#BDS_Epic_Fail: Former 'white shoes' law firm withdraws Harvard Law School funding due to BDS
Shavua tov, a good week to everyone.
Back in the 60's and 70's, New York law firms were split into 'Jewish law firms' where Jews could be accepted and predominated, and 'white shoes law firms,' which for the most part did not accept Jews. By the time I came out of law school in the mid-'80's, the world was changing (my first law firm was one that was known as a 'white shoes' law firm and I had offers from others) although there were still vestiges of the old regime.
Milbank Tweed (known as Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCoy when I was in law school) was a 'white shoes' law firm 50 years ago. No more. Last week, Milbank withdrew $250,000 in student funding from Harvard Law School because students
used some of the money to fund a program promoting the anti-Semitic BDS movement.
For the uninitiated, the “Milbank Tweed Student Conference Fund” (or Milbank Fund, named after the multinational law firm that
endowed it), was established in 2012 to support the activities of
student-run organizations at Harvard Law School. The Dean of Students
office allocates the funds through an open application process. As part
of the arrangement, Milbank Fund recipients are required to recognize
the contribution by ensuring that all promotional materials for
Milbank-funded programming include at least one reference indicating
Milbank as a headlining sponsor.
At the start of this semester, HLS announced, without explanation,
the sudden termination of the Milbank Fund. We are writing today so that
the record may reflect that the termination of the Milbank Fund is, in
fact, completely our fault.
In our defense, we couldn’t have possibly foreseen how our actions
would come to affect the rest of the campus community. On the eve of our
first-ever Milbank-sponsored speaker event, titled “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech: A Movement Under Attack”,
the only thing we were really concerned about was what type of food to
order for our fellow classmates. Like many others, we are an
organization that recognizes the value of quality food as a major key to
the success of any lunch talk.
So we ordered pizza—about $500 worth. We made sure to get a little
something for everyone, because inclusivity! We got some margheritas for
the traditional, buffalo chicken for the carnivorous, and of course,
some formaggio for our colleagues with a more refined palate. The pizza
was delicious, and for that, we must take a moment to sincerely thank
Milbank for its generous contributions.
Even though we had only used Milbank’s money for the pizza (our
speakers, two civil rights attorneys and an undergraduate student,
graciously offered their time at no additional cost to the school), we
held up our end of the deal by including, in all promotional e-mails and
at the bottom of the event’s official Facebook page, some iteration of
the following sentence: “This event is brought to you by the generous
support of Milbank LLP.”
...
Ironically enough, a very similar sequence of events would unfold at
Harvard Law School in the aftermath of our event. The very next day, the
Dean of Students office—citing a flood of angry phone
calls and emails received from Milbank executives and other off-campus
parties over the previous 24 hours—asked an organizer of the event to
disassociate from Milbank in all past and future Justice for Palestine
programming.[1]
As a start, the organizer was asked to immediately remove the reference
to Milbank’s “generous support” from JFP’s Facebook event page.
After acknowledging that they recognized the irony in asking a
student to retroactively edit the description for an event that was
about free speech and its exceptions, the Dean of Students
administrators proceeded to make it very clear that our cooperation
would be greatly appreciated. Even though the event had already passed,
it was evident that the administration was feeling tremendous pressure
to do something, anything, to appease Milbank.
In exchange for a written guarantee that JFP’s future funding (be it
from Milbank or any other source) would not be adversely affected, we
agreed to remove the sentence from the Facebook event page. Though that
guarantee was promised to us, we never got it.
Turns out, that’s because our request was directly incompatible with
what Milbank was demanding. Administrators would later reveal that
Milbank had gone so far as to demand that JFP’s Milbank funding be
rescinded completely. According to Dean Minow, this was not a demand her
administration could honor, so Milbank decided to pull out all of
its annual $250,000 in student activity funding as a result of her
administration’s “principled stance” in support of our right to speak
openly and honestly about Palestine.
Boo. Hoo.
Labels: BDS, Harvard Law School, Students for Justice in Palestine
Obama's ties to Saudi royal family deeper than first thought?
President Obama's ties to the Saudi royal family may go back further than being introduced to the man who got him into Harvard Law School by
the Saudi royal family's US lawyer. In fact, Obama may have been among a group of blacks who were educated with the intention of having them assume positions of prominence to
undermine the United States (Hat Tip:
Instapundit).
The column itself had appeared in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Evening
Independent of Nov. 6, but it was the work of a veteran newspaperman who
at the time was working for the prestigious Chicago Tribune and whose
work was syndicated nationally. (1)
So far as I know, this 1979 column has not previously
been brought to light, but it certainly should be because it broke some
very interesting news about the “rumored billions of dollars the
oil-rich Arab nations are supposed to unload on American black leaders
and minority institutions.” The columnist quoted a black San Francisco
lawyer who said, “It’s not just a rumor. Aid will come from some of the
Arab states.”
Well, if anyone would know, it would have been this
lawyer — Donald Warden, who had helped defend OPEC in an antitrust suit
that year and had developed significant ties with the Saudi royal family
since becoming a Muslim and taking the name Khalid Abdullah Tariq
al-Mansour.
Al-Mansour told Jarrett that he had presented the
“proposed special aid program to OPEC Secretary-General Rene Ortiz” in
September 1979, and that “the first indications of Arab help to American
blacks may be announced in December.” Maybe so, but I looked high and
wide in newspapers in 1979 and 1980 for any other stories about this aid
package funded by OPEC and never found it verified.
You would think that a program to spend “$20 million
per year for 10 years to aid 10,000 minority students each year,
including blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, Asians and native Americans” would
be referred to somewhere other than one obscure 1979 column, but I
haven’t found any other word of it.
Maybe the funding materialized, maybe it didn’t, but
what’s particularly noteworthy is that this black Islamic lawyer who
“for several years [had] urged the rich Arab kingdoms to cultivate
stronger ties to America’s blacks by supporting black businesses and
black colleges and giving financial help to disadvantaged students” was
also the same lawyer who allegedly helped arrange for the entrance of
Barack Obama into Harvard Law School in 1988.
...
It also might be considered more than coincidence that the author of
that 1979 newspaper column was from Chicago, where Barack Obama settled
in 1986 a few years after his stint at Columbia University. It is
certainly surprising that the author of that column was none other than
Vernon Jarrett, the future (and later former) father-in-law of Valerie
Jarrett, who ultimately became the consigliere of the Obama White House.
It is also noteworthy that Vernon Jarrett was one of
the best friends and a colleague of Frank Marshall Davis, the former
Chicago journalist and lifelong communist who moved to Hawaii in the
late 1940s and years later befriended Stanley and Madelyn Dunham and
their daughter Stanley Ann, the mother of Barack Obama. (4) [Last month, I saw a column claiming that Davis was actually Obama's father. I didn't run it, but you can find it here. CiJ]
And to anyone who has the modicum of a spark of
curiosity, it is surely intriguing that Frank Davis took an active role
in the rearing of young Barack from the age of 10 until he turned 18 and
left Hawaii for his first year of college at Occidental College in Los
Angeles. (5)
It is also at least suggestive that Obama began that
college education as a member of the highly international student body
of Occidental College in 1979, the same year when Vernon Jarrett was
touting the college aid program being funded by OPEC and possibly Prince
Alwaleed. The fact that President Obama has studiously avoided
releasing records of his college years is suggestive also, but has no
evidentiary value in the present discussion. (6)
So which do you think is more likely? That Google will remove the offending articles or that the mainstream media will ignore this story? I would bet on both.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Harvard Law School, Saudi Royal Family
Obama's Harvard mentor asks him to free Pollard
Charles Ogletree, a professor who mentored President Obama at Harvard Law School, has written a letter to the President asking him to free Jonathan Pollard.
Ogletree, who directs the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard, was Obama's professor and his wife Michelle's and the president still considers him his mentor and friend.
"I have written President Obama seeking a pardon for Jonathan Pollard," Ogletree wrote. "I hope the president grants the wishes of many who have supported a pardon for Mr. Pollard." White House and State Department officials said Wednesday that they had received Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's letter requesting clemency for Pollard and were considering the matter.
"We have received the letter and will review it," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said, declining to provide a timeframe or any further details on the review process.
Similarly, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said the State Department had received the letter but refrained from commenting further.
Will Obama listen?
Labels: Barack Obama, Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School, Jonathan Pollard
