Class Act, or Mendacious Moral Midget?
Eric Holder, 2012 Class Day Speaker, Harvard Law School
1. In 1968, members of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS) of Columbia University, armed with guns, took over a building and took Dean Henry Coleman hostage for 24 hours, as part of an ultimately successful effort to block the building of a gym. Two years later, as a Columbia freshman, Holder joined the SAAS and was part of “a group of armed black students” that took over another building for five days, successfully demanding the creation of the “Malcolm X Lounge” for black students (in which Barack Obama would hang out as a student in the early 1980s). After being confirmed as Attorney General Holder began bragging about his student activism, while misrepresenting it as having been entirely peaceful.
2. Another group that used armed force in the 1970s in an effort to achieve its goals was FALN, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group committed to winning independence for Puerto Rico. FALN “conducted a deadly bombing campaign in numerous cities around America during the 1970s and ’80s, setting off nearly 140 bombs that killed six and injured more than 80.” The terror ended only when nearly all FALN members were captured, convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison in the early 1980s. The day after Holder became Deputy Attorney General in 1997 he began pushing to have the FALN terrorists released from prison, even though none of them had ever asked for clemency or expressed any remorse for their actions, and even though the Department of Justice had just months earlier, after an extensive review, recommended against any clemency. During the next two years Holder met nine times with advocates of clemency, but kept the many victims out of the process and never spoke to any of the law enforcement officials who had won the convictions. Despite massive law enforcement opposition, Holder succeeded in obtaining clemency for sixteen Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican terrorists in August, 1999, with the support of Hillary Clinton, who had announced her bid for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, which has a sizable Puerto Rican electorate.
3. Another group that has used armed force in an effort to achieve its goals is the New Black Panthers, “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers” — a “black racist hate group” (according to the Southern Poverty Law Center). One leader said: “I hate white people. All of them. . . . You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!,” and: “Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!” Another said: “There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.” On election day in November, 2008, armed members of the New Black Panthers physically blocked white voters from voting in Philadelphia while shouting racial slurs at them. Given the obvious violation of federal law, they were prosecuted for voter intimidation by the Department of Justice, which readily obtained convictions. But Holder became Attorney General before the case became final, and he forced dismissal of the case. He later lied to Congress by denying any involvement. He defended the dismissal by testifying that modern-day intimidation of white voters by blacks is different than what “my people” endured in the 1960s in the South. Unrepentant, and knowing the Attorney General has their back, in 2012 the New Black Panthers called for mob violence against George Zimmerman and threatened to kidnap him; threatened violence at the Republican National Convention; and returned on election day to intimidate white voters at the same Philadelphia polling place they had commandeered in 2008 — again armed, and in full uniform.
4. In his Class Day speech, Holder made no mention of the “Fast and Furious” scandal which had engulfed him, a topic addressed in posters placed throughout the Law School documenting this deadly, “insane” plan to assist Mexican drug cartels in buying thousands of high-powered weapons in Arizona, which were then used to murder U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican citizens; how Holder was kept fully briefed on the operation as it unfolded; how Holder lied to Congress in claiming he knew nothing about the operation until it was over; and thus how Brian Terry died while Eric Holder lied. Instead, in an awkward effort to belie the impression that he’s a bit of a dim bulb who wasn’t able to get into Harvard even with the help of affirmative action, in his Class Day speech Holder asserted that he won admission to Harvard Law School, but for reasons unexplained he instead (supposedly) elected to attend the much less prestigious Columbia Law School (knowing that federal law bars Harvard from revealing the truth).
