There is essentially no one to appeal to, unless someone on the Google webspam team takes a personal interest in this when it hits the top page of HN. (Which has been known to happen.) That will be to avoid the PR hit rather than out of the moral persuasiveness of avoiding collateral damage. Google does collateral damage on a fairly frequent basis.
They prefer to deal with it by "scalable communication methods" rather than by speaking to you about it. For example, to a certain philosophy within the borg, that blog post should teach you your lesson about being in a "bad neighborhood." (This euphemism has become a term of art in the SEO community. Google recommends you not link to websites in bad neighborhoods.)
how can I recover the traffic that was previously coming from Google before they removed my site?
You seem to be under the impression that that traffic was yours to begin with. I think the borg believes it is their traffic, though they would be circumspect about saying that in as many words. They'll sell it to you, for example. (Google makes scads on selling brands their own branded keywords.)
Most professional SEOs of my acquaintance would note that, if one has a site burned, redirecting that site to a new site is a fairly risky endeavor for that new site.
P.S. If one needs a new free web host and one is worried about getting smacked down again for being in a bad neighborhood, a cynical person might recommend blogspot.com. You'll still be in a bad neighborhood, but you'll be in a bad neighborhood which is highly unlikely to get hit with the orbital ion cannon.