Land of the free
Philip Roddis
The map below shows the spread across the USA of laws against support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. It was compiled by Palestine Legal, an organisation dedicated to protecting the civil rights of Americans who speak out for Palestinian freedom.
One state with anti BDS legislation on its books is Texas. Says The Intercept:
The bill’s language is so sweeping that some victims of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Southwest Texas in late 2017, were told they could only receive state disaster relief if they first signed a pledge never to boycott Israel. That demand was deeply confusing to those hurricane victims in desperate need of help but who could not understand what their views of Israel and Palestine had to do with their ability to receive assistance from their state government.
The evangelical author of the Israel bill, Republican Texas state Rep. Phil King, said at the time that its application to hurricane relief was a “misunderstanding,” but nonetheless emphasized that the bill’s purpose was indeed to ensure that no public funds ever go to anyone who supports a boycott of Israel.
Here’s what Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas, had to say as he signed King’s bill into law on May 2, 2017:
Now meet Bahia Amawi, a speech therapist in the lone star state. Having lost her job for refusing to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel, she’s suing the state of Texas in a bid to repeal the law which compelled an Austin school district to fire her for so refusing.
Says the Times of Israel:
Amawi worked with the local Arabic-speaking community at the Pflugerville Independent School District since 2009, on a contract basis. She told the news site that the district renewed her contract each year without incident, but when she received the documents for the 2018-19 school year in August, Amawi said it included a new clause requiring that she “not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” and refrain from any action “that is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israel, or in an Israel-controlled territory.”
Washington Post has Pflugerville District, which alongside State Attorney General Ken Paxton is in the firing line of Amawi’s lawsuit, saying:
This language is required by the State of Texas for all school districts in Texas, along with other governmental entities. Unfortunately … all Texas school districts are at the mercy of the state and the regulations printed into law, and in situations such as this, we are forced to spend time on state political issues and not on our core mission — educating students.”
Nor is Bahia Amawi the only one suffering here. The Intercept tells us that:
Because Amawi, to her knowledge, is the only certified Arabic-speaking child’s speech pathologist in the district, it is quite possible that the refusal to renew her contract will leave dozens of young children with speech pathologies without any competent expert to evaluate their conditions and treatment needs.
The Intercept goes on to quote Amawi directly:
If I [signed the pledge] I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully.
… the point of boycotting any products that support Israel is to put pressure on Israeli government to change its treatment, the inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people”
Three comments. One is that though the hard left was in the main always opposed to the Israeli State, or at any rate its policies on the Palestinians, the liberal left tended, mindful of recent European history, not only to support it but give it a blank cheque on whatever it deemed had to be done. That began to change after the Shatila and Sabra camp massacres in Lebanon, 1982. Since then its acts have seen the weight of liberal and centre left opinion steadily tilting away from Israel, to the point where the Jewish State is approaching a position once the preserve of South Africa. Israel is vulnerable, despite the support of Western ruling elites, to grassroots boycott. Recognition that, for all its hasbara, Israel is losing the propaganda war is the context in which anti BDS legislation within its ally and primary underwriter [1] should be seen.
Another is that this shift is analagous to that much wider change which has seen mainstream Western media slowly losing their grip on our hearts and minds. Thanks to the rise of the internet – with its triple whammy of vastly extended choice of news sources, many-to-many social media and, related but distinct, threat to revenues for corporate media’s two hundred year old business model – a ruling class monopoly on opinion formation and manufactured consent is weakened. This poses problems for a status quo loaded massively in favour of the few against the many. (All the more so when, as now, war drums are beating.) Like those anti BDS laws the war on fake news is best understood as early skirmish within conflicts greater, more fraught and ultimately more far reaching in significance.
But one of capitalism’s many dialectics is that for all its terrifying instability, it is extraordinarily adaptive in its Borg-like ability to accommodate all – or at any rate most – opposition. Not to mention its own crimes. Which brings me back to the issue at hand. Given more confidence in the survival of our species – and liberal democracy – I’d offer generous odds on Bahia Amawi being granted, half a century from now, Rosa Parks status.
NOTES:-
- [1] It almost goes without saying that as descriptors of America’s relationship with Israel, “ally and underwriter” are far from exhaustive.
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This is astonishing – genuinely staggering! – that Americans are allowing such an infringement on peaceful expression of political views. And in so many states, too, not just one or two. Salute to the gumption of Bahia Alawi, in taking on such a law! But she should not be alone – can there not be a class action, run by the best public-interest lawyers in the nation to overturn all these laws?
I see Israel as a military colony of the Western financial elites whose mission is to maintain a Western military presence in the Middle East. That is why the appalling apartheid policies and daily terrorizing and murdering of Palestinians is defended and justified by the Western establishment. The Western establishment will never permit peace or security for either Palestinians or Israel. Israel’s mission is war not peace.
These repressive laws imposed on US citizens are the kind of excesses and absurdities I have come to almost expect from US politicians.
I see Israel as a military colony of the Western financial elites
If that were true, you would expect to see Israel frequently fighting America’s wars, rather than the other way around.
The following video strongly suggests that, although the relationship between the US and Israel is indeed colonial, the direction of colonization has been widely misunderstood.
Anybody who would like to maintain that the US is the colonizer, rather than the colonized, should provide evidence that the puppet regimes which preside over undoubted US colonies such as Honduras, Ukraine, Egypt, and South Korea, have ever been received in Washington similarly to the way in which the reichsfuhrer of the Jewish State was greeted by the adoring leaders of the American goyim.
Very well said. America is Israel’s bitch, dumb goy muscle to fight its endless multi trillion dollar wars and hand over endless billions in annual tribute. The Kikenreich contributes nothing whatsoever to US interests – it is just a millstone around its neck That applies even if you buy into Neocon fantasies of world domination. The Zionist Lobby has a complete stranglehold over US politics, media and finance. There can be few more contemptible and degrading spectacles than all the 30 shekel whores in Congress jumping up and down like trained seals to give scores of standing ovations to Nitwityahoo if he so much as breaks wind.
It’s true the “friends of Israel” lobby has enormous clout. It is not only feared in the Beltway but can take scalps in the British Labour Party. The words Ken and Livingstone come to mind!
But to see the USA as vassal of Israel ignores a reality likewise ignored by liberal opponents of Israel’s illegal occupations and apartheid practices. The USA and its junior partners are rapacious imperialist powers. Nowhere more so than in the middle east, where in the name of peace and/or humanitarianism they have sought by all means necessary to control the oil rich region. In this respect Israel, like Saudi Arabia, is a client state of the West in general, USA in particular. The importance of both as regional gendarmes was boosted by the fall of the Shah in 1979, and has only increased since then.
Which is not to say the many sided relations end there. Israel is also trading partner and major arms exporter (importer too, by way of credit transfers which make Lockheed Martin and what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex rich at the expense of US taxpayers). Last but not least the IDF’s experience, gained over sixty years in the occupied territories, has spawned a lucrative business in training other repressive states – doubtless including yours and mine – in the art of counter insurgency.
The complexity of such realities points to the need to move away from understanding the world in purely nation terms. True socialists, which is to say internationalists, have always understood this of course. But even socialist understandings of the relations between state and capital are premised on theoretical work not seriously updated for a century. It seems to me that major theoretical and empirical work, on the nature of the state in the age of advanced imperialism, is long overdue. Problems in characterising the relationship between Tel Aviv/Jerusalem and Washington/Wall Street are a case in point
Israel is NOT a client state of the US. Clients do as they are told. Who is calling the shots? Really? No public figure in the US dares utter a word critical of Israel. Not a word critical of Israel will ever appear in the US media. Israel is like a poisonous maggot feeding off a host in an advanced state of decay. It’s not complicated. That’s the way it is. You just have to see things the way they are.
There is nothing new or abnormal about Western elites defending and justifying apartheid, terror and murder. They all supported South Africa for decades. The CIA underwrote numerous death squads and assassination programmes all over Central and South America.
What is new is the effective criminalisation of political dissent here.
Supporting Israel uncritically is not a moral standpoint, it is a political one. It is backing bunch of somewhat racist people against the rather racist code of Islam. It is backing the repeated and calculated breaching of internationally agreed terms of coexistence.
I hope this woman wins in court and it would do the President and Capitol Hill a great deal of good if punitive damages of a billion dollars were awarded against them personally for Unamerican activities….which in this case involve legislating against the American Constitution and ordering state governments to do the same.
A law professor has already started to spread disinformation about the nature of Bahia Amawi’s legal suit against the state of Texas:
David E Bernstein, “Everyone is Misreporting the Texas BDS Lawsuit”
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/12/18/everyone-is-misreporting-the-texas-bds-l
Bernstein completely (and perhaps deliberately) missed that part of the Texas law he quotes which refers to the definition of “business” and “company” as including a “for-profit sole proprietorship” which is exactly the nature of Bahia Amawi’s business as a contractor who happens to have just one business client. There would be thousands of sole proprietors just like her, maybe even hundreds of thousands or a few million if we count Uber drivers as sole proprietors (because they technically are not employees).
Even if Amawi were indifferent towards the BDS movement and had no plan to join it, had she signed the contract, then any future business decision she makes, which could be construed to be boycotting Israeli-related businesses or products, could put her in violation of the law. Given the nature of her work, she would have little reason anyway to use Israeli-produced goods or even Hebrew-language goods, and that in itself could be interpreted to be in violation of the anti-BDS law in Texas.
This anti-BDS law is far more insidious than just being a threat to Americans’ First Amendment rights.
to admin:
sorry, there is a formatting problem and now it’s a duplicate comment.
Thanks if you could remove this comment
You would think these new put-Israel-first laws are created by Sacha Baron Cohen for another episode of Who Is America. Sadly, this is happening in real life and this is how the ‘land of the free’ has become.
Think about the Israeli checkpoints all over Palestine. The Israelis are effectively bringing checkpoints to regulate how citizens conduct business (and how to think) in the US. Bahia Amawi’s life has been ruined by the introduction of these legal or virtual checkpoints. She cannot go about her daily life as she rightly deserves.
She earns more far respect than those US lawmakers who are ‘exceptionally’ depraved and outright criminal.
“She earns more far respect than those US lawmakers”. Indeed she does, Narrative, and even Israel’s liberal media say so. See Carolina Landsmann’s December 21 piece in Haaretz.
Truly sickmaking is that the first ten pages of Google returns on the search I just did on “Bahia Amawi”, to find that Haaretz opinion piece, contained not one Guardian instantiation (or Beeb). So I searched on “Bahia Amawi Guardian” and “”Bahia Amawi BBC”.
Zero, zilch, sweet Fanny Adams from these courageous crusaders for truth and decency, which led with vim and gusto the demands that Jeremy Corbyn cleanse the British L:abour Party of antisemitism.
What is this world coming to? I thought the right of consumers to spend their money as they see fit was sacrosanct in the US. These laws are not only unconstitutional, but demanding loyalty to a foreign state, no matter how allied, amounts to treason.
This barbarism is already enshrined in law. What is planned next?
Like half an article, bunch of quotes, a tiny bit of history (that we all know) and… end. Mondoweiss it ain’t.
Amawi worked with the local Arabic-speaking community at the Pflugerville Independent School District since 2009
Still Arab speaking after 9 years? No integration, no tolerance (of 1 Jewish state on Earth), non-Americans.
Imagine a Christian American speaking community in Gaza since 2009…. ha, ha, ha!!
She works with children. What, precisely, is your problem?
When living in America, teach them the basics in American. Politics is neither basics nor for children.
My problem is that some Palestinian children were brainwashed to becoming suicide bombers/ fighters while the responsible parents/ teachers stayed out of the physical fight. Not your problem?
“When living in America, teach them the basics in American” That would be tricky, since there is no such language as American. Although it would be good if they taught them some American history, the most important part of which is the genocide of the indigenous population and its replacement by european colonisers. In that respect American history has a lot in common with the zionist apartheid colony occupying Palestine.
Ok, the American language does not exist in your universe, but Arab does. Now please explain why it is being spoken today from America to Indonesia, Morocco till Nigeria without massive imperialism?
Apartheid at least let other groups live permanently in separate provinces; Islamism doesn’t let any other group live permanently in the Gulf and wipes out all others in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Eritrea etc.
You seem confused. When you say “Islamism” you mean “Israel” and when you say “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Eritrea etc.” you mean Gaza.
It’s more likely called “hasbara”.
To blame the Palestinians for “brainwashing” children is a fucking cowardly, craven and utterly duplicitous ploy. With an insane and truly disgusting World Record in incarceration, torture and outright murder of Palestinian children by israel the victims hardly need any further incentive to legitimate violence in the face of such horrors. There be plenty of evidence of israeli brainwashing…
HAJO MEYER, Auschwitz survivor :
“The Zionists …are automatons…They are brainwashed to nothing. It is a lesson I learned in Auschwitz. When a dominant group tries to dehumanise a certain distinguishable group, it is necessary that the members of the dominant group have been brainwashed beforehand. A normal human being cannot see another human being suffering, let alone inflict suffering.”
“Large parts of the Jewish population don’t want to talk about the Palestinians. They cannot get out of their role of the victim. They have forgotten about Jewish ethics as laid down in the Golden Rule by Hillel, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do unto others’. I was jeducated to put inter-human ethics central in religion [but] in Zionism they practice a dogmatic Holocaust religion: there is only one people which knows about suffering, that is the Jewish people [and] any suffering Zionists inflict on Palestinians is negligible as compared to Jewish suffering. [This] gives the Zionists the freedom to do anything they want without feeling guilty.”
Of course Zionists cannot do anything they want; nobody can. They are trying to create a defensible piece of historical home land.
They are simply ~6 million Jews fighting for a few square miles in a sea of Islam. They don’t want to be slaughtered like the Yazidis or other minority groups in the ME.
What you are doing here is uplifting Palestinians to “The Chosen People”, the notion you hate for the Jews.
Millions of Muslims are migrating to Europe; what is stopping the Palestinians? The Arab world will not give them permanent status nor a passport but Sweden, Germany, Belgium or France will.
Anyone adult who honestly believes what you’ve just written is in serious need of some private research: Zionist Jews do enge in horrendous violence against peacful Palestinians, cinluding defenceless women an children, and regularly get away without legal retribution by police and legal authorities that turn a blind eye or make monumental excuses.
But don’t believe me – just read Haaretz!
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-shin-bet-sharp-rise-in-attacks-on-palestinians-by-jewish-extremists-1.6015038
(Note, just as one example, 53 violent attacks on churches and Mosques – yet only 9 indictments.)
Or for a more historical underrstanding of Jewish violence, and the psychopathogically arrogant religiosity which fuels it read: Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky’s “Jewish fundamentalism in Israel”
Or subscribe to a news website like Johnathan Cook’s: The View from Nazareth:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/
If you are not willing to examie the evidence then you are just trolling.
Jewish violence and the psychopathogically arrogant religiosity which fuels it
Israel Shahak — Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years
“What you are doing here is uplifting Palestinians to “The Chosen People”” ???????????
What? Just for suggesting that they ought to be able to stay alive?
And the fact that you so nonchalantly say they can emigrate reveals that you too advocate something worse than Apartheid.
Stay alive? The Palestinian population was one of the fastest growing ones on this planet! For real massacres just look over the border into Syria, but you won’t.
Oy vey, goyim! Muh Holocaust! The six gazillion!! All we Chosen People want is Palestine, the whole of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Not much to ask, is it? Anyone who thinks different must be anti semitic or something.
Why should the Palestinians go to Europe/ Palestine is their country and that’s where they want to go to. Maybe all the Jews should go back to Jew York.
Israeli children are brainwashed from birth to hate all Palestinians and goyim in general. They are encouraged to paint slogans on bombs and shells used to slaughter thousands in Lebanon and the Zionist Auschwitz of Gaza. And taken on picnics and barbecues to watch all the fun and slaughter in Gaza. Sort of like German kids being taken to watch Jews being gassed for fun.
@ Antonym.
Unlike Israeli Children:
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism.
They are called ”Arabs” with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress, and are described as vile, deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state – people who don’t want to develop,” she says. “The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.”
Peled-Elhanan, is a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, ‘Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education’, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism– but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service.
“People don’t really know what their children are reading in textbooks,” she said. “One question that bothers many people is, how do you explain the cruel behaviour of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, and their indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. People ask how can these nice Jewish boys and girls become monsters once they put on a uniform. I think the major reason for that is education. So I wanted to see how school books represent Palestinians.”
In “hundreds and hundreds” of books, she claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a “normal person”.
The most important finding in the books she studied – all authorised by the ministry of education – concerned the historical narrative of events in 1948, the year in which Israel fought a war to establish itself as an independent state, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the ensuing conflict.
The killing of Palestinians is depicted as something that was’ necessary for the survival of the nascent Jewish state’, she claims. “It’s not that the massacres are denied, but they are represented in Israeli school books as something that in the long run was ‘good for the Jewish state’. For example, Deir Yassin [a pre-1948 Palestinian village close to Jerusalem] was a terrible slaughter by Israeli soldiers. In school books they tell you that this massacre initiated the massive flight of Arabs from Israel and enabled the establishment of a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. ”So it was for the best. Maybe it was unfortunate, but in the long run the consequences for us were good.”
Children, she says, grow up to serve in the army and internalise the message that Palestinians are “People whose life is dispensable with impunity. And not only that, but people whose number has to be diminished.”
http://warincontext.org/2011/08/07/how-israel-trains-its-children-to-hate-and-kill-palestinians/
“A million Arab lives are not worth a Jewish finger nail.”
“Palestinians are cockroaches.”
Begin.
So you missed the bit about here being multi-lingual? She speaks three languages, including English. How many languages do you speak??
He doesn’t seem to have even mastered the basics of a single language yet.
Five. How about you?
To see the difference between American English and UK English go no further than your computer spell checker.
Five languages. That’s genuinely impressive. But you do know that American and English only count as one, right?
So you speak only one language then…..
Talk about dealing with a troll who is being deliberately disingenous and whose argument about apartheid allowing groups to live separately and in different homelands tips him/her off as an unapologetic racist scumbag!
Apartheid – as Antonym knows or should know very well (perhaps I am too generously overestimating the troll’s level of understanding) – is a system that deliberately privileges one group above another based on an arbitrary criterion or set of such criteria determined by that one group that sets itself above all the rest and which determines the rules by which all the groups must abide. This includes that one group appropriating for itself territory that holds the most or the best resources that everyone needs, and spooning out whatever it deigns to spoon out to everyone else.
Had the article said that Amawi was working with a local Comanche-speaking community, the troll would have left her alone and made no comment about the Comanche-speaking children or their community integrating or not integrating with the wider community, or tolerating / not tolerating a state or states hostile to their continuing Comanche existence. Imagine a Comanche-speaking community practising its old religion in Texas and being allocated a children’s speech therapist to work with its children to identify speech problems … would the troll snicker then?
I think you are being too kind and this troll wouod have ordered the Comanche to speak… er… American.
Apartheid is ….a system that deliberately privileges one group above another based on an arbitrary criterion or set of such criteria determined by that one group that sets itself above all the rest and which determines the rules by which all the groups must abide
Nice definition of Islam. If you were against Apartheid – like me – why are you not anti Islam?
(Women have even more reasons to object to Islam)
Apartheid is a system that deliberately privileges one group above another based on an arbitrary criterion or set of such criteria determined by that one group that sets itself above all the rest and which determines the rules by which all the groups must abide.
Remind me which country it is, that US (and UK, and …) citizens are not allowed to criticize?
You are missing the point.
Why don’t you just sod off to the Kikenreich and go shoot some Untermenschen Palestinian kids yourself with dum dum bullets like the rest of the IDF kiddie killers. Palestinians are surprisingly tolerant of their own and other Christians in view of all the useful idiot Christian Zionist scum like Hagee calling for their genocide, and subhuman criminal filth like Bush and Bliar bombing one Moslem country after another back to the Stone Age “because God told them to.”
Just add some meddling by the Israeli lobby. US lawmakers effectively turn the constitution into toilet paper.
Overdoses of attention for Palestinians on this site alas: a blot on a good record…
You’re a disgusting zionist. You have no leg to stand on.
Ooh look! Another synagogue shooting in 1.2.3…
So please tell us why you hang around to criticize anyone that comments on the criminality of Zionists .
Leave then .
This site: We operate a completely open comment policy, and all shades of opinion are welcome.
My main reason to hang around: why let a principally good site be spoiled by an over-dosis of anti-Zionist comments, some of which go way beyond Gaza border control: Jewish world domination plots (since ages) etc. I am no fan of Nethanyahu but there are much bigger fish to fry in this world today.
The old dodge: “I am no fan of (insert the barely concealed object of admiration) but there are much bigger fish to fry”
The USA is a Colonial Settler state that came into being by exterminating the previous inhabitants while allowing a handful of their ancestors a few crumbs from the table.
I think that tells you all you need to know about what lies ahead for the Palestinians.
However the Palestinian “problem” will ultimately be passed on to their oppressors in America who are already seeing the gradual turning of the tide that their ancestors in Russia and Europe saw too late.
I sure hope Ms. Amawi gets her job back. Even more importantly, I hope her case overturns this completely UNCONSTITUTIONAL assault on our First Amendment rights. Go BDS!
Am I the only one to find this topic absolutely and utterly staggering? To think that the settler colony of israel, kept afloat by vast US taxpayer extortion, can now legalise the prohibition of criticism in that same sovereign country while at the same time continually advertising itself as democratic and label those it subjugates as “terrorist”? And it takes a teacher to stand up to it?
I’m lost. This is surreal.
I wonder if all these subservient politicians even understand that Israel and Israelis really don’t give a shit about them or their interests. They are NOT loyal to the US, nor do they give much in return for the massive aid and assistance they receive. Having spent some time in Israel, I saw virtually no acknowledgement of what the American taxpayer does for them, and many of them are so absorbed in their nationalist/religious/colonial drama that they couldn’t care less about people in the US. And here American legislators throughout the country bend over backwards against their own constituents to satisfy the most illiberal, insane, and cruel impulses of the Israeli government.
It seems the majority of US (and western) politicians care only about keeping themselves on the gravy train. In the US certainly, taking Israel Firster money is an easy way to do that.
They pander to the zionist evangelical vote .Those deluded so called Christians waiting for Jeessus to come back riding on a cloud to take them to rapture.
I do believe that if he did come back , he would do no different and this time get rid of the synagogue of hypocrites.
To the modern “tough guy” mind, getting rid of hypocrites seems the obvious solution. However, at no time did J.Chr. ever “get rid of” anybody.
We’re apparently stuck with these jackasses until their own bowels digest their heads.
“When we have squeezed all we can out of America, it can dry up and blow away.” Nitwityahoo.
Every Israeli household gets $23,000 a year from America while their own people die for lack of medical care and general neglect. But of course all the goyim were just put on earth like donkeys to serve the Chosen People.
Yes, they do realise that, but they don’t care. They are low life who will do anything for Zionist money. Their moral and ethical standards would make any street corner whore blush.
No, it’s not staggering at all. As Voltaire once said, “If you want to know who rules over you, ask who you are forbidden to criticise.”