One of the strangest affairs of recent years has been the alliance of the hard-line Islamists and the American radical left. On the face of it, they ought to have nothing in common. The former believe in the recreation of a global Caliphate, whereas the latter claim to be in favor of the separation of church and state. Our home-grown left, like many others not of the left, staunchly upholds the rights of homosexuals; the mullahs want them put to death. Our feminists want to expand the scope of a woman’s “right to choose’; but many Muslim fundamentalists – as per Algeria – would give women the option of only the veil or decapitation.

These two disparate groupings do, however, have one overwhelming point of agreement about the contemporary world: that America is, in the words of the KGB’s old training manual, “Main Enemy.” This trend is personified by Lynne Stewart, the 65-year-old lawyer who is currently in the fifth month of her trial in the Federal District Court in Manhattan on charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government and providing false statements pledging to abide by jail visiting rules. Ms. Stewart, a native of Queens and one-time public librarian, was the defense attorney for Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric and spiritual godfather to the Islamic Group, a terrorist gang which has murdered 1,200 people, including 58 tourists in Luxor in 1997, and has boasted of assassinating Anwar el-Sadat.

Notwithstanding Ms. Stewart’s advocacy skills, “Sheik, Rattle and Roll,” as he is not so affectionately known among some law enforcement officials, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 for conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center. But having fulfilled her professional obligations to her client, Ms. Stewart insisted on remaining in contact with this inmate. She, in turn, now stands accused of helping the sheik pass coded but highly inflammatory messages in the form of a press release issued in 2000 to his supporters in Egypt – which, it is alleged, contributed to their decision to call off their 3-year-old cease-fire.

Ms. Stewart does not deny passing the message, but says that she interpreted the Special Administrative Measures of the Bureau of Prisons forbidding such communications in an “expansive” fashion. She further asserted that the intention was not to incite violence, merely to trigger a debate amongst the sheik’s supporters (some of whom, her supporters claim, misinterpreted his exquisitely chosen words for their own nefarious ends). We can’t pronounce definitively on the quality of the Islamic Group’s internal deliberations, but it’s probably safe to say that it would not bear much of a family resemblance to the norms of senatorial courtesy that obtain, say, in Nebraska’s nonpartisan legislature.

Bearing in mind that Ms. Stewart does not speak Arabic, some generous souls might be tempted to think that she conforms to Lenin’s classical definition of a “useful idiot.” The New York Times reported yesterday that she wept under cross-examination by her own lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, whose past clients have included the Chicago 7, Angela Davis, and Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols. She was not sure if she would “do it the same way again,” citing the human and financial cost of her principled choice (though in an earlier interview she had waxed lyrical about the Arab street vendors of New York who gave her free food for defending the sheik).

Well, the jury will decide, but from our vantage point in the scriveners’ ranks, hers is a performance hard to credit. “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous because so often, dissidence has been used by the great powers to undermine a people’s revolt,” she once told the far left Monthly Review. She has also defended the Rosenbergs, whose guilt in passing atomic bomb secrets to Stalin was again confirmed with the release of the Venona transcripts in 1995. Her partisans’ claim that she is a Clarence Darrow is about as credible as Patrick Buchanan’s notorious assertion that John Demjanjuk was “an American Dreyfus.” We interpret her tears as springing from the anguish of being confronted with the bankruptcy of the left-wing gods she embraced.