Richard Silverstein writes:
NOTE: Yerushalmi has withdrawn his lawsuit threat in a note he sent to my counsel.
The lawyer David Yerushalmi had threatened to sue Silverstein for libel, writing to his lawyer that:
When he first attacked me personally and stated that I was a fascist, racist, and Kahanist, I ignored [his statements]… Unfortunately, your client has republished the original articles via links in a most recent piece stating that I am a white supremacist. I might still have ignored this except for the fact that it has now concretely and specifically injured me in my legal profession in Arizona. I have now lost an African American client who was prepared to retain my firm but for your clients defamatory publications, because he could not afford to be associated with someone accused of such beliefs even though he knows I do not hold these beliefs. Much of his business is in public relations and this charge by your client was for him too much to sustain.
…The suit will be brought in Arizona. An interesting and related case is Yetman v. English, 168 Ariz. 71, 811 P.2d 323 (1991).
I certainly understand your client will raise the standard First Amendment defenses: opinion, hyperbole, no actual malice. If we get past these, your client will have the opportunity to test “truth” as a defense.
I’ve blogged on Yerushalmi previously; his clients include Pamela Geller (who also likes to make legal threats while accusing Muslims of “lawfare”), and in 2008 he was involved with the absurd “Mapping Shariah” project. Yetman v. English refers to case in which an Arizona representative had accused a political opponent of being a “communist” over his approach to a rural zoning change; it’s odd to see Yerushalmi rely on such as a precedent, given that accusations of secret communism are a central strategy of so many of his activist allies.
I’m generally cautious with allegations of racism: too often, such accusations end up getting bogged down in how racism should be defined. Opinion is cheap, and people can make up their own minds over what may have motivated someone to write something or to follow a particular course of action. The accusation was also made against Yerushalmi by Mother Jones.
In his own defence, Silverstein draws attention to one particular passage by Yerushalmi:
…Our constitutional republic was specifically designed to insulate our national leaders from the masses,democracy has seeped up through the cracks and corroded everything we once deemed sacred about our political order. Prior to the Civil War, the electorate, essentially white Christian men, had access to local government. It was here, where men shared an intimacy born of family ties, shared religious beliefs, and common cultural signposts, that representative government was meant to touch our daily lives. With the social and cultural revolution which followed the emancipation, man’s relationship to political order was radically nationalized and democratized.
…Raw or radical democracy where all men and all ideas and all cultures are deemed equal and given equal voice. That is of course the agenda of the Left…
Such views appear in a rambling essay called “On Race: A Tentative Discussion”, which used to be on Yerushalmi’s Saneworks site but which has since been reposted elsewhere (without his permission). Some highlights:
…Now, if skin color, disease, body shape and size, athleticism all have a biological basis, why is it that intelligence or predilection to violence might not also have genetic bases. In fact, there is enormous evidence to the contrary. For example, at the extremes, we know that mentally retarded people and geniuses were “born” that way.
…But if standardized testing suggests a racial component to IQ, if the New York City and national murder statistics suggest there is a racial component to murder, why is that necessarily a bad racism? With all of the liberal talk of evolution and biology, why do people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?
…There is a reason the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote. You might not agree or like the idea but this country’s founders, otherwise held in the highest esteem for their understanding of human nature and its affect on political society, certainly took it seriously.
…The fact that a retarded person can vote [i.e., literacy tests have been outlawed] but a child cannot is not sustainable and eventually the ACLU will successfully challenge this baseless age discrimination. Just like the laws against “consensual” sex with minors, or animals, or polygamy will eventually be challenged and held to be unconstitutional in the same way sodomy has been transformed into a “right,” when it once was an absolute abomination to the vast, vast majority of Americans… When Process and Rights replace the moral compass supplied by this country’s Judeo-Christian foundings, nothing, absolutely nothing can be morally repugnant anymore, at least not in the eyes of the law.
…If, on the other hand, science, meaning liberal scientists with the Elites’ agenda firmly in hand, don’t allow for an inquiry into the differences between peoples, races and sexes, and scientists carefully guard the boundaries that keep science in control, democracy and the Open Society, multiculturalism and the remainder of the trendsetters on the way to an amorphous World State, remain unchallenged.
One wonders what some of Yerushalmi’s clients might make of such “tentative” ruminations, even without whatever label Silverstein or anyone else may have given to them.
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