Lawyer of JIHAD: meet Lynne Stewart, the radical attorney who happens to be on trial herself
REPORTS about Lynne Stewart will tell you how sweet and warm and cuddly she is. And it’s true: She’s sweet and warm and cuddly. Heavyset and endearingly disheveled, Stewart comes to court in a faded cotton housedress and likes to refer to people, even relative strangers, as “dear.” You’d never think this charming, grandmotherly figure–someone who refuses to defend childabusers because she believes children are true innocents–would be accused of helping Islamist terrorists. But appearances can be deceiving.
On February 26, 1993, Muslim terrorists set off a powerful bomb in the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring a thousand. The man widely recognized as the terrorists’ “spiritual leader,” the Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, had previously claimed credit on behalf of his group for the murder of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and was revered by Osama bin Laden. In July 1993 the “blind sheikh” was arrested on immigration charges. In January 1996 he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to wage a war of urban terror against the United States that included the World Trade Center attack and a foiled plan to simultaneously bomb the U.N. complex and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.
Lynne Stewart is the radical leftist lawyer who defended Rahman in 1995 and continued to serve as one of his attorneys thereafter. During the trial she argued the sheikh was not a terrorist but a venerable Islamic scholar who was not responsible for the actions of his followers and shouldn’t be punished “for his outspoken ideas.” Clearly, those responsible for deciding his case didn’t buy it. As Andrew McCarthy, who led the prosecution, documented in the Middle East Quarterly after the trial, Rahman had long incited violence against those he considered “enemies of Islam,” America foremost among them. “Every conspiracy against Islam,” he once said, “its source is America.” He had even issued a warning to this country just a month before the attack: “We must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” His organization, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group, which he had led for over two decades before his imprisonment, was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997.
The 64-year-old Stewart has now been indicted for helping relay messages between the imprisoned sheikh and members of the Islamic Group in violation of government-imposed security measures. The official charges against her are conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity, actually providing and concealing that support, and making false statements (two counts). In just a couple of months, a New York jury will decide whether she’s guilty; if convicted, she could spend over 30 years in prison. Regardless of the verdict, her story is a powerful illustration of how easily radical leftist dissatisfaction with America becomes cheerful support for America’s enemies–even the most destructive of them–and how a so-called defender of the public becomes a defender of the public’s enemies.
A GIRL FROM QUEENS
Stewart’s defense is that she was just doing her job as an attorney –”nothing more than what any lawyer would ever do under any circumstances.” But she also admits that her notion of good lawyering goes beyond the traditional lawyer’s role. She is a self-described “political” or “movement” lawyer, in the mold of William Kunstler and Ron Kuby. Stewart proudly acknowledges that she goes the “extra yard” for her clients–which means being an activist, sometimes breaking the rules, making a client’s cause her own.
To anyone unaware of the alliance between the radical Left and fundamentalist Islam, it may be hard to believe that a ’60s radical would go out of her way to help an Islamist sheikh. Stewart, a Protestant girl from Queens, turned political in the 1960s while working as a public-school librarian in Harlem. There she met her second and current husband, Ralph Poynter, a black militant and then schoolteacher who would later lose his job and serve six months on Rikers Island for assaulting a police officer. Stewart went to law school angry at America for its racial and economic injustices, and after graduating started a criminal practice defending underground groups such as the Ohio Seven and the Black Liberation Army. As those movements dwindled, she moved on to defending individual cop killers and drug dealers, all of whom, according to her worldview, had been in some way betrayed by “the system.”
Having spent her life defending homegrown miscreants, Stewart didn’t know much about the Egyptian sheikh in 1994. But famed radical Ramsey Clark persuaded her to take his case. As George Packer told it in the New York Times Magazine, Clark said that the Arab world would feel betrayed by the American Left if Stewart didn’t step up. And for her, Rahman is a natural fit. Like many of her previous clients, he is a public enemy and a revolutionary: anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois, and most of all anti-American. Stewart has always seen violence as the unavoidable result of the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and though she might not say it explicitly these days, “Amerika” is Oppressor No. 1.