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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 26 2017, @06:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the chilling-effect dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 27 2017, @12:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 27 2017, @12:06PM (#545117)

    Bigotry is hating someone because you have a normal, inbuilt need to hate.
    Bigotry is trying to make yourself look big by making someone else look small.

    FTFY
    Unfortunately, everything points to this conclusion. Everybody needs somebody to hate, and evil always again springs out from the good (usually in the form of "better").
    Look into your heart and you will find it true, even though you will certainly attach a "but, ... " rationalization to it, to quench a cognitive dissonance.

    There is certainly a group of people you can define that you hate (it is presumed that you don't personally know at least significant part of that group), and you probably keep a good reason for that hate.

    And if you would humor me by making a thought experiment, imagining that that particular group of people didn't exist, try to imagine what is the next definable group of people that would be least sympathetic to you. You see, "it is turtles all the way down"! There is always somebody getting on our nerves, the last one probably being "all these impersonators of me around me, mocking me all the time".

    Hate is a missing need on Maslow's hierarchy. It is bothering us, it is drowning our dreams of a better world, but it turns out we need to take it into account and deal with it, try to keep it under control the best we can.