Don’t Forget Peace Lovers’ Hate Crimes

Kathleen Ann Soliah, a k a Sara Jane Olson, returned to California last week to face charges that she conspired with an extremist group in 1974 and 1975 to kill Los Angeles police officers. Soliah has been a fugitive for these 24 years for her alleged acts as a “soldier” in the Symbionese Liberation Army--hate criminals of their day.

Soliah’s arrest and the attendant reprise of the history of the ‘60s and ‘70s arrived in ironic confluence with Benjamin Nathaniel Smith’s ugly and bigoted Fourth of July weekend shooting spree. Smith killed a black man and a Korean graduate student and wounded seven others in Illinois and Indiana in his twisted mission before taking his own life as police moved in on him. Elsewhere, authorities recently identified two prime suspects in the murder of a gay couple in Northern California and the torching of three synagogues in Sacramento.

For those too young to know or who have been schooled in the last decade’s political correctness, the treacherous domestic terrorism rife from 1965 to 1975 has been pretty much forgotten as we digest this rancid contemporary violence. It may seem that the “hate crimes” of the current era are unique--especially given the penchant of the mainstream media to portray many of these phenomena as having roots in the political right.

But if 20th century crimes rooted in intolerance, bigotry and social destructiveness were the invention of the Ku Klux Klan, they were elevated to a new level by the leftists who wrought devastation and death throughout America in the ‘60s and ‘70s--often in the name of “peace and social justice.”

Some peace. Some justice.

Soliah’s Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and its related New World Liberation Front kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, robbed banks, assassinated Oakland’s schools superintendent and engaged police in a shootout that left six of them dead. Soliah herself, accused of joining others in planting bombs under two Los Angeles police cars, has been on the lam for a quarter of a century.

The Black Panthers were another group of those times. Its then-minister of communication, Eldridge Cleaver, advocated a “revolutionary temptation to kidnap American ambassadors, hijack American airplanes, blow up American pipelines and buildings and to shoot anyone who uses guns and other weapons in the bloodstained service of imperialism against the people.” (Years later, Cleaver recanted his past.) “Off the pig”--a reference to police officers, not Babe--was the Panther slogan, and they routinely engaged in bloody armed combat with law enforcement.

Then there were the Weathermen, a terrorist offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society. At their National Council meeting in 1969 they adopted a campaign of underground warfare, police murder and bombing. Their first public communique stated: “Revolutionary violence is the only way.” The FBI reported that from January 1969 through April 1970 there were at least 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings and bomb threats resulting in the death of 43 people.

In August 1970, a University of Wisconsin graduate student working at a research center was killed in a political bombing. On March 1, 1971, the U.S. Capitol was bombed by the Weather Underground. A few weeks later, antiwar mobs rampaged through Washington in an attempt to force a government shutdown.

Not surprisingly, Soliah’s lawyer has filed court papers claiming that she was “like many of her generation: passionate, swept up in the ‘revolution’ ” of the ‘60s and ‘70s and that “we are obligated to view that time through the lens of history”--including Watergate and the National Guard shooting at Kent State. Leave it to liberals to blame society for individual crimes and to suggest that joining a terrorist organization or attempting to kill policemen was a proper response to Watergate. (Who knows which thug will some day cite the amoral and lying connivance of Bill Clinton to justify a crime?)

The alacrity with which blame for heinous conduct is attached these days should indeed be seen through the lens of history--but a lens that is in focus. What we today call “hate crimes” should not be any more detested for having that title.

And before blame goes in any particular political direction, we would do well to remember the horrors perpetrated in the name of the political causes of yesterday.