Franklin Foer doesn't care much for rabbis who take positions
on the political right ("Torah Cover," June 20). He apparently
doesn't even care much for rabbis like me, who do not publicly express
political opinions of any kind, but whose brothers happen to take such
positions. Foer wonders why my firm was hired in 1996 to consult
on a project in the Mariana Islands (CNMI), when I was, "at the time,
a Johannesburg rabbi." A more accurate description, but one that
would not support Foer's conclusions, is that, at the time, I had a well-established
business consulting firm that included an elite list of high-profile clients
(a list that I provided for him, incidentally).
Relying on a single CNMI source who, by her own admission, has no familiarity
with what we did, Foer reports ambiguous secondhand conclusions nine years
after the fact. It is not as though there weren't firsthand accounts of
what my firm and I did in the CNMI. Foer had a three-page 1997 memo
from Nancy Gottfried, CNMI's former assistant attorney general, who also
happened to be the person who drafted the labor reform legislation on which
we consulted. In the memo, Gottfired details precisely what our firm
did and states unequivocally, "I drafted [the legislation] based on
work I had done with a task force set up by ABEI" (Applied Business
Ethics International, as our firm was then known). The memo goes on
to detail the "series of workshops at the Department," run by
ABEI. It also discusses at length the tangible results of our work
and the legislation it inspired, including raising the minimum wage, ensuring
overtime pay for workers, and providing housing assistance, to name just
a few. Moreover, the extensive consulting that we did in the CNMI
went well beyond the drafting of legislation and included the streamlining
of the CNMI's government bureaucracy.
Foer also mischaracterized my current relationship with both Jack Abramoff
and my brother, Daniel. I am not "furiously distancing"
myself from Abramoff. On a personal level, I am pained by what he is going
through; as far as his guilt, I leave that to the justice system to decide.
Nor do I view my brother as a liability. I view my brother
as my brother, whose interests in politics are his business and have nothing
to do with our relationship as siblings.
Foer snidely mocks the very notion that a rabbi can have anything worthwhile
to contribute to the business world (apparently, that is the exclusive
province of those with MBA's from Harvard and Wharton). Our firm,
now base in Los Angeles and called Strategic Business Ethics, continues
to win contracts all over the world with large and small companies that
have no association with Abramoff. Foer has produced not one shred
of evidence that I or my firm had any knowledge of the things Abramoff
stands accused of. Yet he poses the loaded question, "What
kind of rabbis ...would provide guidance to a man like that? The
Lapin brothers, that's who." One might just as reasonably ask
the loaded question, "What kind of editors would provide guidance
to a journalistic charlatan like Stephen Glass? The late Michael
Kelly, Charles Lan, and the staff of The New Republic, that's
who." Of course, that would ignore their long records and many accomplishments
in the field of journalism. But why let the facts get in the way?
DAVID LAPIN
Chief Executive Officer
Strategic Business Ethics, Inc.
