Did You Know...

When we last caught up with the convicted, disbarred, disgraced jihad lawyer Lynne Stewart, she was preparing to teach a legal ethics class at Hofstra U. (Previous Lynne Stewart blogging here.)

The New York Post editorial board brings news that a three-judge panel met earlier this week to consider prosecutors’ requests to mete out a harsher sentence for her role in abetting her terrorist client and 1993 World Trade Center bombing/NY landmark bombing plot mastermind Omar Abdel-Rahman. She got 28 months. She could have received 30 years:

Nevertheless, District Judge John Koeltl decided that Stewart had performed “a public service . . . to the nation” in representing “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman – regardless of any, well . . . overzealousness in his cause.

Yet Stewart went far beyond legal work in the service of Abdel-Rahman, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and numerous other plots against New York City landmarks.

Despite an explicit pledge to uphold Abdel-Rahman’s court-ordered isolation, Stewart, a jury found, smuggled in messages from terrorist Rifa’l Ahman Tara urging the sheik to support renewed Islamic violence in Egypt – then smuggled out a coded dispatch that torpedoed a cease-fire between the sheik’s terror organization and the Egyptian government.

If that’s not abetting terrorism, it’s hard to say what is.

Nor was this just some innocent mistake by a starry-eyed naif: Stewart, a hardened radical, boasted during trial of her belief that “entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence” and “you can’t always single out the combatants from the non-combatants.”

Unfortunately, Koeltl appears to have at least one booster on the panel.

“I find the work Judge Koeltl did admirable to a degree that is amazing,” said Judge Guido Calabresi, who is famous himself for comparing President Bush’s election to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

Amazing, sure – but admirable?

Try disgusting.

The plain fact is that Lynne Stewart broke her promise – and the law – in helping her terrorist client collude with his underlings when no one else could.

Twenty-eight months for that is an insult to justice – and dangerous to boot.

I second the NYPost: Let this American jihad colluder rot.