2-14-2020 Israel’sNetanyahu boasts of having Destroyed US 1st Amendment and Free Speech – Juan Cole Informed Comment
Israeli caretaker prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been indicted for corruption and is facing an election soon, just boasted that his ministry of strategic affairs has managed to undermine first amendment protections for free speech in the United States by lobbying state legislatures to pass laws forbidding the boycott of Israel.
Anti-boycott laws of the Old South were used against Martin Luther King, Jr. and other activists in the Civil Rights movement to keep African-Americans subordinate and segregated. The right to boycott establishments over civil rights was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1982 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware…When Kansas fired Mennonite school teacher Esther Koontz from a program to train other teachers over her refusal to certify that she doesn't boycott Israel (she does), the ACLU took the case to court and a Federal judge struck down the Kansas statute. The state legislature then reformulated it so that it only affected big businesses under certain circumstances, which is also unconstitutional, but made it a little unlikely that the law would affect anyone…The anti-boycott laws are unconstitutional. They are also racist, aimed at keeping brown Palestinians down.
Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member
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