Law students graduating from CUNY Law School enter a hostile world. The curriculum is all about standing up for the poor and oppressed in society, using one's legal skills to speak truth to power.
But the powerful in our society have learned to use their influence and money to make such goals difficult indeed. Our representatives in government rarely stand up for the powerless. Our media has no interest in home grown oppression. And our colleges have become dependent on the very rich to fund them. There is hardly room for idealism in the neoliberal world we have created.
So when a young CUNY graduate has the courage to give a commencement speech about the victims no one wants to hear about, all hell breaks loose. Five million Palestinians suffer under a ruthless apartheid occupation, and our country pays for the whole human rights catastrophe. But that subject is taboo, especially in the minds of all the politicians who are generously funded by the Israel Lobby. For ours is a democracy hanging by a thread. The very richest get to speak for us all. How else to explain the obscene disparity between the billionaires and everyone else?
Maybe Fatima Mohammed's commencement address to her class will be the tipping point. Perhaps the American people will finally ask the right question of the Israel Lobby: "Have you no shame?"
Fred Nagel
But the powerful in our society have learned to use their influence and money to make such goals difficult indeed. Our representatives in government rarely stand up for the powerless. Our media has no interest in home grown oppression. And our colleges have become dependent on the very rich to fund them. There is hardly room for idealism in the neoliberal world we have created.
So when a young CUNY graduate has the courage to give a commencement speech about the victims no one wants to hear about, all hell breaks loose. Five million Palestinians suffer under a ruthless apartheid occupation, and our country pays for the whole human rights catastrophe. But that subject is taboo, especially in the minds of all the politicians who are generously funded by the Israel Lobby. For ours is a democracy hanging by a thread. The very richest get to speak for us all. How else to explain the obscene disparity between the billionaires and everyone else?
Maybe Fatima Mohammed's commencement address to her class will be the tipping point. Perhaps the American people will finally ask the right question of the Israel Lobby: "Have you no shame?"
Fred Nagel
