In late January 1979, at the Harvard Law School, announcement was made of a forthcoming weekend conference, entitled “Third World Communities and Human Rights: A Commonality of Interests.” The conference, sponsored by the black, Asian-American, and Chicano law-student associations, was to be held on February 16 and 17, 1979, on the premises and with the active assistance of the law school. According to advance publicity, the conference would consist mainly of panel discussions on topics ranging from the new international economic order to bilingual education. There was no mention of any panels to discuss such human-rights issues in Third World countries as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, or protection of the rights of the accused. There was, however, to be a panel devoted to “human rights at home,” which would consider the problems of “institutional racism” and “political prisoners” in the United States.
The roster of those invited to lead the discussions included some eighty professors, Third World students, lawyers, and government officials. Prominently listed as a “guest of honor” on all the circulars and posters announcing the conference was Mohammed Emhemad Abdul Aziz of the Libyan Mission to the United Nations.
Soon after the announcement was made, members of the Harvard Jewish Law Students Association (HJLSA), a campus organization devoted to legal research on foreign and domestic Jewish issues, decided to protest publicly the honoring at a human-rights conference of an official of one of the most repressive and anti-Semitic governments in the world. From the beginning, the purpose was not to oppose the conference itself but only to protest the honor being conferred on Abdul Aziz. Committees were set up to compose an open letter to the law-school community, to draft a fact sheet detailing Libya’s extensive violations of human rights, and to contact those invited to the conference to inform them of the intended honor and to request that they dissociate themselves from it. All this activity, however, was to be deferred pending the response of the organizers to requests that the honor be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, the organizers themselves had set up a stand in the law-school student union in order to accept advance registration for the conference. On Friday, February 9, one of the members of the HJLSA, a third-year law student, approached several black students who at the time were supervising the stand, conveyed to them his objections to the honoring of the Libyan official, and informed them of the intentions of the HJLSA. At least one of the black students took offense at the phrase “you people” uttered by the Jewish student during the course of the altercation and in response threatened the latter with physical violence. Another of the black students, a principal organizer of the conference, warned that if Jewish students continued to interfere with the success of the conference, “I’ll burn this law school down.”
After this and other similar, though less dramatic, exchanges, rumors became widespread at the law school that the HJLSA planned to disrupt forcibly the upcoming conference. Urgent meetings were called by the sponsoring organizations to discuss what should be done to thwart these supposed intentions. The following comment, from a newsletter written by the editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and distributed among the sponsors of the conference, was typical of the agitated reaction:
At stake is the integrity and autonomy of the Asian, Black, and Chicano Law Students Associations. . . . The real issue is not whether Libya is a “good” or “bad” country. The real issue is whether the handful of students in the Jewish Law Students Association should be able to impose their censorship upon a conference of Third World students.
During this time, the organizers of the conference refused all requests to withdraw the intended honor to the Libyan official. But instead of defending Libya’s human-rights record, about which they evidently knew little and cared less, the organizers publicly stated that they neither approved nor disapproved of the views or policies of any individual invited to participate at the conference. As for the title “guest of honor,” it was reported by the Harvard Law Record, the law school’s weekly newspaper, that “Shirley Wilcher, vice president of the Black Law Students Association and a key conference organizer, said, ‘We haven’t used “honor” as that word is traditionally used, this is just a recognition of their positions.’” The Harvard Crimson reported further that Miss Wilcher stated that the term “guest of honor” was “used to designate the official capacity of foreign and domestic government officials and officials of national organizations,” although in fact there were many such officials who were listed as planning to attend the conference who were not referred to by the title “guest of honor.” In any event, several days before the conference was to begin, new publicity posters were put up which displayed, much more prominently than had previous circulars, the name of Abdul Aziz as a “Guest of Honor.”
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Alarmed at the situation that was developing, the law-school administration intervened to arrange a meeting between officers of the HJLSA and the principal organizers of the conference. The meeting, which was held on February 13, was conducted by Assistant Dean Stephen Young and Professor C. Clyde Ferguson. After several hours of heated discussion in which the HJLSA was again accused of intending to disrupt and censor in advance the proceedings of the conference, a statement was drafted for release to the law-school community which specifically denied any such objective.
Young and Ferguson requested that the statement be released in the names of both the conference sponsors and the HJLSA. The HJLSA officers agreed to this, with the understanding that none of their original plans for protesting was to be altered. But the conference sponsors, although they had participated in drafting the statement, refused to sign it, apparently in the belief that the HJLSA really was planning a disruption (or perhaps in the belief that continued rumors of disruption would further their own purposes). The Jewish students then rescinded their agreement to sign the statement, but to their dismay Young and Ferguson nevertheless proceeded to distribute it over their own names.
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Indeed, the administration acted all along as if the HJLSA were primarily responsible for the tension over the conference, despite the fact that the HJLSA had kept it fully informed from the start that its intentions were restrained and modest. The Jewish students, for example, learned from a faculty member of the remark of one law-school administrator: “I hear the Jewish students are planning to bring in the Jewish Defense League from New York.” The very fact that such absurd rumors were taken seriously was a sign of the administration’s disposition toward the Jewish students, who could not help but contrast the treatment their protests were receiving with the favorable treatment that had been accorded previous protests by the Harvard Black Law Students Association (HBLSA).
Each fall, for example, the Harvard Law School Placement Office arranges for several hundred law firms and other organizations to interview on campus. One of these, the Washington, D.C. firm of Collier, Shannon, Rill, Edwards, and Scott, has represented South Africa in the United States for a number of years. The HBLSA has each year contacted students who had scheduled interviews with Collier, Shannon in order to discourage them from going through with the interviews. The HBLSA has also held demonstrations at the locations where Collier, Shannon meant to conduct its interviews. As a result of HBLSA pressure, for at least the past two years not one student from Harvard has been interviewed on campus by Collier, Shannon.
This challenge by the HBLSA to a law firm’s right to represent any client, no matter how unpopular, has if anything been encouraged by the law school. No administrator or dean has publicly criticized the HBLSA for any of its actions in this matter. On the contrary, in 1977 and 1978 the administration issued memoranda designed to bring to the attention of the student body the fact that Collier, Shannon represents South Africa. The 1977 memorandum stated:
Obviously the placement office is in no position to make judgments about the many clients that interviewing firms represent. However, it ought to be clear that the presence of Collier, Shannon on the law school campus does not in any way indicate that the placement office supports or condones the social and political conditions that now prevail in the Republic of South Africa [emphasis in original].
As for the HBLSA, it went further than merely publicizing the law firm’s representation of South Africa; it actively sought to prevent the firm from interviewing on campus—and succeeded. There is an instructive comparison between this and the actions of those Jewish students who in 1979 merely sought to protest the honoring of Abdul Aziz at a Third World conference—and between the different reactions of law-school officials to the two “protests.” For in the latter case, the law school not only refused to dissociate itself from the unsavory aspects of the conference, but actually provided facilities, publicity, and direct financial assistance.
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In spite of the pressure put upon them, the Jewish students did not change their original plans. On February 12, they sent mailgrams to the United States government officials invited to the conference requesting that they dissociate themselves from the honoring of the Libyan while making sure to point out that the HJLSA did not “wish to interfere” with the success of the conference. An open letter to the law-school community, together with a documented fact sheet, was distributed widely. It read in part:
We believe that the honoring of an official representative of the government of Libya is totally at odds with the conference’s high aspirations and is an affront to the cause of human rights. . . .
The Libyan regime which Mr. Abdul Aziz represents is among the most repressive in the world in its brutal treatment of political prisoners, in its persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, in its subjugation of women, and in its fomentation of virulent anti-Semitism. It serves as a training ground and a haven for terrorists. . . .
The selection of a Libyan diplomat as a “Guest of Honor” . . . is tantamount to an endorsement of Libya’s despicable human-rights record and of its publicly declared war on the Jewish people and their nation. . . .
We find ourselves in a quandary not of our making. We in no way oppose the conference itself, nor do we wish to interfere with its success. However, to the extent that the conference will honor Mr. Abdul Aziz and thereby appear to endorse the policies of Libya’s repressive regime, we cannot remain silent. We cannot ignore our duty to our people, our sense of justice, and our belief in human rights.
In addition to these efforts, the faculty adviser of the HJLSA, Alan Dershowitz, circulated among the faculty a petition protesting the honoring. Several professors added their names; at least one, however, was dissuaded from signing by Albert Sacks, the dean of the law school.
Shortly after the open letter was distributed, two organizations which had been nominal sponsors of the conference reconsidered their positions. The Women’s Law Association, without directly mentioning the controversy, issued a statement emphasizing that it intended to co-sponsor only the conference panel which would discuss the status of Third World women. The International Law Society reaffirmed its sponsorship while saying that it did not endorse or reject any views to be expressed.
On February 15, two additional open letters were circulated at the law school. The first of these was written by a group calling itself “Muslim Students at Harvard University.” The letter asserted that “[h]uman rights is not the rationale behind the statement of the Jewish students, but a hate for Muslims in general and Arabs in particular,” and claimed that the Jewish students should rather be exercised over Israel, “one of the world’s major violators of human rights.” By this time it was known that the Middle East panel at the conference was to be composed only of Arabs and Muslims and would focus on alleged Israeli violations of human rights.
The second letter was written and distributed by a group of anonymous students calling themselves the Harvard Realist Students Association, an ad hoc organization never before or since heard from on campus. Entitled “Another Open Letter on Human Rights,” it claimed that “Libya, whose record on human rights is not perfect, is actually being attacked for its support of the struggle of the Palestinians for self-determination.” It quoted the maxim of Anglo-American law that “he who seeks equity must do so with clean hands,” and proceeded to examine its version of Israel’s human-rights record. It concluded that the “political liberty which does exist for many Israeli citizens is based on the wholesale displacement of millions of Palestinians in the 1940’s, the near destruction of the Palestinians as a people, and the repeated conquest and continued occupation of neighboring land. War and genocide are the ultimate violations of human liberty.”
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Approximately 200 people attended the opening session of the Third World conference on Friday evening, February 16. At this session, which began with remarks by Dean Sacks on behalf of the law-school administration, speeches were delivered by the four designated guests of honor who included—in addition to Abdul Aziz—A. J. Copper, the black mayor of Pritchard, Alabama; Hope Stevens, co-founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers; and Leslie A. Harriman, the Nigerian delegate to the United Nations.
References to the controversy between the Jewish students and the organizers of the conference pervaded the remarks that night. Stevens was conciliatory, calling upon blacks and Jews to revive their old partnership to work for civil rights. This plea was received in silence and his speech was given perfunctory applause by the audience which consisted largely of blacks and other minority-group students. Cooper, by contrast, spoke to cheers and frequent stormy applause. He decried the state of human rights in this country and claimed that “there are many political prisoners in the United States.” He denounced those who, he maintained, had tried to disrupt the conference and then turned to face Abdul Aziz and said, to an especially strong wave of cheers, “I happen to believe in the First Amendment and I believe that what you have to say represents the best for which this nation stands.”
Abdul Aziz and Harriman also received extremely enthusiastic receptions. Abdul Aziz spoke briefly, observing that Western notions of human rights are inapplicable to Third World nations, and expressed support for the struggles of Palestinians, Chileans, Africans, and black Americans. Harriman criticized the United States for depriving its minority groups of basic human rights and stated that the foreign policies of the United States worked to abridge human rights in other countries as well.
On Saturday, at a conference panel devoted to the issue of political prisoners in the United States, the radical lawyer William Kunstler described what he called the hypocrisy and utter lack of justice in American society and its legal system. He asserted that no “Third World” criminal in the United States can or should be held accountable for his acts, and called for “guerrilla warfare and armed struggle in the major cities of this country” to remedy the situation. At the same panel, Lennox Hinds, a black professor of law at Rutgers, adverted to the efforts of “sinister forces” which had tried to “disrupt and misrepresent” the conference. These sinister forces, according to Hinds, acted as the “lackeys and allies” of the foreign policy of the United States, which “has never been the friend of the people. It has supported every repressive and racist regime.”
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Yet these attacks on the United States were gentle compared with the treatment accorded Israel. The panel on human rights in the Middle East in effect sat as a tribunal at which, to the vocal and fervent approval of most of the large audience, the state of Israel (referred to by the panel as “so-called Israel”) was tried, convicted, and condemned to extinction. The panel included Abdul Aziz and several foreign students from Muslim countries.
Abdul Aziz spoke first. He managed in the same speech both to assert that the separation of religion and state is an essential precept of a just political system and to laud the Libyan system of Islamic government. When questioned about Libya’s widespread violations of human rights as detailed in the HJLSA fact sheet, he referred to the inevitable minor imperfections which attend all human endeavors. Israel, by contrast, he described as an illegitimate entity because it allegedly distinguishes among religions, grants special, favored status to Jews, and tortures and oppresses the Palestinians.
The next panelist, a Yemenite graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, spoke briefly, claiming that the Jews maintain concentration camps for the Palestinians. A third member of the panel, a Pakistani student, discussed the relation between human rights and wars of national liberation, averring that the principal movement for national liberation in the world today is that of the Palestinians who are combating the real terrorism in the Middle East—namely, their dispossession by Zionism. Finally, an Egyptian law student at Harvard showed how Islam, unlike Israel, guarantees absolute equality for all minority groups under its rule.
Several members of the HJLSA who attended this session attempted quixotically to challenge these statements. They were met by the disbelief and the ridicule of the audience. Near the end of the discussion, a white, non-Jewish student rose to voice his disappointment that the panel was so completely one-sided against Israel and to ask why no defender of Israel had been invited. One of the organizers present responded furiously. She shouted, “This is a conference for Third World people. Everyone knows Israel is not a member of the Third World.” Apparently mistaking the religious affiliation of the questioner, and under the further mistaken impression that only a Jew could ask such an impertinent question, she concluded by agitatedly saying, “If it is an anti-Israel conference, it’s because you turned it into one.” This outburst was greeted by the loudest applause of the session.
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The controversy over the conference did not entirely abate in its aftermath. A newsletter of the HBLSA related that two of the organizers, at a post-conference meeting with Dean Sacks, complained that Professor Dershowitz had interfered with the conference by contacting its invited participants and asking them not to attend. According to the newsletter: “Dean Sacks’s reply to these complaints was that he would discuss the matter with Professor Dershowitz. [Miss] Wilcher [one of the conference organizers] said that given this guarantee, they would not pursue the matter further ‘for the moment.’”
This whole story is nothing short of shocking. It is shocking that Dean Sacks did not forthrightly tell the two students with whom he met that, even on the assumption that their allegation were true, Professor Dershowitz was entitled to speak with anyone willing to listen about any subject he pleased and that it was none of his—Sacks’s—or their business even to suggest otherwise. It is all the more shocking in light of the fact that the allegation was entirely false.
After the conference, the HBLSA newsletter published several reports on the proceedings and continued to run comments such as this:
What happens when Third World students get together in the land of academia? Beneficial discourse, right? Wrong! They may try but they are thwarted by those whose views are different from their own, by those who would thrust their judgment on them in matters such as who is allowed to speak. And at Harvard Law School no less!!
Several hundred people attended the Third World conference. There was absolutely no interference and absolutely no disruption. No one was “thwarted” by anyone from carrying on “beneficial discourse.” No one ever attempted to tell anyone who should speak at the conference. On the contrary: the most vicious slurs were allowed to be perpetrated against the Jewish people and no attempt to challenge them was countenanced. As if that were not enough, at the end of the conference an assistant dean of the law school, in good conscience, reported that he was “personally pleased with the results of the First Annual Third World Conference,” and a dean of the law school acquiesced without apparent protest in what amounted to an attempt to abridge the freedom of speech of a professor on his faculty. This, at Harvard Law School, no less.
