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4.2.12
WC: 191694

I’ve been to many prisons and on numerous death rows, but I’ve never experienced so grim a
place as this “life or death row,” where every inmate saw every other inmate as a competitor in
the quest to remain alive.

The warden invited me to play basketball with the inmates and I agreed. No one fouled me, trash-
talked me or in any way misbehaved, as the warden watched, notepad in hand. I was conscious
throughout the 30 minute game that anything a player did or didn’t do could become part of their
score of death—or life. I tried hard to make everyone look good in the eyes of the warden.

The changing consensus regarding human rights

By the mid-1970s, the consensus regarding human rights was beginning to change. Although the
Soviet Union had long used the language of “human rights” (as well as the language of “civil
rights”) as a club against western democracies, few serious people gave this hypocritical ploy any
credence. “There they go again” was the general response when Soviet diplomats at the United
Nations postured against the imperfections of the United States, while their Communist masters
locked up dissidents, made a mockery of justice,99 and kept entire nations in subjugation behind an
iron curtain.

By the early 1970s, however, the Soviet ploy was beginning to be expropriated by the hard left in
the United States and Europe. Hard left intellectuals such as Professors Noam Chomsky of MIT
and Richard Falk of Princeton were claiming that the United States was the worst human rights
violator in the world.100 Some hard left lawyers, such as William Kunstler, refused to say anything
critical of the human rights records of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or other “socialist”
countries, while railing against the human rights violations of the United States and its allies. As I
previously mentioned, Angela Davis, who I had helped to represent in the early 1970s, refused to
speak up for Soviet dissidents and in fact supported Soviet repression of “fascist opponents of
socialist democracy,” i.e., dissidents and Refusenicks. Another client, Abby Hoffman, also turned
against me. I was part of the legal team in the Chicago Seven case that grew out of
demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Abby Hoffman, who was
one of the defendants, had allegedly made some crude remarks about how his “Jew lawyers”
cared more about Israel than America. I called him out on his comments in a brief note, to which
he responded with an angry handwritten two page letter which included the following:
“I never made a remark about my ‘Jewish Lawyers.’ I might have spoken more positively
about the PLO but I would never make an anti-Semitic juxtaposition such as you think
you heard. If you read my current autobiography you will see I flaunt my ‘Jewishness’ at
every turn of the road.”
At the time Hoffman penned these words, the PLO was a terrorist gang that was hijacking
airplanes, murdering civilians and blowing up synagogues, and Israel had not yet established any
settlements in occupied areas.

99 An old Soviet dissident joke went this way: The leader of Czechoslovakia asked his Soviet masters for money
for a Department of the Navy. The Soviet replied, “But you’re a landlocked country and don’t need a department
of the Navy.” The Czech leader replied: “Well you have a Department of Justice.”
100 [get cite]

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