Historical account of National Lawyers Guild's shift to radical left and anti‑Israel stance

4.2.12 WC: 191694 At about the same time, another radical client fired me because he heard that I was a “Zionist” and he could have nothing to do with anyone associated with such a “fascist” cause. Father Daniel Berrigan, a lapsed Catholic priest who had become the darling of the hard left as the result of his anti- Vietnam War activities, began to call both the United States and Israel “criminal” entities.'°' Chomsky notoriously defended the ruthless Cambodian dictator Pol Pot against charges of genocide, insisting that western media reports of millions of murders were typical exaggerations of horrors regularly but falsely attributed to Communist regimes. The National Lawyers’ Guild, which had become the legal arm of the hard left, dismissed all accusations against Communist regimes as “red baiting.” They also became the legal arm of anti-Israel extremists, including terrorists. They did not support these clients on grounds of human rights or civil liberties principles, but rather because they agreed with their politics. In 197 __, I broke with the National Lawyers Guild, with which I had worked closely when it had been a neutral human rights organizations. In a widely read article in The American Lawyer, I told the sad story of the transformation of the NLG from a genuine human rights organization into an advocate for some of the worst human wrongs on the planet. This transformation presents in a microcosm the larger account of the hyacking of the human rights label and agenda by the hard left. The National Lawyers Guild was established in 1937 as an antidote to the American Bar Association, which was then fighting the New Deal, excluding black lawyers from membership, and opposing the labor movement. The original guild was an amalgam of Roosevelt liberals, CIO labor leaders, black civil rights lawyers, and radicals of assorted affiliations and persuasions. It strongly supported Israel’s struggle for independence and opposed the arms embargo against the Jewish state. Its membership over the years has included such distinguished lawyers as Thurgood Marshall, Arthur Goldberg, Ferdinand Pecora, Paul O’Dwyer, Louis Boudin, and William Hastie. During its early years, splits developed between the anti-Communist liberals and the radicals. But the guild survived and accomplished much good on the domestic front, including an excellent record of providing legal assistance to the civil-rights, labor and anti-war movements. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the antiwar movement, the guild began to be taken over by younger, more militant lawyers from the New Left. As George Conk, an admiring guild historian and a former editor of the monthly Guild Notes, describes it: “At the Boulder [Colorado] convention in 1971, the young veterans of the antiwar movement found they had the guild in their own hands, and many older members withdrew from active membership.” Law students and other “legal workers” were also admitted, thus strengthening the hold of the young radicals but reducing the percentage of actual lawyers in the guild to less than half. The guild no longer considered itself an alternative bar association but rather the prime organizer of “radical legal people” and the legal arm of the American radical Left. While all this was happening at home, the radical Left was beginning its campaign against Israel. In a highly publicized speech delivered on October 19, 1973—a speech that many people see as the original declaration of war by the radical American Left against Israel—the Reverend Daniel Berrigan described Israel as “a criminal Jewish community” that has committed “crimes against humanity,” has “created slaves” and has espoused a “racist ideology” reminiscent of the Nazis, aimed at proving its “racial superiority to the people it has crushed.” Berrigan also chastised the “Jewish people,” whom he described 101 Toet quotes] 331 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017418