Yesterday, lawyers for the Occupy Wall Street movement successfully filed for a temporary restraining order with a New York court. On paper, at least — the Bloomberg administration did not comply — Justice Lucy Billings’s ruling allowed the protesters to return to Zuccotti Park between yesterday morning’s eviction and yesterday afternoon’s full hearing. She temporarily barred the city and the private owners of the park from preventing the occupation or keeping the occupiers from setting up tents.
Justice Billings is perhaps the ideal enabler for the occupiers. Her liberal credentials are sterling: She graduated from the University of California–Berkeley’s law school in 1973, was admitted to the Vermont bar in 1974, and went on to spend 25 years working for the American Civil Liberties Union, where she worked, according to her official biography online, “to enforce new rights for minority, disabled, and low-income persons” and “forged new legal remedies by litigating issues not previously addressed in housing, environmental justice . . . public health, child welfare, education, and employment.” And her role may not have been coincidental; the Daily Newsreports: “Asked why they called her first, protest lawyer Daniel Alterman wouldn’t say, remarking that he’s not a ‘gossip guy.’”
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Speaking of the protest’s lawyers, most of them are affiliated with the National Lawyers Guild, a group of explicitly progressive lawyers whose mission calls for the “reconstruction of legal values to emphasize human rights over property rights.” That philosophy runs throughout much of their work, which has consistently championed the preferences of “marginalized” groups over the rule of law. Here is a guide to Occupy Wall Street’s legal counsel.
Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler, formerly spouses,are the authors of Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in the Twenty-First Century. One of their favorite forms of dissent, it seems, has been a significant amount of anti-Israel advocacy, including the charge of Israeli “apartheid.” Ratner has accused Israel of “massive violations of Palestinian rights” and “inhuman [sic] treatment of Palestinians.” He has written that Americans have not widely condemned Israel because of “ambivalence about condemning the actions of a people that have experienced pervasive antisemitism and the holocaust.” Alan Levine, another OWS lawyer, has also publicly expressed anti-Israeli arguments. In light of the confirmedpresence of anti-Semitic sentiments at OWS and other occupations, the choice of several prominent critics of Israel as counsel is somewhat disturbing — Jewish people appear to be one minority group that neither the occupiers nor human-rights lawyers have much interest in protecting.
Another OWS lawyer, Michael J. Boyle, has an even more worrisome history of advocacy: He has represented no fewer than four men with connections to terrorism, basing his arguments on legal technicalities. Most appallingly, he represented Pakistani terrorist Shahawar Matin Siraj in an appeal of his conviction for plotting to bomb Manhattan’s Herald Square subway station. There was no dispute over Siraj’s guilt; Boyle appealed the decision on the grounds that Siraj had a right to access police records of his own oral statements — an argument that was legally unjustified and rejected.
In 2008, he secured the overturning of a conviction of two Yemeni men, cleric Ali Hassan al-Moayad and his assistant, Mohsen Yahya Zayed, for conspiracy to support al-Qaeda and Hamas. Their conviction was overturned because a witness’s description of a Hamas bombing in Tel Aviv was ruled “inflammatory testimony.” He also defended Osama Awadallah, an associate of two 9/11 hijackers, on perjury charges — Awadallah claimed he didn’t know one of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar, despite material evidence that he did. Boyle secured Awadallah’s release, via a dramatic jury reversal, by arguing that Awadallah had unintentionally denied knowing al-Midhar to the FBI.
And this is a surprise why? I'm surprised Eric Holder hasn't rushed to their defense. Maybe he's still a tad upset after finishing just behind Senator Kerry for this coveted DC Award ... External Link
Ah, remember back to those halcyon days of September when OWS was exemplified by lazy students who simply wanted "the rich" to pay back their student loans for them and were protesting the lack of +$100K jobs available to them right out of college so they could earn a decent living wage?
So sad. Next you'll be telling me that the people described in this article are cynically using these honest young people, along with common criminals, to further their own anti-American agenda which is no coincidence to their own professional backgrounds.
The second-worst thing Joe McCarthy did, was to discredit anti-communism enough to allow liberals the mind-destroying indulgence of thinking Communists aren't as bad as Nazis.
(The worst thing Joe McCarthy did, was acting like a liberal and equating garden-variety political opponents with totalitarians.
I expect liberals to call conservatives Nazis. That's what drama queens do. I expect better of sober-minded conservatives. They should only call people communists, who are actually communists.
And, Mike, a lot of the National Lawyers Guild pioneers indisputably were. Some of its members still are.
I think it's pretty obvious these guys are not concerned with high minded concepts like "due process" or "the rule of law" unless they can be used as tools to advance their agenda. It's called waging "lawfare" and is a manifestation of the Alinsky principle of making the other side play by its rules in order to defeat it. Seems pretty obvious to me.
I'm not so sure that the occupiers chose these lawyers, as much as the lawyers chose them.
Ratner and his ex-wife do not care about Jews as minorities because, to socialists, "minority" merely is a term of convenience used to connote a group of people who can assist the far left to advance its agenda.
Jews do not offer leftists that opportunity, because in no way does pining for the interests of Jewish people do anything to enlarge the sphere of government power and coercion. So, there is really no opportunity to exploit or use Jews for the leftist cause.
Jews like Ratner and his ex also do not view Jews as minorities because the Ratners and their fellow travelers would never dare think of themselves in those terms. THEY would never view themselves as disadvantaged. Quite the contrary. They are the essential upper crust of society that is so superior, they should be given authority to make decisions for everyone else.
Despite the persecution that Jews have faced throughout the centuries, and their ability to overcome it by self reliance, Jews like Ratner et al still feel guilty for what they have achieved.
So, instead of looking at the history of Jewish suffering as a rebuke to their socialist dogma, which it is, these lawyers look at Jews as power brokers that accidentally stumbled upon their good fortunes.
Socialism and the requisite mindset to embrace it are illnesses, especially when advanced by people whose ethnic history belies the socialist philosophy. Their self-hatred is sickening, as is their ability to exploit the plight of people less fortunate than they for the advancement of a coercive dogma that is inimical to the freedom that made their success possible.
Advice: don't ever go to a schule in the Kiryas Joel neighborhood, lest you denounce an entire village of Chasidim as "antisemitic".
You must have missed the entire section of Bolduc's write-up that focused on the deeply-held anti-Israeli sentiments of several of these lawyers, including Ratner.
And, no, my comments are not antisemitic at all. They reflect a sincere distaste for socialist Jews.
Get over it, or ignore my posts that pertain to it.
But do not conflate sentiments deeply held by a Jewish person -- sentiments you don't at all understand -- with antisemitism.
Your ignorance of me and why I look at things the way I do is quite a flimsy basis on which to allege a Jewish person is antisemitic.
It suffices to say that Jewish socialists are about as oxymoronic (despite their significant #) as "conventional wisdom".
Too bad you gravitate to pejoratives upon confronting an outlook of a fellow coreligionist you've never confronted before.
What's antisemitic about mads' post. Criticizing a Jew doesn't make you antisemitic. Pehaps not being a Jew myself makes me incapable of understanding antisemitism. I'm also a white male so I supppose I can thereby have no understanding of racism or sexism.
I am also not an idiot (or so I like to think) so I must have no understanding of idiocy.
This could go on forever and I realize it has nothing to do with the article - which I read, but which it appears MikeB didn't.
My many Jewish friends taught me a thing or two. One was that the yarmulke was not such a pain in the rear as it looked. Another was that this Jew was not that Jew just as this Christian was not that Christian.
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