<story><title>It’s Time to Reaffirm Our First Amendment Right to Boycott</title><url>https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/its-time-to-reaffirm-our-first-amendment-right-to-boycott</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>connicpu</author><text>I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of making a boycott illegal. If it&amp;#x27;s not accompanied by speech, what is the difference between someone who actively avoids a product or one who simply would not have purchased it in the first place? How can that possibly be enforced? If I sign that form and then happen to not buy any of the products I&amp;#x27;m not supposed to boycott, have I violated the contract?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jawns</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the way it works, in practice.&lt;p&gt;Legislators who propose and pass this legislation use it to demonstrate their support for Israel, or coal mining, or gun rights, or whatever anti-boycotting cause they&amp;#x27;re advancing.  They are the primary beneficiaries here, because it helps them get donations and get re-elected.&lt;p&gt;Entities who are forced to sign these pledges generally put as much thought into it as you or I put into agreeing to a TOS with a binding arbitration agreement.  In other words, not very much thought at all.&lt;p&gt;Because ... As you&amp;#x27;ve pointed out, the government cannot, in practice, prove that those entities are actually boycotting unless the entities come right out and say it.  So if the entities actually want to boycott Israel, they can continue to do so without announcing it.  The law doesn&amp;#x27;t actually stop anyone from boycotting Israel; at best, it merely stops them from publicizing what they&amp;#x27;re doing.&lt;p&gt;The reason this doesn&amp;#x27;t get much push-back from most people who are forced to sign the pledge is because they weren&amp;#x27;t actually planning to boycott anyway.  But there&amp;#x27;s a small number, such as the publisher who&amp;#x27;s at the heart of this case, who had no plans to boycott Israel, but who isn&amp;#x27;t going to let those legislators bully them.</text></comment>
<story><title>It’s Time to Reaffirm Our First Amendment Right to Boycott</title><url>https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/its-time-to-reaffirm-our-first-amendment-right-to-boycott</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>connicpu</author><text>I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of making a boycott illegal. If it&amp;#x27;s not accompanied by speech, what is the difference between someone who actively avoids a product or one who simply would not have purchased it in the first place? How can that possibly be enforced? If I sign that form and then happen to not buy any of the products I&amp;#x27;m not supposed to boycott, have I violated the contract?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SpicyLemonZest</author><text>The original antiboycott laws were an unfortunate response to an otherwise intractable issue. Until recently, most countries in the Arab world had both a primary boycott on Israel and a secondary boycott on any company that does business with Israel. So there was a real and pressing concern that some companies might feel they &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to boycott Israel, not because they themselves have an issue with the country but because they can&amp;#x27;t afford to sacrifice the rest of the Middle East market for it. Antiboycott laws were a solution, and a solution that seems to have worked pretty well - the Arab League never explicitly revoked their boycott, but it&amp;#x27;s virtually unenforced and nobody has to choose between doing business with Israel and doing business with the Arab world.&lt;p&gt;The new wave of antiboycott laws this article is referring to are much less justified, I think, but you&amp;#x27;ll note that they&amp;#x27;re on the same topic in response to still-ongoing efforts by the BDS movement to promote a secondary boycott. So it&amp;#x27;s not as unreasonable as it would first seem.</text></comment>