RUTHFULLY YOURS

If demonstrations unfold as expected at the Democratic National Convention next week, look for an occasional fluorescent-green hat among the protesters. This is the signature headgear worn by National Lawyers Guild (NLG) legal observers, who can often be found attending major left-wing protests in support of the demonstrators. They represent an organization that has long been one of the most deeply radical activist groups in the country and one that harbors a particularly virulent hostility toward Israel. They have expressed that hostility in some truly appalling ways.

Next week in Chicago, scores of radical groups are promising to “March on the DNC.” While the protesters’ ancillary demands span the full “Everything Leftism” spectrum, the overriding motivation is animosity toward “apartheid Israel” and the Democratic Party’s alleged complicity in a “genocide” in Gaza. Tens of thousands are expected to take to the streets.

For months, members of the NLG — a nonprofit association of leftist attorneys, law students, and other legal workers — have been mobilizing in anticipation, promising “on-the-ground support to all the courageous protesters.” This includes training sessions in protesters’ rights, assistance for any demonstrators who are arrested, and access to a network of volunteer attorneys ready to represent those facing charges. The guild’s local Chicago chapter will operate a 24/7 legal support hot line for convention protesters.

The guild’s most visible presence will be its trained legal observers in their trademark lime-green caps. Their job is to shadow protesters while scrutinizing and documenting the actions of law enforcement, who must perform the often difficult task of respecting the protesters’ legitimate First Amendment rights while protecting the people of Chicago from any diversions into criminality. The NLG is notoriously one-sided in this respect, believing as a matter of official policy that law enforcement should be completely abolished. To the guild, police officers are merely instruments of a “white supremacist, capitalist, settler colonial state.”

Founded in the 1930s, the National Lawyers Guild has always been aligned with whatever the extreme-left fringe happened to be at the time. In its early years, this was the Communist Party USA and the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s, the guild had become what historian Harvey Klehr called “the legal arm of the New Left” and was heavily involved in supporting the generation’s radicals. Bernardine Dohrn became the group’s student organizer in 1967, and according to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 book Days of Rage, a small group of mostly guild-affiliated attorneys later became “by far the most important single source of money” for the Weather Underground, of which Dohrn was a co-founder and leader. More recently, the guild’s open support for Antifa has earned it some notoriety.

Today, the radical Left is broadly united in anti-Israel fervor, and the NLG embodies some of the movement’s most reprehensible manifestations. This has extended all the way to justifying the cold-blooded murder of Israeli civilians.

The day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attacks, the guild’s international committee released a statement referring to what it characterized as “military actions carried out by Palestinian resistance” in furtherance of “their fundamental and protected right to self-defense” and their “right to resist unlawful occupation” through “armed struggle.” The statement demanded that the United States immediately cease designating “all Palestinian and Lebanese resistance organizations” as terrorist organizations. The guild also signed the Progressive International’s so-called Gaza Resolution, denouncing “the false equivalence of colonizer and colonized” and declaring that “the violence of the oppressed is a response to the original condition of their oppression.”

The NLG has similarly praised attacks conducted by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels — whose official slogan is “Death to America, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory to Islam” — as “principled actions in solidarity with the people of Palestine.” It has even lauded the Iranian regime for showing “great restraint in the face of Zionist aggression” while nevertheless arguing that “force is a legitimate response to the genocidal occupation state’s aggressions.” In the guild’s eyes, Israel “has no right to self-defense” even against those who explicitly seek to destroy it.

This is what the NLG believes. It is not some legitimate critique of Israeli policy, about which reasonable minds certainly can and do differ. Nor is it a call for all who live in the Levant to achieve lasting peace with one another, which is the earnest hope of everyone of good faith and decency. Instead, it is a despicable declaration of solidarity with Jew-hating terrorists and their malevolent state sponsors. If the NLG’s legal observers don their green hats and take to the streets of Chicago next week, it’s important to know what they represent.