https://theintercept.com/2023/10/16/pro-palestine-students-campus-gaza-war/
With tensions exploding on campuses across the country over Israel's war against Gaza, NYU Law student Ryna Workman lost their job offer.
TheIntercept.com
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 The offer was rescinded because the law firm saw that they don’t know or follow proper etiquette in positions of supposedly unbiased positions.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,
Ryna
This 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.
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.
Would you like to elaborate on why disliking the murder of innocents and the conflating of all Palestinians with Hamas is disagreeable to you?
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!
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.
I had to deal with this during the pandemic. As the team lead, my ex-worker, exhausted and furious at the political climate, fired off a email to our client base. It doesn't matter if we agreed with the statement or not. But like, bro... we provide technical services.
I tried my best to step in front of the fire, brush it as a misstep and give them mental health days. But they went radioactive on the CEO and my boss and I had to let them go.
It's like that Dave Chappelle skit "when keeping it real goes wrong"
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.
Now chart the number of attempted civilian killings and see how the picture flips.
Did you think the Israeli casualties are low because Hamas hasn't been trying to murder them?
If you care about truth, there is strong evidence that that was a misfired rocket launch from the Palestine Islamic Jihad. The IDF has released intercepted radio comms between two Hamas members discussing it, including mention of rocket launches from a graveyard behind the hospital (which would be a war crime, of course).
It's likely that there will continue to be some uncertainty for a while over what exactly happened, but it doesn't matter much, since most people have already decided what the truth is and are reacting accordingly. Surely that doesn't include you though.
Oh, wow I read the news and commented on it, and watched a video showing a missile clearly going full speed into a building and causing an explosion bigger than anything Hamas has ever done before.
What wild biased conclusions I'm drawing! /S
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?
There is data, though I won't pretend to know the exact numbers - and it needs to be remembered that polling is difficult is places like Gaza - that suggests that a majority of Gazans do support violence against Israeli civilians.
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.
they choose monsters to represent them who have never been good faith negotiators for a peaceful solution that doesn’t require genicide.
They did actually. There were two ceasefires in the past and it was Israel who didn't follow them by lifting the blockade.
This is a really refreshing perspective that's been way too rare.
I wouldn't say that I've taken a side, and I don't think that's a productive way to analyze this issue. The way I see it, there are actions that contribute to peace, and there are actions that push it further away. I support the first and oppose the second, regardless of who's doing them.
And unfortunately, there hasn't been much of the first from either party.
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.
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.
Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences, which this person is now recognizing
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
Cool .freedom and democracy. As long as you don't oppose Israel. Then its all hands on deck to fuck you up and still you are treated as a criminal but hey, it's a free world unlike some countries who discriminate against women and lgbtq
Read the text they wrote in the newsletter (I've posted is in this thread) and make up your own mind. Bear in mind this was not sent as private email expressing her views; they wrote it for (and published it in) the weekly Student Bar Association newsletter and signed it as SBA President.
I doubt the NYU Law Student Bar Association is a political organisation.
It is what was actually written and the context that matters in this story, both of which are largely missing from the theintercept.com coverage. The reaction was for them to lose their position as SBA President and have a job offer rescinded.
EDIT: To be clear I don't see how freedom or democracy has been curtailed here. People are free to say and do what they want, but actions have consequences. The SBA membership is entitled to remove their student president and the law firm is entitled to rescind a job offer.
I don't believe this student has been prosecuted and imprisoned.
No one has the right to work at a particular Big Law firm, and if they don't have the awareness to know that publicly blaming a country for its own citizens being murdered isn't exactly a good look, I can't say I really blame the law firm for not wanting this student around.
You're not wrong haha, but repaying those loans just got much much harder.
Basic ethics and professionalism aside, just from a pragmatic perspective, I can't imagine what would possibly make some think it's a good idea to express support for a thousand dead Jews as a wannabe lawyer in god damn New York City.
Like, an NYC law firm is just about the highest concentration of Jews you can find outside of Israel.
Yes, countries like Palestine in which women are second class and lgbt people are treated with violence
Cool. So how is this any different? What moral supremacy does supporting this hounding someone for something they wrote or supports any different from Palestine as you say which discriminates against women?
What do you think happened to babies in that hospital?
There's no justification for killing civilians. Both Hamas and the IDF need to be destroyed
I was going to say that there's a difference between opposing Israel and supporting a massacre. But if what the article say is true, the guy never outright supported Hamas' actions. It looks like the worst you can accuse him of is to sweep it under the rug by not mentioning it.
In the current climate and context, it is an absolute shitbag move on his part for doing that. If you're going to condemn one side doing atrocities, you have to condemn the other as well in order to not be a shitbag in my book.
I would generally think that this should still not be sufficient cause to fire an employee in general (or rescind an offer), unless your reputation and political alignement is inherent to your job function.
I don't know enough about how the law firms work to know for sure if this is the case here. But I've seen many stories of law firms letting go of low level lawyers due to them failing to maintain a certain level or reputation. Either way it's not specific to Israel.
I was going to say that there's a difference between opposing Israel and supporting a massacre. But if what the article say is true, the guy never outright supported Hamas' actions. It looks like the worst you can accuse him of is to sweep it under the rug by not mentioning it.
Here's what the Student Bar Association's (former) President wrote:
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.
But if what the article say is true, the guy never outright supported Hamas’ actions. It looks like the worst you can accuse him of is to sweep it under the rug by not mentioning it.
It's worse than that. He said all of the bloodshed was Israel's fault, and went on to issue several apt condemnations of Israel. He very pointedly did not condemn Hamas for the attack.
He blamed the context of how we got to the murders instead of the actual murderers. It was never swept under the rug.
Why? Why should this person have said something about both sides?
In a court of law, when an attorney goes to plead their case, do they have to plead their case or both sides equally?
What about their opponents? Does netanyahu or bush or any pro Israel supporter who condemns only hamas for "massacre" also say that Israel commits war crimes by doing collective punishment or by using white phosphorus or killing thousands of babies in the last week alone ?
Why should a job offer be affected by your persnla views unless you say you only hire people who have shared values and only those shared values ? Isn't.... That ... discrimination?
Why? Why should this person have said something about both sides?
Bobby punches Danny
Danny punches Bobby in response
Teacher scolds Danny in front of entire class
Danny visibly upset
Can you really not understand why failing to address both sides of a conflict might be seen as problematic to an outside observer, and as a personal attack by one group or another?
Note: I'm not assigning first cause blame to one party or another in the Israel-Gaza case, just to be clear.
Why should a job offer be affected by your persnla views unless you say you only hire people who have shared values and only those shared values ? Isn’t… That … discrimination?
A law firm has a right to refuse to hire an actual neo-Nazi, too. They can associate with or disassociate with anyone they want. You're torturing the definition of "discrimination" to the point where it's lost all utility in this conversation.
You are running in circles. I am saying why isn't pro Israel lobby saying something about the POV of Palestine ? Why does it have to be only pro Palestine people who have to recognize the other side?
No, you quite literally said: "Why? Why should this person have said something about both sides?"
I'm not engaging your whataboutism. I'm specifically responding to the exact words you used. This person should have been more sensitive to the broader context than they were, as the president of the university's Student Bar Association and a person with a considerable audience. In the event of a violent conflict it's poor taste to come out and lambast the actions of one party but sidestep or ignore the actions of the other.
I didn't say anything about any "lobby", or the fact that one person should be instructed to do something and the other given a pass.
Go back and read my comment again, because you clearly didn't get it the first time.
Why should a job offer be affected by your persnla views unless you say you only hire people who have shared values and only those shared values ? Isn’t… That … discrimination?
Only if you're a fucking idiot.
Why? Why should this person have said something about both sides?
Because failing to acknowledge the major differing and valid viewpoints in a complex situation contributes to echo chambers and radicalization which can ultimately lead to or contribute to political disfunction, civil war, war and deaths.
Because of the several layers of indirections I think it's completely unreasonable to expect people to live up to the expectation of acknowledging differing valid viewpoints, but people who fail to do so are still engaging in shitbaggery, in my opinion, because they contribute to the deterioration of the political discourse which can have catastrophic consequences.
As I said I generally think that engaging in shitbaggery in political discourse shouldn't harm your job /career. Unless your job relies heavily on your reputation, which lawfirms seem to weirdly believe is the case for lawyers. I personally don't get it, a lawyer's argument should always be just as a valid regardless of which lawyer makes the argument, but I know very little about law practice.