The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is being hit with a lawsuit over allegations of discriminating against an Israeli organization.
According to a press release from the Lawfare Project, which working in collaboration with attorney David Abrams of the Zionist Advocacy Center on the lawsuit, the NLG refused a $200 offer from the Bibliotechnical Athenaeum to place an advertisement in their Annual Banquet dinner journal on the grounds that they “have a resolution barring us from accepting funds from Israeli organizations.”
“If the NLG had similarly said, ‘Unfortunately, it is our policy not to do business with Chinese organizations,’ or ‘We have a resolution against accepting funds from African organizations,’ we would rightly be outraged,” Brooke Goldstein, executive director of the Lawfare Project, said in the press release. “Where is the same outrage when it comes to unlawful commercial discrimination against Israelis and Jews?”
The lawsuit is headed toward the New York Supreme Court, and the Lawfare Project is confident that the court will rule in their favor under New York’s Human Rights Law.
“The Lawfare Project believes that this is a strong case, and that NLG’s prejudicial conduct overtly violates the applicable laws on which our claims are based,” Benjamin Ryberg, who is representing the Israeli organization from the Lawfare Project, told the Journal in an email. “We are confident that the court will remedy the harm our client has suffered due to NLG’s discriminatory act.”
Ryberg also pointed out that the NLG “has a history of relentlessly attacking the Jewish state.”
“It is a fervent proponent of the bigoted Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, the goal of which is to bankrupt the State of Israel via discriminatory business practices,” wrote Ryberg. “It has urged state governments to divest from Israel Bonds and the U.S. to cut all aid to Israel. Recently, it even actively raised funds in support of a notoriously anti-Semitic professor at a California university, who has consistently used her platform to malign, intimidate, and alienate the school’s Jewish student population.”
In 2014, the NLG called for the Obama administration to face charges of war crimes for funding Israel’s Iron Dome. Alan Dershowitz criticized the NLG in a Jerusalem Post column as being “the sworn enemy of Israel and the legal arm of Palestinian terrorism since the early 1970s following the Soviet Union’s switch from supporting Israel to opposing it.”
“The National Lawyers Guild has lost most of its lawyers since that time and has instead filled its membership roles with paralegals, amateur investigators and other assorted ‘legal workers,’” wrote Dershowitz. “It has no credibility in the legal profession and even some of its anti-Zionist members have recently quit, calling its policies regarding Israel ‘crazy,’ ‘irresponsible,’ and ‘bigoted.’”
The NLG has not responded to the Journal’s request for comment.
