the blind sheik was convicted of planning to destroy other New York City targets including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations building, and the George Washington bridge. The Islamic Group dubbed the multiple target attack plan “The Day of Terror.” …

Lynne Stewart knowingly aided a convicted terrorist and avowed enemy of the United States during a time of war and deserves to be executed for her crimes. …

Lynne Stewart aided Rahman’s communications with his followers and even personally issued decries on his behalf. Stewart had defended Rahman in his 1995 trial and continued to visit Rahman in prison. Apparently at some point, Stewart ended her role as his lawyer and began one as his co-conspirator. …

Under the guise of giving legal counsel, Stewart helped pass along a fatwah from Rahman to his followers which commanded: “brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwah that urges the Muslim nations to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are.” …

In Rahman’s 1995 trial, Stewart argued that issuing the order to destroy the World Trade Center was merely a necessary part of his religious duties as a Muslim leader. After Rahman was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 65 years, Stewart was seen weeping uncontrollably inside the courtroom.

Federal prosecutors filed court papers which said Stewart’s crime was in fact, “egregious, flagrant abuse of her profession, abuse that amounted to material support to a terrorist group, which deserves to be severely punished.”

Amazingly, while U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said Stewart’s actions could have had “potentially lethal consequences” and represented “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct,” the Clinton-appointed judge waited until October 2006 to sentence Stewart…A full 20 months after her conviction.

Though Stewart could have received a 30 year sentence under federal guidelines (which the prosecution sought), Judge Koeltl only sentenced her to 28 months. In an insulting move to the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he has even allowed her to remain free while her appeal is pending. …

Lynne Stewart seems to have a particular affinity for murderers and enemies of the state. Over her career, she has defended Black Panther Willie Holder, Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and mafia hit-man Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. Stewart has even expressed a desire to defend Osama bin Laden.

In a 2003 speech to the National Lawyers Guild, Stewart listed Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Mao Tse Tung as “heroes.”

In 2002, Stewart told reporter Susie Day of Monthly Review: “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.”

She went on to talk about her client Abdel-Rahman, by saying: “Now, certainly somebody like Sheikh Omar, who was a world figure, someone who was listened to by the entire Muslim population for being a very learned scholar, deserved to have a platform, deserved not to be entombed in the middle of America and not able to speak. They said the Sheikh was responsible for, I dunno, everything except flat feet. They made it sound like a worldwide conspiracy… He’s a blind, elderly, sick man. He may be a spiritual head …  But he’s certainly not a combatant in any sense whatsoever.” …

Though she has been disbarred, Stewart has become a regular speaker at several law schools. In 2003, one such event at Oregon’s Portland State University Law School was billed as “Lynne Stewart vs. John Ashcroft.” Another engagement at the Arizona State University School of Law was entitled “Emphatically Not Guilty.” A Stanford University speech was canceled by Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan, when she learned of Stewart’s advocacy of violence.

Stewart is certainly not without her admirers. According to the IRS, left-wing activist George Soros gave Stewart a $20,000 donation for her legal defense. In addition to money, Stewart also receives honors. In 2003, the law students at City University of New York voted to honor her with that school’s Public Interest Lawyer of the Year award. However, once news of the award was picked up by the press, the dean thought better of it and rescinded the offer.

Stewart has remained defiant and filled with hatred for the United States. Stewart’s official website (www.LynneStewart.org) states that her prosecution is “an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers and instill fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism.”…

Stewart is as hypocritical as she is unrepentant. She has said that she approves of Fidel Castro “locking up” dissidents, but complains that the U.S. government has prosecuted her to “silence dissent.” Apparently, imprisonment is fine when communists use it against those who speak out for their freedom, but somehow wrong when it is used by a democratic republic against their enemies.

However, while Stewart seems to relish the role of dissident martyr, she is neither a dissident, nor is she a martyr. She is in fact, a convicted felon who has aided and abetted a terrorist leader and his organization. Period.

It is more than outrageous that Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who sat in prison for two years, for shooting a drug smuggler, were not allowed to remain free while their appeals were pending (as is customary for law enforcement officers charged with crimes relating to the performance of their job), though Lynne Stewart who knowingly and willfully gave aid to a terrorist was given that courtesy.

While a lengthy sentence for someone who has colluded with the enemy during a time of war is of course not without precedence, it is also not without precedence that one could be put to death for this crime. Had Lynne Stewart committed her crime during World War II or even the early days of the Cold War, she would have undoubtedly been hanged for her actions.

Stewart however, has been the beneficiary of a federal bench heavy with left-leaning judges and a political climate which now has a great tolerance for what our parents and grandparents knew to be treason.

Every single day which Lynne Stewart was allowed to give speeches, talk to magazines, attend swanky dinners for some leftist cause, and sign autographs for adoring college students was a terrible affront not only to those who were killed and maimed in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but to every man and woman who has ever fought and died for this country.