In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians, several student groups including at Ivy League schools protested or signed letters of support for the jihadi murderers. At Harvard, 31 student groups demonstrated solidarity with Hamas and refused to make a distinction between the terrorists and the residents of the Gaza Strip, further fanning the conversation on moral equivalence.

Though there were students who masked up or otherwise hid their identities and pro-terrorism sentiments, there were those who happily bared their ideological allegiance. Among these were three recent Ivy League grads from Harvard and Columbia. The price for their outright Jew hatred was losing valuable job offers at an elite law firm, Davis Polk.

Moral Equivalence vs. Actual Morality

In the case of law firms, it is important to a future employer that law students have some sort of moral grounding in order to correctly and efficiently uphold the law. The moral equivalence that these student groups at universities are citing is that Israel is an “apartheid state” that condemns non-Jewish citizens to second-class status. They are merely reciting propaganda that their woke professors have told them or that their Middle Eastern friends have pushed. And it’s false.

They have been told that the Palestinians are oppressed and that groups like Hamas are decolonizers, or “freedom fighters,” ergo they have every right to go in and kill Israelis for the freedom they seek. Hamas, Hezbollah, and their backers like Iran use this feeble-minded reasoning to justify what their actual goal is: Jewish genocide and ultimately the destruction of the West. The latter is also the goal of many of these students’ “enlightened” professors, so it’s no surprise that these students’ brains are filled with moral equivalency garbage to justify mass murder. In their minds, Israel shouldn’t be there; it took over already occupied land, therefore the Arabs in the vicinity should push them out.

These students mostly have no clue what the actual history of the region is — that, or they are believing lies. Sadly, they have to believe the lies in order to justify the violence or swallow the morally dubious idea that the violence is cyclical — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth…

Cancel Culture or Freedom of Association?

All of this leads to the pertinent question: Are the actions of law firms like Davis Polk cancel culture and therefore something we shouldn’t support?

No.

Cancel culture is a largely left-wing phenomenon that advocates for the bullying and silencing of people who disagree with their worldview. Thanks to emotionally incontinent tirades, the cancel culture mob has gotten people fired and kicked off of social media. They force their victims to recant and apologize, and until they do, the victims are hounded by harpy-like activists who range in bullying tactics from scolds to threateners. Cancel culture advocates’ main purview is to silence and intimidate.

Choosing not to hire someone because their values are diametrically opposed to the values of the company is entirely different. A company doesn’t violate the free speech rights of job applicants like cancel culture does. On the contrary, a company wants to know what prospects think and how they conduct themselves in order to see if their values and morality are a good match for the company.

These students signed letters that said the genocidal attack on Israel was justified and that Hamas should be applauded. In a very real sense, they endorsed the same ideology that Hitler and the Nazis embraced — and at least for now, people can still clearly call that ideology unequivocally evil.

These students might be under the illusion that there is a difference between iradicating the so-called Zionist oppressors in Israel and the Jew hatred of the Nazis. But there’s not. As The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro correctly states, “Anti-Zionism is an incredibly shallow cover story for Jew-hatred — and because it is a cover story, it’s easier to proclaim your support publicly.” Davis Polk, by rescinding the job offers, is saying it doesn’t want anti-Semitic employees.

The law firm has the freedom to choose whom it wants to associate with, just as these students have every right to say what they think. That doesn’t mean these students’ words, ideas, and actions won’t have consequences.

Steven Davidoff Solomon, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, discussed in The Wall Street Journal another firm that took similar actions as Davis Polk. Solomon implored: “Legal employers in the recruiting process should do what Winston & Strawn did: treat these law students like the adults they are. If a student endorses hate, dehumanization or anti-Semitism, don’t hire him. When students face consequences for their actions, they straighten up. … If a student endorses hatred, it isn’t only your right but your duty not to hire him. Do you want your clients represented by someone who condones these monstrous crimes?”

At the end of the day, discriminatory hiring (in the best sense of the word here) allows for freedom of speech and association to flourish, as both maintain their integrity in public life.

It is excellent to see law firms choosing employees who are going to be advocates for their clients and not be blinded by university-induced prejudice. Perhaps these woke baby college activists will wake up as a result.