Harvard Law Students Defend Hamas [UPDATED]

Editor's note: PJ Media has learned that the students listed in the original article apparently graduated in May 2023. Our reporting relied on the Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association website, which has since been taken down. According to an email we received, the list of board members was outdated at the time this article was published. Because it's not known whether any of these students, now graduates, signed and/or agreed with the statement, we have removed their names. 

Original story:

“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”  So says a letter signed by 34 student organizations at Harvard in the hours following the Hamas slaughter of innocents in Israel.

“The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”

Joint Statement by Harvard … by PJ Media

Bungling history, the bright young things at Harvard label Israel a colonial power and borrow the language of genocide—annihilation—to complain about a people who were in fact the only victims of attempted annihilation in the last half millennia.

Worst of all, four Harvard Law School organizations signed this letter, and their leaders are not fit to practice law in any state. State bars should take notice of who these particular Harvard Law students are.

If the Left won’t condemn the slaughter of innocents, what would they do to you given the chance?

Of course, history answers the question for us.

We know of Che Guevara’s revolutionary justice tribunals. History leaves no room for equivocation regarding Joseph Stalin’s Gulags, where millions turned into, as Solzhenitsyn framed it, a form of human sewage passing through. We know of Mao Zedong’s cultural march in the name of political correctness that led to bodies by the millions, dead from starvation, and the Red Guard’s cleansing of divergent opinions on campus.

We know what the Left is capable of because we know the body count of the 20^th century.

It all happened again, in the place Jews were meant to be safe, on a beautiful holiday, with people outdoors celebrating—some gathering in their sukkot, some at a shining music festival.

Hamas killed babies, families, and the elderly, and snuffed out the future of joyous young ravers with a cruelty sometimes worse than the Einsatzgruppen in Latvia.

Perhaps Hamas learned their demonic trade from these Nazis of the Eastern Front.  Hamas modernized it with cell phone video, drone footage, and barbaric games of separation—theatrical killings where parents witnessed the execution of children in one house and the opposite in the next.

Contrary to the bright young things at Harvard, Israel’s fight is as stark of a battle of good versus hellish evil as anything in the 20^th century. Israel is on the side of civilization, and Hamas is on the side of all the bloodthirsty monsters of history.

Which is a nice place to go back to Cambridge.

Hans von Spakovsky and I have been cataloging the depravity and militancy of the modern elite law schools.  The “Do They Teach Law Anymore” series has cataloged the rank deconstructive leftism of modern elite law school curriculum.  I covered Harvard Law here.

Four Harvard Law student groups signed the vile letter.

The four groups are the Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association, the Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine, Harvard South Asian Law Students Association, and the Harvard Muslim Law School Association.

Leadership at these groups who assented to joining this insane excuse and justification for murder do not appear to have the character and fitness to practice law, and no bar, in my view, should approve their application to practice law absent a serious change of heart.

American lawyers do not excuse the murder of innocents. American lawyers purportedly stand on the side of civilization and the rule of law, not chaos and barbarism.

The Harvard South Asian Law Students Association doesn’t list its current executive board, but has Instagram and Facebook pages listing the big law firms that sponsor them, including Kirkland and Ellis.

All of this madness reinforces what Hans and I have been writing about the rot at elite law schools. Elite law schools are producing lawyers who do not know how to practice law, and worse, exhibit contempt for civilizational and constitutional American norms such as free speech and the rule of law.

The Harvard letter reinforces that view.

Law students involved in signing a letter that, in my view, excuses the wholesale slaughter of innocents and literally shifts blame to Israel, exhibit a lack of character and fitness to practice law. I would strongly urge bar associations who get the applications of the students responsible for the letter to carefully scrutinize the applicants.

With some bar associations focused on the character and fitness to practice the law of those who purportedly provided intellectual cover to “insurrection,” it seems those who are providing excuses for the slaughter of innocents deserve scrutiny also.

Now, there is some chance that these particular executives in the organizations had nothing to do with signing the letter or disagreed with the decision, and my opinion could change about them if they came out and disavowed it. I can even rewrite this piece. But so far, crickets, as far as I can tell.