I Am Interested In Politics

The progressive media insists that it’s conservatives who are violence-prone—especially in the era of Trump. But it’s the left that champions monsters like Oscar López Rivera, Rasmea Odeh and Leonard Peltier.

It took a backlash for Oscar López Rivera to lose his ‘hero’ status.
Puerto Rican nationalist and terrorist leader Oscar López Rivera in Chicago, May 18.

When the fourth bomb exploded in lower Manhattan on New Year’s Eve 1982, Detective Richard Pastorella took shrapnel from his stomach to his scalp. It blinded him, maimed his right hand, left him nearly deaf. Surgeons used 22 titanium screws to hold together his ruined face.

“When my granddaughters present me with crayon drawings and are pleased to show them to me, I have to pretend that I can see them and enjoy their effort,” Detective Pastorella later testified. “I have sacrificed my pride, my dignity and will never be free.”

Now the leader of the terrorists who maimed him is free. President Obama granted Oscar López Rivera clemency in January. This weekend he will march in New York’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

López Rivera was the “prime recruiter” for the terrorist group FALN, as well as “a key trainer in bombing, sabotage, and other techniques of guerrilla warfare,” according to his presentencing report. From 1974 to 1983, his group carried out more than 130 bombings, killing six. He has shown little remorse. Last month he insisted that “colonized people” have the right to use “all methods within reach, including force.”

The Puerto Rican Day Parade had originally designated López Rivera its first-ever National Freedom Hero. After massive backlash, organizers tried to save face. He stepped down from his “formal role,” they announced, but will still march.

So will the city’s far-left political elite. Although both of the state’s U.S. senators said they wouldn’t march, Mayor Bill de Blasio was willing to do so even when the terrorist was the official parade honoree. His office called the uproar “needless controversy.” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito overtly supported López Rivera.

That’s part of a broader trend: Over the past year, the far left has repeatedly venerated terrorists and murderers. Take Rasmea Odeh. In 1969 her group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, murdered two college students by planting a bomb in a box of sweets in a Jerusalem grocery.

Odeh awaits deportation after lying about her terrorism conviction on U.S. immigration papers. According to the feminist website Jezebel, she “epitomizes the progressive left movement and exemplifies the women to whom we should be listening.” The Women’s March gave Odeh a prominent role as it orchestrated the Day Without Women strike. She has also gone on the campus speaking circuit.

Another leftist cause célèbre: Leonard Peltier, serving a life sentence for murdering two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1975. He and other assailants ambushed the men, riddling their cars with at least 125 bullets. As one agent lay wounded and another tried to surrender, Peltier shot both point-blank.

The Standing Rock alliance of environmentalists, Hollywood progressives and Native American activists have fought for Peltier’s release, portraying his conviction as a legacy of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre.

By Jillian Kay Melchior
June 6, 2017 7:40 p.m. ET

Ms. Melchior is Heat Street’s political editor.