[ April 24, 2024 ]
The ACLU, like every other leftwing ideology and org, is being upended by its Jew-hatred.
For the ACLU, Antipathy to Israel Trumps Antidiscrimination
Laws against boycotting the Jewish state are patterned after those that protect gays and lesbians.
Story continues below advertisementBy Eugene Kontorovich, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11, 2019:
Identity politics guides its adherents in strange directions. The American Civil Liberties Union, which for decades defended the vulnerable against public discrimination, has begun an assault on several antidiscrimination laws. Its goal is to bring boycotts of Israel into the political mainstream.
The ACLU’s latest target is the Combatting BDS Act, which passed the Senate last week 77-23. The bill is quite modest compared with the anti-BDS measures enacted in 26 states in recent years, which the ACLU is also challenging. Those laws prohibit state contracts with, and investment in, companies that boycott Israel-connected firms. The federal Combating BDS Act would simply declare that the state laws don’t violate U.S. foreign policy.
Despite the bipartisan support the bill enjoyed in the Senate and overwhelming approval of the underlying state legislation, it faces a difficult road in the House, where radical Democrats are united against it.
The ACLU is providing political cover to Democrats who oppose the laws by claiming they raise constitutional problems. It has brought lawsuits in three states, arguing that the First Amendment protects firms’ right to boycott certain clients. In the litigation, the ACLU claims that “the state cannot condition government contracts” on a company’s refusals to do business with private parties for “political” motives. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has also brought two such lawsuits.
Yet state anti-BDS laws do not infringe on speech. They don’t regulate speech at all. That’s exactly what the ACLU has said when states passed similar antiboycott laws that weren’t about Israel.
The First Amendment protects speech, not conduct. In the 2006 case Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Supreme Court held unanimously that the government can deny federal funding to universities that boycott military recruiters. Even though that boycott was based on political motives, that did not make it protected speech.
Similarly, the act of boycotting Israelis does not in itself express any particular political viewpoint. Companies may boycott Israel to curry favor with Arab states or out of mere anti-Semitism. They may hope to avoid harassment from the BDS movement or simply cave in to pressure from Palestinian groups.
Airbnb, the most prominent U.S. company to announce an Israel-related boycott, says its decision was entirely apolitical and that it opposes boycotts of Israel. A boycott or divestment doesn’t constitute a message in itself, meaning refusing to do business isn’t speech. That’s what a federal court held last month when it threw out an ACLU challenge to Arkansas’s anti-BDS law.
The ACLU has long argued that although private parties have the right to refuse to do business with people for ideological reasons, the government need not fund such conduct. “Taxpayer dollars must not fund discrimination” carried out by private parties, the ACLU states in its issue brief on government-funded discrimination. It has successfully pushed measures banning the federal government from contracting with companies that engage in certain boycotts. And it “strongly” supported legislation that would bar federal funds from being used by states in contracts with companies that engage in boycotts.
Identity politics is the key to understanding the ACLU’s apparent change of heart. The antiboycott laws the ACLU has defended are meant to protect gays and lesbians, an identity group they favor. The ACLU acknowledges that in many states it is “legal to fire or refuse to hire someone based on their sexual orientation,” but argues that companies that do so “must not be allowed to do so with taxpayer dollars.” It inexplicably ignores that the logic of those antiboycott laws applies equally to Israel.
The ACLU may think that refusing to do business with people because of their sexuality is immoral while refusing to do business with people connected with Israel is a blow for justice. That’s an intelligible political position, but it’s lousy First Amendment jurisprudence. First Amendment protections are the same regardless of what one thinks of the underlying conduct.
I played a role in developing the state anti-BDS laws, submitting testimony to legislatures and advising private groups that supported the measures. To avoid any constitutional doubts, I stuck to the model of antiboycott laws that the ACLU supports, comfortable in the knowledge that their constitutionality was unquestioned. I underestimated how much changes when sexual identity is replaced with Israeli identity.
There is more at stake here than hypocrisy. The ACLU’s enthusiasm for Israel boycotts has led it to take legal positions that threaten to undermine the antidiscrimination norms it has worked for decades to achieve. Now it is prepared to risk legal protections for sexual minorities for the sake of creating a constitutional right to boycott Jews. The ACLU probably hopes to have it both ways, arguing that boycotts of Israelis are “political” and boycotts of gays and lesbians are just mean. But courts won’t maintain one standard for boycotts of progressives’ favored targets and another standard for everyone else.
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17 Comments5 years agoThe ACLU and SPLC are basically two worthless organizations.
5 years agoReply to TangoUniform2I can deal with, and accept, “worthless”. However, those two organizations are downright destructive, very dangerous, and evil.
5 years agoThose that support Muhammadism are not held accountable, not prosecuted by the law.
That’s because the law & the government are illicit.5 years agoThe ACLU has been infiltrated with Muslims. Muslims HATE Christians. The new ACLU LOVES Muslims.
ACLU sues Federal Prison for ‘violating Islam’ by forcing American traitor, ‘Taliban’ John Lindt to wear long pants
MAY 21, 2014
…
Remember when American traitors were quickly executed in America? John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, was instead sent to prison. There, he developed a full-time hobby of waging Litigation Jihad against the United States, with the aid of lawyers who work on behalf of enemies of the United States – NOT al-Qaeda lawyers, the ACLU.
..
Frontpage (Daniel Greenfield) Last year he sued and won over prayers to Allah, the Muslim deity that inspired him to join the Taliban. Now he’s run out of things to sue and he and the ACLU are suing because his pants are too long. (The ACLU fought for him and he won too!)
…
https://barenakedislam.com/2014/05/21/aclu-sues-federal-prison-for-violating-islam-by-forcing-american-traitor-taliban-john-lindt-to-wear-long-pants/
5 years agoLike most take overs of established organizations, most Americans are oblivious. They want the established ones as they change their agenda. The ACLU is another one that is anti-American and PRO Islam. They don’t tell their donors about the change..It’s been going on for a few YEARS now…
Has the ACLU become the MCLU (‘Muslim’ Civil Liberties Union)?
DECEMBER 26, 2013Americans might as well be living under Islamic sharia blasphemy laws. That’s because the nation’s so-called champion of free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is AWOL…now being run and influenced by an inordinately large number of Muslim supremacists.
Clarion Project (h/t Gerald) On September 26, 2012, Investor’s Business Daily made an acute observation: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has fiercely fought against essential U.S. counter-terrorism programs and actions but was curiously silent when the White House pressured YouTube to take down the film Innocence of Muslims, a provocative presentation of Mohammed’s life, in order to appease Muslim rioters. The background of one top ACLU official, Jameel Jaffer, may explain the inconsistency.
Jameel Jaffer heads the ACLU’s Center for Democracy and was the director of the Center’s National Security Project from 2007 to 2010. He is best known for suing to get information about CIA interrogation practices and the drone campaign to kill terrorists overseas, which he staunchly opposes. This national-security wrecking machine is not even American. He’s Canadian. He also happens to be a Muslim activist closely tied to major Muslim Brotherhood figures and front groups.
The irony is not lost on Steve Emerson, director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “The ACLU was founded on the basis that there shouldn’t be any blasphemy laws,” said Emerson, who’s airing a new documentary, “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.” “Yet in the last 10 years, they’ve appointed (to their boards) members of the Muslim Brotherhood who believe in blasphemy laws.” The top Muslim lawyer in ACLU’s stable is Jameel Jaffer, who successfully sued the U.S. to reveal CIA secrets for interrogating terror suspects.
In March 2009, Jaffer was the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which the federal government designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation. The government said CAIR is an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s secret Palestine Committee that was set up to support Hamas. The event raised $130,000 for CAIR.
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In a 200-page report on jihad fundraising, “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity,” the ACLU argued that “federal law enforcement is engaging in practices that intimidate Muslim donors and create a climate of fear that chills American Muslims’ free and full exercise of their religion.”In other words, the First Amendment rights of Muslims are more precious than those of the average citizen. Where is this bias coming from? Muslims. The ACLU now counts at least eight Muslims on its national executive staff alone. In fact, a Muslim runs the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, while another heads its National Security Project.
The message of the ACLU’s Center’s National Security Project mirrors that of the Islamist groups with Muslim Brotherhood origins. Its website says it fights against counter-terrorism programs that “amount to racial profiling on a federal scale,” “suspicionless searches and arbitrary detentions of Arabs” of Muslims, the “many horrific abuses inflicted on detainees in U.S. custody” and terrorism-financing laws that “unfairly target” Muslim organizations. It claims that the U.S. government has gone to “extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent” and has “returned to the bad old days of unchecked spying on ordinary Americans.” It also takes aim at the government’s denial of visas to foreign scholars on ideological grounds.
It gets worse – https://barenakedislam.com/2013/12/26/has-the-aclu-become-the-mclu-muslim-civil-liberties-union/
5 years agoThere are Moslems in the Anti-defemation League. These IslamoNazis are not our friends.
5 years agoThe ACLU and the SPLC both have several jewish lawyers. Seems odd to me. The SPLC has labeled a large number of organizations as anti-Semitic which should also cover muslims, since most of them are semites too. All minority groups have some identity political organization, even the queers are well represented in both organizations. There is only one group that is not allowed to have any identity worth noting and that is normal whites, especially normal white Europeans, nope, that would be a hate group.
5 years agoWell written and articulate article. I do hope that the courts accept the basic proposition that the issue has nothing to do with free speech, but in fact covers only conduct. The Arab claim that Israel is illegal is ludicrous, because many of the nations comprising the middle east were created the same way as Israel. We all know that what motivates the Arab hostility towards the “Jewish” state is their belief system of HATE! Their violence against Israel, and Jews around the world, is conduct which they will bring with more effort to the states, speaks for itself. I hope that our electorate recognizes that those who vote against this anti-BDS legislation are putting the American civilization in jeopardy to these believers of Islam. We have to call them out for what they are: a venomous belief system that cannot assimilate into what being American is all about.
5 years agoThese Muslims need to seriously read the second half of their Koran. If I wrote many of those verses without quoting the reference, I would be arrested for hate speech. There are over 100 verses calling for terrible things to be done to non believers who refuse to convert to Islam.
5 years agoReply to [email protected]I have a remedy for the terrible things to be done to infidels that Muslims call for. You just make it easy for them to suck their own penises!
5 years agoAll these big well-funded organizations are almost always skewed towards the left, funnily enough.
5 years agoAll these big well-funded organizations are almost always skewed towards the left, funnily enough.
5 years agoI always thought it meant haven’t got A-CLU!
5 years agoACLU stands for:
Atheists,
Communists,
Liberals,
Un-Americans5 years agoThe Mossad is alive and well! Let a word to the ACLU be wise.
5 years agoWho funds the ACLU these days? Muslim Brotherhood? Saudi sheikhs? UAE?
