On
this date, June 1, 1996, Henry Schwarzschild, the founder of the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty died of cancer. When I was young, I was
a strong opponent of the death penalty, but after learning about the execution
of the Smiling Assassin, Amrozi and the murder of Sally Anne Bowman, I began to
realize that Schwarzschild was all along a dishonest person. I used to oppose
the execution of John Martin Scripps, as I thought that the Abolitionists were
right that it is wrong to take human life, when the only human life they
treasure and cherished are murderers.
He is like the
American version of Roy Jenkins. I got the information about Henry
Schwarzschild from Wikipedia and I would like to respond to his thoughts.
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Henry Schwarzschild
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Henry Schwarzschild (November 2, 1925 – June 1, 1996) was an activist for civil
rights and human rights. He was a fighter for the American Civil Rights
Movement and later on became involved in the fight against capital punishment.
He founded the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP),
Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee, and headed up the American
Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project.
Work
With Capital Punishment
In
1972 he was appointed to head up the ACLU’s project on capital punishment which
was named the Capital Punishment Project. From 1972 until 1990 he worked as the
leader of this project and fought to get legislation passed to help with the
opposition to the death penalty. For the first five years he ran this project
completely on his own. After those five years they finally began to get funding
and more volunteers into the program. The ACLU is the American
Civil Liberties Union and they work to “extend rights to segments of
our population that have traditionally been denied their rights, including
people of color, women, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people,
prisoners, and people with disabilities.” The ACLU had groups who spoke up for
those who were anti-death penalty through the Capital Punishment Project
especially. Through his power in the ACLU he was able to organize and establish
a structure called the National Coalition for Universal and Unconditional
Amnesty to help pressure President Ford to pardon those who had left the United
States to avoid military conscription.
In
1976, while also working with the Capital Punishment Project and with the other
groups he was a part of, he created the NCADP which stands for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Henry
founded this organization in response to the Supreme
Court decision Gregg v. Georgia which permitted
executions to resume in the United States. Schwarzschild organized it in New
York and then transferred its headquarters to Washington, D.C. where he could
do more with the legislation process. The NCADP consists of several dozen state
and national affiliates, mainstream Protestants, and other groups along with
these. The opposition to the death penalty was obviously present before the
creation of this group but that bond is what solidified the different members
of this group. They attempted to create change in the death penalty topic by
creating public policy campaigns, serving as an information contact for people
who want to know more about the death penalty and a site to keep up with the
updates on new conquests in the death penalty area. They did this through
trying to influence state by state changes in their constitutions that ban the
death penalty individually in each state one by one.
RESPOND: Henry, you spent your whole life with
your criminal rights group and Pro-Choice group (ACLU is Pro-Choice) causing
the death of millions innocent victims of crime and the millions of unborn. How
many millions of dollars have you and your gang spent reducing America’s
population? How many lies do you and your gang have spread to deceive the public
into preserving murderers? The ACLU also wants to get rid of LWOP next and you
keep quiet about it.
Here
is a quote from the late Philosopher, Louis Pojman:
It is
noteworthy that prominent abolitionists, such as Charles Black, Hugo Adam
Bedau, Ramsey Clark, and Henry Schwartzchild, have admitted to Ernest van den
Haag that even if every execution were to deter a hundred murders, they would
oppose it, from which van den Haag concludes "to these abolitionist
leaders, the life of every murderer is more valuable than the lives of a
hundred prospective victims, for these abolitionists would spare the mur-derer,
even if doing so will cost a hundred future victims their lives."
Opposition
to Israel
Following
the Israeli siege of Beirut
in the summer of 1982, he wrote a public letter of resignation from the
editorial advisory board of the journal Sh’ma, which was then published by Nation Magazine.
I will not avoid an unambiguous response to the Israeli army’s turning West Beirut into another Warsaw Ghetto. I now conclude and avow that the price of a Jewish state is, to me, Jewishly unacceptable and that the existence of this (or any similar) Jewish ethnic religious nation state is a Jewish, i.e. a human and moral, disaster and violates every remaining value for which Judaism and Jews might exist in history. The lethal military triumphalism and corrosive racism that inheres in the State and in its supporters (both there and here) are profoundly abhorrent to me. So is the message that now goes forth to the nations of the world that the Jewish people claim the right to impose a holocaust on others in order to preserve the State. I now renounce the State of Israel, disavow any political connection or emotional obligation to it, and declare myself its enemy....
The
letter has been popular with left-wing Jews ever since. In 2003 it was included
in Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon.
In
2003 the right-wing American newspaper The Jewish Press created an annual ‘Henry
Schwarzschild Award' for "a person in the public spotlight who, by his or
her statements, displays contempt for the Jewish people, disregard for historical
truth, a desire to sup at the table of Israel’s enemies, or who otherwise plays
into the hands of the enemies of Jews and Israel".
RESPOND: I believe that Henry is an Antisemitism.
You should leave America as they are the friends of Israel. It is thanks to
people like you, evil has triumphed around the world. I noticed that whenever a
white supremacist gets executed for murder, even the ACLU and their anti-death
penalty allies remain silent.
Retirement
and Beliefs
After
retiring from the ACLU in 1990 he began to help with problems in the Middle
East between Israel, Palestine, and other third-world countries. He fought for
the religious and political rights of these groups.
Schwarzschild
has been opposed to the death penalty all of his life and has stated that “he
is an advocate not for murderers but against the death penalty.” (Word and the
Law) He wanted to clear up the controversy in society about him supporting
murderers by not wanting the death penalty. He believed they still deserved to
suffer, but not through death. Throughout the years he fought for the support
of national political figures and for the most part he found none. Many lawyers
and political figures supported the death penalty because their constituents
and clients supported it. The one thing that Henry made clear was that he
“could not live in a period of major moral, social events and be a bystander.”
RESPOND: As usual, Henry is a lifelong loser
and liar, he does value the lives of murderers more than the victims and their
families. He just wanted to keep them alive and they can go free to kill again.
There are many pedophiles, prison killers, recidivist murderers, serial killers
and terrorists that should had been send to his house and see if he could make
them ‘suffer’. He does not want to review to the public that the ACLU wants to
get rid of LWOP, once the death penalty is abolished.
Death
On
June 1, 1996 Schwarzschild died in the White Plains Hospital in White Plains.
He was 70 years old. His daughter said the cause was cancer.
Legacy
His
legacy is continued through a few different methods. In Berea, Kentucky at Berea
College there is a collection in their library for Henry Schwarzschild. In 2000
the Lincoln Center of Henry Schwarzschild was added to the holdings in special
collections. His important collections of “printed works, government
publications, and other contemporary pieces” were added by his wife, Kathleen.
Another way his legacy remains is through the annual Henry Schwarzschild
Memorial Lecture which began in 1999. It is sponsored by the NYCLU and the
Hogarth Center for Social Action at Manhattan College and the lecturers focus
on critical issues of “human rights and human dignity.” Schwarzschild also
contributed a few times to The New York Review of Books with letters titled
“Help for Ben Chaney” (March 1971), “HUAC” (September 1966), and the article,
“An Exchange on Racism” (December 7, 1967). Many people see his life as an
example of how to fight for rights and use his example to take a stand for what
they believe. His most recent legacy was his denouncement of the use of legal
injections in executions. (NYSDA Defender News)
RESPOND: I see his life as an example of one
who wants to reduce the world population by letting evildoers go and kill
again. As Ted Nugent once said, “Do-gooders are more dangerous than a sow grizzly with cubs or a coiled
rattlesnake, as do-gooders champion and sanction legalized barbarism.”
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