“The U.S. Supreme Court did the world a great big favor yesterday in ruling that ‘no’ means absolutely not in any way shape or form when it comes to providing supposedly high-minded assistance to designated terrorist organizations,” the New York Daily News notes today.


The ruling won’t be so welcome to the supposedly high-minded activists who believe “there’s such a thing as an altruistic means of supporting mass murderers,” but it will make perfect sense to ordinary people who don’t see how contributing to the “humanitarian” arm of an organization that has been designated as sponsoring terrorism is separate from supporting terrorism.
 

Supporters of PKK, which has murdered thousands in support of Turkish Kurds, and LTTE, which killed 100 in a single attack in the name of Tamil independence, claimed that strictures against supporting the supposed good works of these organizations violated their First Amendment rights. The editorial notes: 

The difficulty is that organizations like the PKK and LTTE, not to mention Hamas and Hezbollah, conduct terror campaigns while providing social services to constituents – kind of like John Gotti murdering people even as he bought bats and balls for South Ozone Park Little League teams.


A piece in the Wall Street Journal also explains the absurd reasoning behind the arguments of the PKK and LTTE supporters:

Money and expertise being fungible, it’s an act of high wire legal acrobatics to claim that expert advice or assistance given to one part of a terrorist outfit can be compartmentalized from the group’s murder and mayhem. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it, “Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends.”
 

The Wall Street Journal piece makes a troubling point: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was one of the dissenters. Retiring Justice John Paul Stevens voted with the majority. Would a Justice Elena Kagan have voted with the minority? It is interesting to note that the Court yesterday reversed three rulings of the oft-reversed Ninth Circuit. Justice Sotomayor dissented each time. The editorial notes a possible implication:

A Supreme Court crafted in Justice Sotomayor’s image would transform the Ninth Circuit’s oft-overturned jurisprudence into the law of the land. That’s worth pondering as Senators head into next week’s confirmation hearings on Mr. Obama’s second nominee, Elena Kagan.

 

Just asking…