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ACLU* national legal director David Cole warns that this new piece of legislation is a serious problem to free speech. He says that just discussing the boycott of Israel could land you in prison for 20 years and fined $1 million.
The right to boycott has a long history in the United States, from the American Revolution to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Montgomery bus boycott to the campaign for divestment from businesses serving apartheid South Africa. Nowadays we celebrate those efforts. But precisely because boycotts are such a powerful form of expression, governments have long sought to interfere with them — from King George III to the police in Alabama, and now to the U.S. Congress.
The Israel Anti-Boycott Act, legislation introduced in the Senate by Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and in the House by Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.), would make it a crime to support or even furnish information about a boycott directed at Israel or its businesses called by the United Nations, the European Union or any other "international governmental organization." Violations would be punishable by civil and criminal penalties of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison. The American Civil Liberties Union, where we both work, takes no position for or against campaigns to boycott Israel or any other foreign country. But since our organization's founding in 1920, the ACLU has defended the right to collective action. This bill threatens that right.
As a European myself I find it very strange that such a law can ever be officially proposed. And in the US of all countries where the freedom of speech in codified in the constitution.
What do you make of it?
*American Civil Liberties Union
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Thursday July 27 2017, @04:21AM
You really are an almost perfect demonstration of thick headed aren't you. The concept of actual voluntary cooperation has no chance of making it into your thick skull. All you can imagine is the regimented top down "cooperation" of the Leader giving orders which will be obeyed at gunpoint; because that is what The State is.
Nah, they were the newest unassimilated immigrants and essentially got hazed. And yea they were at the bottom of the social order because they were at the bottom! They mostly came here with nothing, most had little here, they were trying to build a new life, accumulate some wealth, etc. The thing about America at the time was that just because you were at the bottom you weren't required to stay there and your children wouldn't be stuck there too. As they mostly assimilated and diversified throughout society it ended. Go ahead and face it, most of you guys are still stinging from the hazing you got as Freshmen, amiright?
I'd also assert that had the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s not been subverted by Communists / Progressives, Blacks would even be mostly assimilated by now since they were already getting fairly close at the time. Incomes were rising, opportunity increasing, etc. All they needed was to make Southern Democrats actually obey the law, had they stayed focused on that goal they could have achieved it. But they sold out to LBJ and off to the plantation they went, where they remain to this day.
And no, nobody in the U.S. with a brain willingly uses public transit. I haven't been out of the U.S. but every report says many other countries manage to have mass transit that isn't horrid (especially Asia). The closest I have seen to a good one is the historic trolley system in New Orleans that is as much a tourist attraction as it is a working public transportation system.