Jumping To Conclusions

Blair's Law: the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.

Case in point: the New York Times reports on the impending criminal trial in Germany of Horst Mahler for "approving of crimes and inciting violence." (Those wacky Germans -- never big on civil liberties, are they?) Real prince of a guy:

A few weeks after the attacks in 2001, in a broadcast interview with Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the public network in North Germany, he called the terrorists' actions justified.

"It was frightening, but one also had the feeling that at last, finally, they had been hit in the heart," Mr. Mahler said then. "And it will certainly make them think. So, I say it was an action that, as cruel as it was, was justified."

In other comments in a letter posted on his Web site, Mr. Mahler has expressed more strident admiration for the Sept. 11 attacks.

"For decades, the jihad — the holy war — has been the agenda of the Islamic world against the Western value system. The Anglo-American and European employees of the global players, dispersed throughout the world are — as Osama bin Laden proclaimed a long while ago — military targets. Only a few need be liquidated in this manner; the survivors will run off like hares into their respective home countries, where they belong."

Mr. Mahler, 67, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1974 for bank robberies in connection with the Red Army Faction terrorist group. Once part of the extreme left that violently opposed residual Nazi tendencies in Germany, he is now known for anti-Semitic and anti-American rants.

The comments appeared to reflect an unsettling development in Mr. Mahler's ideology. In October, Mr. Mahler and his party's leader, Udo Voigt, reportedly attended an event at Berlin's Technical University sponsored by Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic militant group with 27,000 members in Germany that was recently banned here for extremism and for spreading anti-Semitic propaganda in universities.

For Mr. Mahler, making common cause with Islamic groups has some precedent. He and other members of the Red Army Faction received terrorist training in Lebanon in the early 1970's from Al Fatah.

The only problem with the article is that the Times buys into its own preconceptions:

Mr. Mahler, who is defending his party in court against the government petition to ban it, is not the only former leftist in Germany to have made a political transformation.