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Behind the posturing, two real issues are at stake. First, in compiling a comprehensive encyclopedia of the left is there a legitimate rationale for including the full range of American leftists from radicals to moderates (all currently mislabeled "liberals")? Second, is there a rationale for including Islamic radicals like the aforementioned terrorists along with Americans who disapprove of terrorism (or like Berube, who disprove of terrorist tactics while locating their own strategic enemies in the environs of Pennsylvania Avenue)? Obviously, the second question is the one that has really got the leftist goat, so we will address it first.

Both Sami al-Arian and the "blind sheik" Abdel Rachman, as Michael Berube certainly knows, are no strangers to the American left. Indeed, al-Arian's Coalition to Protect Political Freedom was the spear-head of the anti-Patriot Act movement. Al-Arian was a colleague and comrade of the leaders of America's legal left which includes the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Now that al-Arian is in jail, where he belongs, his organization is headed by a longtime National Lawyers Guild (web site) executive (and fellow radical), Kit Gage. (web site) The "blind sheik," Abdel Rachman has been championed and abetted in his terrorist enterprises by a hero of the academic left, Lynne Stewart, (web site) who -- while under indictment -- toured American university campuses as a guest of their law school faculties. (web site)

How easy is it to be a guest of law school faculties like Stanford, as Lynne Stewart was? Ask Clarence Thomas and Judge Bork. The reason an indicted terrorist can get such invitations (and conservatives usually can not) is that law school faculties are dominated by leftist professors like Michael Berube who are linked by one or two degrees of separation to long-standing radicals like Lynne Stewart -- and thus no more than three degrees -- to terrorists like Omar Abdul Rachman and his Islamic Group.

Are these degrees of separation important? Of course they are, and our database recognizes that fact. We have identified and distinguished Totalitarian Radicals, like Ward Churchill, (web site) who supports the terrorists from Moderate Leftists like Bill Clinton, (web site) who fought the terrorists. The New Republic's editor Peter Beinart (who is not yet in the database) is such a moderate. Beinart is currently leading a movement to get moderate leftists ("liberals") to dissociate themselves from leftwing individuals, organizations and publications (try CounterPunch) (web site) who support the terrorists, and among whom are prominent leaders of the broad "anti-war" (web site) left of which Michael Berube is also a part. We applaud Beinart's efforts and note that if successful they would create much more healthy degrees of separation than the existing ones. We wait for Michael Berube to join him.

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