Topic: Horowitz
A July 9 FronPageMag article by Cinnamon Stillwell criticizes professor and blogger Juan Cole for "excus[ing] violence and hatred directed at Israel" and issuing an "apologia" for the Palestinian who unleashed a bulldozer attack on civilians in Gaza. She dismisses Cole statement that "Violence against innocent civilians is always condemnable and deplored" as a "perfunctory admission" and concludes: "Cole’s so-called informed commentary is a font of uninformed conspiracy-mongering where terrorists are excused and the regimes that support them whitewashed."
Stillwell's commentary might be taken seriously if she didn't have her own history of excusing violence and terrorism.
As we've detailed, Stillwell has endeavored to minimize the violence of Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense League and ran to the defense of Earl Krugel, a JDL member sentenced for plotting to bomb a California mosque and a field office of Republican congressman Darrell Issa, who is Lebanese-American. Stillwell ludicrously insisted that "neither [bombing co-conspirator Irv] Rubin nor Krugel had ever been convicted of any violent crimes," as if plotting to bomb a congressman and a mosque wasn't violent.
Stillwell also sought, in an August 2005 article published at Intellectual Conservative (slogan: "Extremism you can believe in"), to explain away the killing of four Arabs on a bus in Gaza by Eden Natan-Zada, an AWOL Israeli soldier linked to Kahane's Kach movement in Israel, which has a similar history of extremism and violence. As she did with the JDL, Stillwell tries to minimize Kach's extremism, asserting that "their effectiveness as such is arguable and any previous acts of 'terrorism' practically nil."
While making the statement -- one might even call it a "perfunctory admission" -- that "Natan-Zada’s crime cannot be justified," Stillwell still did her best to explain it away, claiming that Natan-Zada was "clearly disturbed" and "insane," that "the vast majority of terrorist acts, both in the Middle East and around the world, are perpetrated by Islamic terrorists," and that the Israeli government was really to blame by pushing for disengagement from Gaza:
But how many years of Israeli capitulation in the face of never-ending Palestinian terrorism can go on before people start losing patience and taking matters into their own hands? It’s only human nature to eventually seek an eye for an eye. It’s not right, it’s not Jewish or Christian, but there must be a breaking point somewhere.
So far, the vast majority of the opposition to the disengagement has been peaceful, but as the case of Eden Natan-Zada makes clear, that may not last forever. You can’t simply tear apart a democratic society and expect all the people to follow along meekly. Sooner or later, something’s got to give. This time around, it was Eden Natan-Zada.
Stillwell also takes the Aaron Klein approach in complaining that Natan-Zada was ultimately stopped from shooting more people by "literally beaten to death by the surrounding crowd of Israeli Arabs." After also lamenting that Baruch Goldstein, a Kach follower who murdered 29 Arabs inside Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, was victimized by "the crowd in the mosque" who "proceeded to take the law into their own hands and beat him to death," Stillwell adds: "But is it really so inconceivable to ask that Arabs behave as civilized people and let the authorities do their job?" Somehow, we don't think Stillwell considers the off-duty Israeli soldier who eventually shot and killed the Palestinian in the bulldozer to stop his rampage to have "taken the law into their own hands."
Further, as you may remember, Stillwell attempted to "correct" us a while back by disingenuously claiming that the organization she works for, Campus Watch, "is not tied to any particular political ideology, nor do we critique (not "attack") academics on the basis of political proclivity," even though its agenda parallels that of conservatives and its website is laden with attacks on liberals.
We'll again ask the question we asked back then: If Campus Watch truly has no political agenda, why is a terrorist sympathizer like Stillwell still working for it?
