How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless, heavily tax-subsidized law-school graduate.
That would be Fatima Mousa Mohammed of Queens, who took the occasion of her graduation from the City University of New York School of Law to spray a little poison on the people who paid for her degree.
CUNY Law, a charity project undertaken by the university back in 1983, has been a model of mediocrity from the beginning — most recently ranked 154th of 196 American law schools by US News and World Report. And it has been in the news often lately — for the usual low-rent reasons.
In February, the school came under scrutiny from the state Division of Human Rights after its faculty council embraced a notoriously anti-Semitic, if somewhat symbolic, boycott of Israel.
Then Mayor Adams was heckled during graduation ceremonies this month — simply for telling the grads that once upon a time he had been a cop.
Then came Mohammed’s contribution to the rancor, delivered during that same event but escaping much notice until the Memorial Day weekend.
Maybe that’s because what she had to say was hardly unique, in the sense that similar nonsense floats above commencement ceremonies from sea to shining sea every spring.
There was, of course, a local twist. Mohammed said she chose CUNY Law because it is “one of the very few legal institutions created to recognize that the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.”
In sum: Palestine is persecuted; Israel is evil; the New York Police Department is “fascist” — her word — and the only acceptable course of action is “revolution.”
Mohammed further condemned those supporting “systems of oppression created to feed an empire with a ravenous appetite for destruction and violence — institutions created to intimidate, bully and censor and stifle the voices of those who resist.”
Oddly enough, these self-same systems of oppression let her get away with it; this probably wouldn’t be the fate of a similarly outspoken female law school graduate in, say, “Palestine” — not that there are any now, nor in the foreseeable future.
So a hypocrite? Yes.
An outlier? Hardly. She was selected to speak by a consensus of fellow grads — that is, she essentially spoke for the class as a whole.
Not that this needs to be said, but Mohammed is entitled to her opinions; ditto those who applauded her commencement outburst. But this doesn’t place her worldview above examination.
At its most basic level, it’s a weak-tea take on the Death-to-America ideology that brought hijacked airliners to lower Manhattan, Washington, DC, and a Pennsylvania meadow 22 years ago — and to lose sight of this is to court another bloodbath.
Then there is this: Why in the world is a person who believes that “the law is a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress” in law school in the first place?
More to the point, what sort of a law school is it that graduates students who hold the rule of law in such open contempt — and which even honors moral anarchists as commencement speakers?
That would be a school that similarly lacks respect for the law — as well as for itself, for the truth, for the taxpayers who support it and for simple common decency.
CUNY Law would demur, of course. It has never lacked for self-esteem.
Certainly the school’s self-described mission — to bring educationally problematic students into the practice of law — too often is deployed to disguise a lack of rigor.
And it remains that Mohammed’s corrosive worldview is common enough at America’s top-ranked law schools — including Yale and Stanford.
But none of this excuses CUNY Law’s class of 2023 selection of Fatima Mousa Mohammed as its commencement representative — or the school itself for its silence following her obnoxious eruption.
An explicit apology is in order, but don’t hold your breath. For the problem isn’t the student — it’s the school.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
