4.2.12 WC: 191694 At about the same time, another radical client fired me because he heard that I was a “Zionist” and he could have nothing to do with anyone associated with such a “fascist” cause. Father Daniel Berrigan, a lapsed Catholic priest who had become the darling of the hard left as the result of his anti- Vietnam War activities, began to call both the United States and Israel “criminal” entities.'°' Chomsky notoriously defended the ruthless Cambodian dictator Pol Pot against charges of genocide, insisting that western media reports of millions of murders were typical exaggerations of horrors regularly but falsely attributed to Communist regimes. The National Lawyers’ Guild, which had become the legal arm of the hard left, dismissed all accusations against Communist regimes as “red baiting.” They also became the legal arm of anti-Israel extremists, including terrorists. They did not support these clients on grounds of human rights or civil liberties principles, but rather because they agreed with their politics. In 197__, I broke with the National Lawyers Guild, with which I had worked closely when it had been a neutral human rights organizations. In a widely read article in The American Lawyer, I told the sad story of the transformation of the NLG from a genuine human rights organization into an advocate for some of the worst human wrongs on the planet. This transformation presents in a microcosm the larger account of the hyacking of the human rights label and agenda by the hard left. The National Lawyers Guild was established in 1937 as an antidote to the American Bar Association, which was then fighting the New Deal, excluding black lawyers from membership, and opposing the labor movement. The original guild was an amalgam of Roosevelt liberals, CIO labor leaders, black civil rights lawyers, and radicals of assorted affiliations and persuasions. It strongly supported Israel’s struggle for independence and opposed the arms embargo against the Jewish stat