One anticrictive organization traces its founding to a terrorist acquittal

Evidence

In 1928 Schwarzbard, a Ukrainian- Jewish anarchist, shot dead Simon Petlioura, former head of the nationalist government of Ukraine, as he came out of a restaurant in Paris’s Left Bank, on the grounds that Petlioura had been responsible for pogroms. Thus, the Ligue internationale contre les pogroms, which soon became the Ligue international contre l’antisémitisme (LICA), was founded as part of a struggle against antisemitism, but also in defence of an act of terrorism. … As Yosef Nedava points out, Schwarzbard was fortunate to have killed Petlioura in France rather than in England, where there was no precedent for someone to be acquitted of a murder purely on the grounds that the jury sympathised with their motives; his acquittal was a distinctively French phenomenon, for the political equivalent of a crime de passion. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1350

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on how foundational institutions can arise from morally ambiguous or violent acts, and to French ‘crime passionnel’ legal culture. — connects to: Anti-war activism was prosecuted as material support for terrorism
• CANDY: The image of a jury acquitting a killer to cries of ‘Vive la France’ because he murdered a pogrom-organizer is a striking, shareable courtroom anecdote.