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She should definitely hire Alan Dershowitz if she chooses to appeal.

Switzerland has put in jail a woman who had the genitals of both of her very young children slashed.

The judgement was based on a relatively new article in Swiss law which aims to prevent Swiss-based families from having their daughters circumcised, whether in Switzerland or abroad.

Al’s enthusiasm for the practice makes him a perfect hire for this mass-mutilator.

Margaret Soltan, July 15, 2018 12:25PM
Posted in: FGM

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5 Responses to “She should definitely hire Alan Dershowitz if she chooses to appeal.”

  1. Dennis Says:

    Nothing in the article you linked to, or any other report I’m aware of, supports your comment about “Al’s enthusiasm for the practice” of genital mutilation. You seem to be assuming that an attorney retained by an accused person necessarily supports whatever activity the accused is charged with. Simply stating that position refutes it, doesn’t it? By your logic, Dershowitz’s service on O.J. Simpson’s defense team means that he is enthusiastic about the practice of murder, and that Clarence Darrow was likewise enthusiastic about murder because he represented Leopold and Loeb. For that matter, if you were charged with plagiarism any lawyer you would hire must be enthusiastic about plagiarism. I’m sure you don’t really believe those words. Why then did you write them?

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Dennis: Dershowitz is a rich famous lawyer who can take or leave any case he wishes. He chose to defend a woman who according to sources has been mutilating the genitals of little girls for years. For money. A woman who took her American medical degree and set up a secret criminal business as a paid genital mutilator. Dershowitz went out of his way – a very high-profile way – to defend this woman. To lend the practice of FGM his famous respected name.

    That shows conviction. Call it enthusiasm. He’s certainly not doing it for the money. He’s doing it for the principle of the thing.

    He makes it clear that he believes mutilating girls’ genitals is not only okay, but a solution to the problem of millions of people insisting on mutilating genitals. Of course he will tell you that just sort of sticking a pin or some other sharp object on a little girl’s clitoris is the socially acceptable way to go and will allow these millions of people to keep mutilating little girls in a, you know, harmless way. Everyone picked up by law enforcement for FGM (including his client, who according to medical investigators lied about the extent of her mutilation) insists all they did was stick a little pin or some sort of object into a little girl… No harm done.

    Let me just say that anyone willing to go out of his way even to defend the right of people to stick six year old girls in the clitoris with a pin (as if we could ever determine that this is all they do or will do) is disgusting.

    Your analogy with normal lawyers taking cases of all kinds doesn’t really work here, does it? Dershowitz is defending a principle, and he makes it clear that this is his only motive – the principle that people deserve to mutilate female genitals. He believes in the principle. He is putting his reputation (and it’s certainly taken a hit) on the line to defend this principle. Dershowitz is a principled enthusiast of little-girl-clitoris-needling as a solution to FGM. He is not giving money to opponents of the practice, or speaking out against it, or prosecuting cutters. He could help the rest of us who work to end the practice by lending his name and expertise. He’s on the other side.

    Yes, I really believe the words I’ve written about him. That’s why I wrote them.

    **********

    Of course, these are parlous times for child genital mutilators altogether. Nasty Scandinavian countries are restricting and even outlawing boy baby circumcision – and it’s such a harmless, nice thing. Why shouldn’t religious people be allowed to slice the genitals of their defenseless babies? Maybe Dershowitz’s enthusiasm about the girls has to do with his anxiety about the boys.

  3. Dennis Says:

    Perhaps you have seen something I haven’t, but all of the articles I read indicate nothing more than an attorney vigorously representing the religious group (NOT the woman charged as you seem to think). One article quoted him as specifically rejecting FGM: “Dershowitz will not be representing the defendants in court. On Monday, he told JTA that he is advising the group as to how its followers can fulfill its religious legal obligations while protecting the rights of young girls and staying within the bounds of U.S. law. Dershowitz stressed that he opposes female genital mutilation, which often involves the removal of parts or all of a girl’s labia or clitoris.”

    I don’t think any more of the “pinprick” exception than you do. I would hope the government would clarify the law to remove that possible exception. But if Dershowitz believes that would comply with the current law while satisfying the religion’s beliefs, advising his client that way is exactly what he should do. (And keep in mind that the lawyer may well give private advice to the client that may differ from the public position he asserts.) If you think he’s lying — that is, that he really believes that method too would violate the law — you need to provide some evidence to support your assertion. Of course he doesn’t need the money and of course he believes there’s a principle at stake, but nothing in his statements about that principle even hints that he is “enthusiastic” about the religion’s practices. You mistake the lawyer’s clients for the lawyer’s own beliefs. That’s a little like mistaking a novelist’s characters for the novelist’s self.

    And yes, the criminal defense examples do apply. Good defense attorneys defend the defendant’s rights by forcing the state to prove its case; similarly, good advisory attorneys defend their clients’ rights the best they can. You and I may oppose what the client wants to do, and a court may agree with us, and the attorney may also privately oppose the client’s goal, but none of that means that the lawyer is evil because he or she takes the case.

    Phrases like “going out of his way” and “high profile way” and lending his “famous respected name” change nothing. They just signify that you don’t like his client’s position and therefore think that he (or perhaps ANY lawyer) should refuse to represent them. The ACLU, to mention just one example, went out of its way in a high profile way and lent its respected name to protect the Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie. Are you really saying attorneys shouldn’t represent repulsive clients? Or just that they shouldn’t go out of their way to do so, or should do so only in a low profile way, or should do so only if they lack a famous respected name?

  4. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Dennis: I think the Skokie example is perfect: One has one’s principles, and fights for them, however repulsive particular cases may be. But of course the point is: What principle are you defending when you’re defending people who think they should be allowed to torture and disfigure their children? I don’t think religious freedom is going to work here…

    If the ACLU were defending the Nazis because it supports fascism and therefore wants to make sure fascism is protected, the comparison with Dershowitz would be apt. He’s defending people who want to continue genital mutilation because – obviously, no matter how many weird disavowals he makes under pressure of people’s outrage – he supports it. He may tell himself he supports a “milder” form – but this claim is unworthy of comment.

    If you seek his opinion on the matter of the genital mutilation of infants more broadly, go here. He seems rather intense about it.

  5. Margaret Soltan Says:

    On reflection, and rereading, I think more needs to be said about the remarkable Dershowitz piece about male circumcision. But I’m too nauseated to say it. Let’s let this guy do it:

    http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/09/06/j’acuse-shame-on-germany-for-circumcision-ban/

    [Scroll through the almost-exclusively hostile comments on Dershowitz’s piece to get to the following comment.]

    “This is an atrocious bit of rabble-rousing from a once well-regarded legal scholar. The American constitutional law we both studied only protects belief; it does not protect religious practices, including circumcision of minors, which pose a physical risk to the child.

    It is an accident of cultural history — and legal negligence — that the practice is tolerated anywhere, an artifact, as I have written elsewhere, due to fear of anti-semitism and lack of an effective advocate for the hapless child forced to join a religion he has not yet chosen.

    I would have thought that Counselor Dershowitz would have run across Reynolds v. U.S., (1878), and Prince v. Massachusetts (1944) at some point during his legal career, which make the belief/practice distinction abundantly clear.

    Very likely German law has similar protections for children, especially since Germany has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, while the U.S. is only one of two countries which has declined to do so (the other is Somalia; not such illustrious company).

    Whining about how Jews are unloved might make interesting rhetoric to rouse the rabble, but it does not provide good legal or human rights analysis in German OR English. Certainly the analysis needs to be much more sophisticated than this sophomoric rant.

    John V. Geisheker, J.D., LL.M.
    Executive Director,
    General Counsel,
    Doctors Opposing Circumcision
    Seattle, Washington, USA”

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