Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon reports a recent disturbing event at one of the nation’s elite Ivy league universities.
Anti-Israel Harvard Law School students organized a workshop on the Ivy League campus earlier this month to edit the Wikipedia pages of more than a dozen prominent law firms, singling out some that threatened to stop recruiting at the school over its failure to rein in anti-Semitic activity.
Harvard’s National Lawyers Guild chapter, a left-wing legal advocacy group, hosted the “Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon” on April 2 at Harvard Law’s WCC student center, according to an announcement on Harvard Law’s website.
Third-year Harvard Law student Corinne Shanahan, an organizer with Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, organized the clinic for students to “gather data to edit the Wikipedia pages of Big Law firms to reflect cases they have recently argued.”
Two days later, Harvard Law student Aashna Avachat edited the Wikipedia pages of 14 law firms, mostly to add details of their representation of clients that the activist students deemed to be unsavory, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of Wikipedia edit logs.
Avachat edited the pages for the firms Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to soften the language about anti-Semitic activity on college campuses. Amid a wave of anti-Semitic protests following the Hamas attack on Israel, the two firms warned Harvard Law and others that they would cut back on recruiting on their campuses for failing to rein in anti-Semitic incidents.
The edit logs show Avachat changed the term “antisemitic incidents” to “pro-Palestine protests,” and reworded references to “incidents targeting Jewish students” to incidents that the law firms “described … as antisemitic.” Avachat herself was involved in one incident at Harvard in which her law school classmate, Ibrahim Bharmal, accosted and shoved a Jewish student during an anti-Israel “die-in.” Avachat said she witnessed the incident and claimed Bharmal was protecting “peaceful protesters” against an “aggressive” Jewish student.
