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February 28, 2007
Hollywood Hero Leonard Peltier
Posted by Dave Blount at February 28, 2007 10:41 AM
One lowlife who was not pardoned by B.J. Clinton in his final days in office is the militant moonbat Leonard Peltier. This has been listed as a reason for David Geffen pulling Tinseltown's red carpet out from under Shrillary Rotten. As FrontPage explains, refusing to pardon Peltier is one thing Slick Willie did right.
Leonard Peltier had been arrested for the attempted murder of a police officer when he jumped bail in 1973 and turned up at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where the American Indian Movement was imitating the militant black nationalists that liberal elitists like Leonard Bernstein found so appealing in those days. The result was guerilla warfare between Indian factions, in which Peltier was involved.
In 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams went to the reservation to investigate politically motivated crimes that included a murder. Leonard Peltier was found guilty of waylaying these agents on a back road and gunning them down with a high-powered rifle.
A few years later, left-wing author Peter Matthiessen came out with the book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, credited with reflecting a new "multicultural spiritual sensibility." According to this politically correct sensibility, there's nothing terribly wrong with ambushing and murdering law enforcement officers so long as it's done in the name of moonbattery.
Matthiessen's book admits that Peltier shot at the agents, and took their guns after they were dead, but reveals that someone else in a mysterious red pickup truck swung by at the last moment to commit the actual murders. However, Peltier was found guilty anyway because the jurors were white and therefore racist.
But according to Matthiessen, not even the killers in the phantom pickup were really guilty:
All the Indians who were there that day were warriors and the nameless figures in the pickup truck were no more guilty than [Peltier and his accomplices], because no Indian that day was guilty.
You see, they were partaking in a noble struggle to kill the evil white man. From Viking's press release when the book came out in 1983:
This chilling, controversial book makes clear that Leonard Peltier is only one of the victims in the ruthless quest for land, minerals, and money that the government and industry have pursued at the expense of the Indians for the last 150 years.
The book was pulled for several years because of libel suits, but nonetheless managed to sanctify an Indian equivalent to the vicious cop-killer and liberal icon Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The entertainment industry picked up the ball and ran. Pro-Peltier propaganda was produced in film by Robert Redford, and in song by Steven Van Zandt. The ever execrable 60 Minutes got into the act by broadcasting a sympathetic interview with a mysterious "Mr. X" who offered testimony that he was the real killer and that it was the agents' own fault he had to kill them. One of Peltier's accomplices later admitted that "Mr. X" was a fictional character.
Peltier has been having fun in prison while the FBI agents' bones slowly crumble in the ground. He published his memoirs, of course, and his paintings have sold for up to $5,000 apiece to limousine leftists like Jane Fonda and Oliver Stone.
Whatever credibility Matthiessen had among non-moonbats was flushed in a 1992 Esquire article, in which he moved the site of the killings from a ranch in Oglala 20 miles away to iconic Wounded Knee. As journalist Scott Anderson put it:
The Peltier story has so entered the realm of myth that apparently its architects no longer feel the need to adhere to the most rudimentary of facts.
But Hollyweird deals in fantasy, not facts. As an enemy of our civilization, Leonard Peltier is a hero to the Tinseltown crowd. You can hardly blame Geffen & friends for wondering, if Clinton can pardon Puerto Rican terrorists, why not Peltier?
