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42) However, Hale soon discovered that Dershowitz’s fees were extraordinarily high, so he dropped him and turned to the services of another Jewish attorney, Robert Herman of the St. Louis firm Schwartz, Herman and Davidson. https://dailyegyptian.com/40929/archives/hale-drops-unreasonable-dershowitz/ …
43) Eventually he hired a young hotshot Jewish lawyer from New York to spearhead his legal challenge. Hale liked to trot this young man out for the press as proof (for dumb reporters who hadn’t bothered to crack open a Klassen text) he didn’t hate Jews. His name was @ggreenwald.pic.twitter.com/E7YRQS45uJ
44) Yes, that Glenn Greenwald. As most of us know now, @ggreenwald has a track record of defending the civil liberties of even the most questionable of cases, and they didn’t come more questionable than Matt Hale. In any event, this case launched his legal career and ended it.
45) From a purely abstract and legalistic standpoint, it’s possible to make a case, as Greenwald has, for a Jewish attorney to defend the civil rights of a militaristic anti-Semite and neo-Nazi. And from the first news story I read about his involvement, I understood this.
46) The ethical case, however, is not so clear. After all, Hale’s group was primarily engaged in the business of depriving minorities – particularly blacks and Jews – of their civil rights through hate crimes, threats, and intimidation. They saw this as one of their own rights.pic.twitter.com/sRbzHQAjxC
47) So, from where I sat in Montana, spending time with the frightened victims of WCOTC thugs, someone who was defending their ability to use the levers of the legal system essentially was defending their “right” to deprive other people, vulnerable people, of theirs.pic.twitter.com/5S09BieOKB
48) More to the point, in a world in which there are myriad opportunities to defend genuinely needy, innocent people being wrongly deprived of their civil rights, I struggled to understand why any humane attorney would devote their efforts to defending neo-Nazis’ rights.
49) The most disturbing aspect of Greenwald’s advocacy on Hale’s behalf, however, involved the viciousness with which he attacked Hale’s critics, as well as the strange and frankly dishonest twists of logic and rhetoric he deployed. It went well beyond the usual legal advocacy.
50) Hale’s legal case wound through the state bar’s appeals process. He had two more hearings before the bar. On June 30, the second and final appeal was rejected. Hale had also looked into getting a license through the Montana bar but couldn’t. He lost. https://casetext.com/case/hale-v-committee-on-character-and-fitness …pic.twitter.com/aettZlUw3O
51) Two days later, July 2, his second-in-command – a hotheaded young man named Benjamin Smith, 21, whom Hale had just named “Creator of the Month” – went on a murder rampage. He first took drive-by shots at Orthodox Jews in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, wounding nine.pic.twitter.com/kzENtUHMBS
52) Next he drove to Skokie, where he encountered a black man walking with two of his children outside his home. The man, as it happened, was former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Birdsong. Smith shot and killed him in front of his children.pic.twitter.com/UKvaINbB01
53) Smith left Skokie and shot at an Asian-American couple but missed. The next day, he drove through Urbana, Springfield, and Decatur, wounding two more black men and an Asian man. In Bloomington, Ind., he murdered Won-Joon Yoon, a 26-year-old Korean student entering his church.pic.twitter.com/eIeDCQZqTt
54) Smith also shot at but missed about nine other people. Police soon tracked him down back in Illinois on July 4. After a high-speed chase, he shot himself in the head and crashed his car into a metal pole. Still alive, he shot himself once more in the chest, finishing the job.
55) In Evanston that week, a public memorial provided an opportunity for all of the victims of Smith’s rampage to mourn. There is an annual race held to this day in Evanston in Ricky Byrdsong’s memory. https://www.cityofevanston.org/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/2830/ …pic.twitter.com/WDVdFAZoxj
56) A few months later, the Center for Constitutional Rights led a lawsuit filed on behalf of the victims against Matt Hale and WCOTC. Here’s the original story published in the April 6, 2000, edition of American Lawyer.pic.twitter.com/AyYB2OlS54
57) Take note of Greenwald’s comments. It’s common to see some hyperbole on a defendant’s behalf in such cases. What’s not common is talk like this: "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me."pic.twitter.com/LGgPBcCkTq
58) Also, note how Greenwald bandies the phrase “guilt by association” to describe Matt Hale’s culpability in the rampage. Many of Glenn’s critics will become accustomed to hearing the same phrase, abused in exactly the same fashion, in the years ahead.pic.twitter.com/2JL0m2aRGZ
59) He was also interviewed for an August 2000 Los Angeles Times piece describing how civil-rights groups were using civil courts to bankrupt hate groups. Greenwald was quoted thus: http://articles.latimes.com/2000/aug/22/news/mn-8425 …pic.twitter.com/m9GEiPYflD
60) There are a number of issues here WRT Greenwald's truthfulness. First, in fact, it shortly emerged that not only had Hale just given Smith his group’s top award, he had spent 16 hours on the phone with Smith in the two weeks before the rampage. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-07-25/news/9907250249_1_hale-supremacist-young-man …
61) Even more significant is Greenwald’s view that the standard tactics used by the SPLC and other civil-rights groups to bankrupt hate groups that actively deprive minorities of their civil rights (both via advocacy and action) via the civil process is “an abuse of the courts.”
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