Dan McNamara on Rachel Meerpool

Daniel F. McNamara is the president of Brooklyn College's Young Republicans Club and he is also president of the Brooklyn College chapter of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He has written an excellent article on Rachel Meeropol's hypocrisy, which I have copied below with Dan's permission.

> "Uncommon Dissent.
Article One : Inconvenient Truth
04/18/2007

>"This week I attended the Political Science department's annual
Samuel J. Konefsky Lecture. The lecture topic this year was titled
"Disappeared in New York and Guantanamo: Arbitrary Detention and
Torture Post 9/11". The lecture was given by Rachel Meeropol, a
staff lawyer at Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). I was
disappointed, though I can not say surprised, to find out that the
lecture, under the guises of informed, political scholarship, was
nothing more than a radical leftist tirade against the current
administration.

>"As I researched the speaker, as well as the organization she
works for, I came across some startling facts. For instance,
Rachel Meeropol is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg, two of the most infamous communist spies in United
States history. Both Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of
passing U.S. nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union; both
were executed for those crimes.

>"I believe that the actions of Ms. Meeropol's grandparents should not be used to judge her; I believe that one should be judged by what one says or does. So I will reference a New York Times interview conducted by Sam Roberts on February 5, 2006 titled "A Rosenberg Takes On the Government, This Time Using the Law as a Means of Protest." In the 2005 interview, Roberts asks Meeropol whether she could envision any circumstances under which she could justify passing secrets to a foreign power. "Can I imagine any situation where I would feel the balance of power is so dangerous to humanity that it would be O.K. to do something like that?" She replies, "Sure."

>"At the lecture, I asked Ms. Meeropol if she supports the ideology of her grandparents and she replied, "From everything I can know, yes I do." I will leave it up to you to decide what this means. I bring it up because I find it hypocritical that someone with a communist ideology could be against arbitrary detention and the denial of certain rights, Ms. Meeropol's lecture topic. Was it not the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes around the world that disappeared millions of people during the cold war? Was it not the Soviet Union and other communist regimes that murdered millions of people who were bold enough to dissent? How can one have an aversion for a powerful central government that arbitrarily arrests and holds civilians, and at the same time subscribe to an ideology that has, nay, requires, a strong central authority? An authority that, in the past, disappeared and killed millions of innocent civilans.

>"If this has not yet captured your attention, I will continue.
The organization that Meeropol works for, the CCR, was created by
a group of pro-Castro lawyers in 1966. Not only this, but the
National Lawyers Guild (NLG), of which Meeropol is the co-vice
president, was founded by U.S. Communist Party attorneys. The NLG,
since its creation in 1937, has had strong ties to other communist
or radical leftist organizations. The CCR is also a member of the
Open Borders Lobby, a group whose main purpose, or principle cause
is to remove any restrictions on immigration into the United
States.

>"While the purpose of the Konefsky Lecture is to discuss issues in constitutional law, it seems as though the lecture has taken a turn from being a scholarly lecture series, to a platform for promoting a leftist ideology. For example, the last speaker was Kathleen Neal Cleaver, a former member of the Black Panther Party who was in exile in Algeria and France during the 1970's.

>"It will be interesting to see what next years lecture will cover. I can only hope that it is a little more balanced and scholarly than this years."

Daniel F. McNamara Jr.
President,
Brooklyn College Young Republicans &
Brooklyn College Intercollegiate Studies Institute