Well no shit. This person used their position in academia to spam out a newsletter of their political affiliation to the student body. The offer was rescinded because the law firm saw that they don’t know or follow proper etiquette in positions of supposedly unbiased positions. This person will likely not be proper legal counsel to individuals or companies they might not personally see eye to eye.
Yeah this is exactly right; an inability to separate their own political stance from their professional role. For the law firm, there is also a lack of insight and common sense around wading into such a controversial and difficult issue in such a way.
This is the text from their newsletter:
Hi y’all.
This week, I want to express, first and foremost, my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination. Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life. This regime of state-sanctioned violence created the conditions that made resistance necessary. I will not condemn Palestinian resistance. Instead…
I condemn the violence of apartheid. I condemn the violence of settler colonialism. I condemn the violence of military occupation. I condemn the violence of dispossession and stolen homes. I condemn the violence of trapping thousands in an open-air prison. I condemn the violence of collective punishment. I condemn the violence of phosphorous bombs. I condemn the violence of the United States military-industrial complex. >I condemn the violence of obfuscating genocide as a "complex issue.” I condemn the violence in labeling oppressed people as “animals.” I condemn the violence in removing historical context. I condemn the violence of silence.
Palestine will be free.
Your SBA President,
RynaThis was in the NYU LAW Student Bar Association’s SBA Weekly newsletter.
Even as someone who is generally pro-Palestine, if I was working at a law firm I would rescind a job offer to the person who wrote and sent around that letter.
I mean if I was hiring a roofer or something and saw that he had a pro Palestine newsletter like that, who cares. But if I’m hiring another professional whose entire job it is to not only see nuances in cases and arguments, but to recognize how best to present and argue them before a court of people who may have very different beliefs than them, and make frequent on the record statements that will be preserved until society collapses, then this gives me pretty ample reason to believe they won’t be capable of executing any of that with the level of professionalism I would want out of a coworker.
Yup. I had a funny little blog while I was in college. I think i had twenty regular readers. It was unassociated with my name, but if you tried you could find the connections. When I went into tax and consulting, that blog disappeared into the aether. Publicly I had to be boring and professional. It’s so… What’s the word. Not me.
that blog disappeared into the aether
Out of curiosity… before, or after Archive.org?
No one backed it up in there. I checked. It was a small blog.
Then you will literally never hire an attorney.
A good attorney will be able to craft a powerful argument against their own core beliefs. This guy is very clearly incapable of that. A true professional can conduct an unbiased analysis, and then determine if it’s an issue where you need to speak out or recuse yourself because of your biases.
Hollywood horseshit. If you are crafting an argument against your core beliefs you should not have taken that case, full stop. I’m not about to go argue against the Civil Rights Act because someone picked my name off of a random website. This is not something that happens in real life in any case that actually matters. If your client ends up with an unsatisfactory result your biases (that you did not adequately disclose, that you were not prepared to ignore) against your own client’s interests open things up for a mistrial and possibly even censure.
We’re not talking about taking a case from the local HOA that’s run by douchebags but they’re technically correct here. In cases with real stakes, where real shit is going down and lives are going to be effected, you are never arguing against yourself unless you are woefully incompetent and should never have been granted entry to the bar.
The third option is, of course, that you don’t give a shit about anything but getting paid but at that point you have no core beliefs so none of this applies.
You know what, fair enough. I’m not an expert at law. This is what I thought was the case, but you seem more knowledgeable than me on this, so I’ll take your word for it.
A good attorney can, but a great attorney doesn’t. Good attorneys make enough money that they can pick each and every case they want, and only take ones that advance their career or personal beliefs. My lawyer trained under Lenny Bruce, and his website right now is very similar to this letter. He runs his own firm, though, so he’s not beholden to the respectability politics of big law firms.
Edit: lmao I didn’t mean Lenny Bruce, listening to him while typing this fucked my brain up, but it’s hilarious so imma leave it.
Yikes
I’m a big advocate for considering Palestinians to be completely separate from Hamas, and that punishing civilians for the attack by cutting off crucial resources is unconscionable. If I were on a hiring committee, it would be for an engineering position, and I would strongly recommend against hiring them.
They have very pointedly not made a condemnation of the Hamas attack which killed innocent people and took them hostage. They liken that attack to legitimate Palestinian resistance, and they blame Israel for the actions of the terrorists, instead of the terrorists. This guy isn’t losing the job offer for supporting Palestinian civilians. He’s losing it for refusing to condemn murderers and the murders, and suggesting the terrorists are Palestine’s resistance. And others have pointed out how he used his position of power inappropriately as a bully pulpit.
It’s beyond clear that he’d be a terrible lawyer, and that he has a terrible morality. If he were an engineer, I wouldn’t be able to trust his professional opinion to be separate from his personal one. If Israel was wanting to buy our green energy product, and the deal fell through, I couldn’t know if he purposely tanked the deal or there were other issues. Not to mention, their causality is totally insane. When you have equipment failures or process events, if the reactor fails, the reactor fails. Something may have caused it to fail, but the reactor is still what failed, and you need to look into if the reactor design needs modification in some way. You can’t say the root cause of the failure was something before the reactor and then totally ignore the reactor.
What a fucking idiot.
They have very pointedly not made a condemnation of the Hamas attack which killed innocent people and took them hostage.
Not only is there absolutely no condemnation - that entire text is a justification of the mass murder of 1,200 people.
Okay, liberal
As I chronicled elsewhere, I worked with an attorney that would spam antivaxx right-wing propaganda all over his fucking LinkedIn and he remains employed to this day.
People have a really fucking stupid notion of how lawyers actually behave in real life.
Well, different positions and different companies hold people to different standards.
Was your attorney a student body president at NYU?
I suggest you read the post I’m responding to. There is no such thing as an unbiased person, and attorneys are no different. Thinking otherwise is Hollywood bullshit, which is all most people know about lawyers.
I suggest you re-read the posts you’re replying to. The problem is not that a person has an opinion, the problem is not being able to choose where and when to express what degree of opinion and still think you should have a position at a white shoe kind of firm.
Everybody is biased. The question is can you put your biases aside for your job.
I could not, ergo I’m not a lawyer or in a role where that matters.
That’s defeatist horseshit. You be a lawyer FOR your biases. You be a public defender. You work for the ACLU or EFF. You become a right-wing grifter and just start suing everyone for being woke. You become a lawyer specializing in IP so you can sue the shit out of infringers. You become a lawyer specializing in IP so you can sue the shit out of greedy-ass corporations.
All people are inherently biased and if you think you can’t be an attorney because you’re biased, fuck you. Get off your ass and be an attorney. You have no excuse except for the crushing debt and 6-7 years of coursework unless you’ve already completed a Bachelor’s degree. Do it. Because some asshole on the internet told you to.
Hardly defeatist, as I really don’t want to be a lawyer. I have my dream job and feel blessed for it.
Screw that! Go spend $200k on law school! Get paid $40k a year as a PD! It’s the new hip thing!
Why the fuck would someone want to be an attorney have you met them
If I were the head of a law firm, I wouldn’t hire the idiot you’re talking about or this guy. That doesn’t mean nobody ever will, but it’s not that shocking that one potential employers decided to pass. Nobody is obliged to hire him and he showed a pretty fundamental lack of judgement & ethics.
Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences, which this person is now recognizing
Can we not agree that both groups have done some super shitty things? Why take sides at all.
Both sides have done some super shitty things, but if you want to be objective about it, they’re not balanced at all.
Still seems like a crazy own goal to issue a statement that doesn’t condemn attacks on civilians, but I can understand why people feel driven to take a side, especially when virtually all the bars on the top part of that graph got effectively zero news coverage.
It’s in our nature to take sides, and it’s unfortunate because this is a really complicated issue. You can trace this back centuries to try and understand why everything has happened, and you’ll find devils and angels in every group involved.
After Russian pogroms of Jews around the Russian Revolution time period, a prominent European Jewish thinker concluded that they would never have safety or respect unless they had their own nation. Being scapegoated and killed in Russia was just one of many instances where they were persecuted. Flash forward to the early 1900s, and you have Zionist insurgents in Mandated Palestine who want their own Jewish state, and are carrying out terrorist attacks against the British colonial authority.
We’re both well aware of what Palestinians are suffering right now. I believe I just read that an Israeli airstrike killed 600 in a hospital. A few weeks ago, extremists associated with Palestine killed and kidnapped a lot of people at a concert.
Civilians just want to live in peace and freedom. They’re surrounded by violence they don’t remotely deserve, and that just keeps getting perpetuated. Each side kills innocent people that the other side takes as justification to kill other innocent people, and so forth.
By the numbers, Israel is worse because they’ve caused more casualties, I agree. But I really don’t think that’s important here. Significant numbers of innocent people are being killed by Hamas and also by Israel’s government. Identifying both as major problems and the “bad guys”, while viewing the civilians as the “good guys”, is what’s important I think.
Edit: Forgot to say, the problem wasn’t that this guy supported Palestinians, but that they pointedly refused to condemn killing and kidnapping innocent people.
Being “pro Israel” or “pro Palestine” are problematic positions. You don’t have to pick which of the bad guys you like more. There is no rule that says you have to have a side
I have long standing sympathies for the people of Palestine. But, they choose monsters to represent them who have never been good faith negotiators for a peaceful solution that doesn’t require genicide.
The Israelis also choose monsters to represent them. Among the other colonialist behaviors, they pursue a settlement strategy that is specifically designed to make a 2 state peace impossible.
No good guys. Stop telling everyone which side you’re on! You just telling me which color terrorist you prefer.
But, they choose monsters to represent them
Afaik, like over half the population of Palestine wasn’t even alive or were children when that decision was made and nobody has been given a decision since, at least not the kind of decision that doesn’t involve becoming a martyr and deading yourself in exchange for deading another person.
I suppose I have no data points to tell me what is in the hearts of the majority of gaza civilians. I could I suppose, fill it in with good will and brotherhood toward man. I could fill it in with genocidal intent.
Either way, it is my choice since I can’t really know. I am not so desperate to find a good guy, that I will lie to myself and pretend I know a truth. My hunch is that the truth would be upsetting for the folks desperate to find the good guys. What about that environment would produce a culture of peace and good will?
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Sounds like it’s high time for a change in leadership!
…and nobody has been given a decision…
Wikipedia would call those ‘weasel words’, passive voice. Been given? Who’s going to give it to them? They’re independent and self-governing. If they don’t agree with the actions of their leaders, they need to change leaders; neither Israel nor anybody else can do that for them.
If Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinians, and refuses to step aside, that makes them bad guys twice over: terrorists to Israel and tyrants to the Palestinians. My understanding is that they’re pretty popular, though.
I worded things exactly as I meant them. They haven’t been given a decision that doesn’t involve a probably violent uprising, so they would have to make their own opportunity but authoritarians tend not to like that thus the deading oneself part of my comment. I think we agree ultimately.
As far as Palestinian’s support for Hamas goes, I find that the whole story is honestly kind of nuanced the more I read. https://theconversation.com/hamas-was-unpopular-in-gaza-before-it-attacked-israel-surveys-showed-gazans-cared-more-about-fighting-poverty-than-armed-resistance-215640
Yeah, I read a breakdown of governance is Gaza, and it was honestly bewildering: Hamas has a few different wings for civilian and military governance, and then there’s the Palestinian Authority which plays some kind of role, and a Hezbollah influence… It’s a fucking mess, and it’s a shame. But honestly: there’s nobody in a position to help the Palestinians to pick more reasonable leaders, except possibly Iran or the Saudis exerting influence, which they’re not inclined to do, because to them the Palestinians are just a piece on a chessboard.
Honestly it might help the Palestinians (though not Hamas) if Israel and Saudi Arabia normalized relationships, if only because they’d be a less useful chess piece.
Go Mongooses! 🚩
Why take sides at all.
Because they’ve wandered into an echo chamber and are now hyper aware of all the real bad things on side did plus a few false bad things. While all of the bad things the other side did have been downplayed or justified.
I sadly don’t know enough on the topic to say more on this. And the amount of research needed to get even an idea of “who is worse” is massive due to all the misinformation (or misleading information) on the topic everywhere.
I do know that neither side is taking a sensible approach to the problem because right wing nutbags are in charge of both sides.
I tried to trace it a while back. The specific conflict could be traced back to the after WW1, where the British thought they could expand their influence in the region by growing a Jewish population through Zionists.
That begged the question though, what started the desire for a Jewish state in the first place? Why had groups committed terrorism for that cause? It was a trail of nationalism that came from a very understandable genesis. After Russian pogroms killed innocent Jewish people (just one of many persecutions across Europe), a prominent Jewish writer opined that the only way for Jews to have safety and respect was a state of their own.
That’s where I stopped, but if you continued to look, you’d end up at the Romans in Jerusalem and the Jewish Diaspora as one of the events leading here.
The only side I can take in good faith is of the civilians.
Don’t think there needs to be a worse side when you’re killing civilians.
You mean like the civilians the Israeli government has been killing for 70+ years?
Everyone in a position of power in Bibi’s government and Hamas are assholes. Let’s not pretend like this was something Hamas did out of nowhere for no reason. This is exactly the kind of shit that Bibi has been hoping to provoke his entire time in office.
I didn’t say anything of the sort.
Apparently not, and I don’t understand why.
Americas greatest export is hating marginalized people so white countries and invade and colonize
it’s no different from 20 years ago only now Republicans are openly fascist too
