BY HANK REICHMAN

Last week I posted a piece on this blog reporting on a legal challenge filed by the Arkansas Times against a state law requiring government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel.  Now a similar law is being challenged in Texas by a children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas.

Bahia Amawi is a U.S. citizen who received a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1999.  She  was born in Austria, has lived in the U.S. for the last 30 years, and speaks three languages (English, German, and Arabic).  Amawi began working in 2009 on an annual contract basis with the Pflugerville Independent School District, which includes Austin, to provide assessments and support for school children from the county’s growing Arabic-speaking immigrant community.  On August 13, the school district again offered to extend her contract for another year, but this time she was required to sign a pledge that she “does not currently boycott Israel,” that she “will not boycott Israel during the term of the contract,” and that she shall 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 Israeli or in an Israel-controlled territory.”

The requirement was not the school district’s idea.  It is mandated by Section 2270.001 of the Texas Government Code, which requires that all public contractors agree to these conditions. The measure was passed on May 2, 2017, by the Texas State Legislature and signed into law two days later by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott.  The bill unanimously passed the lower House by a vote of 131-0, and then the Senate by a vote of 25-4.

Amawi informed her school district supervisor that she could not sign the oath.  As her complaint against the school district, filed December 16 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, explains, she “ask[ed] why her personal political stances [about Israel and Palestine] impacted her work as a speech language pathologist.”  In response, her supervisor promised that she would investigate whether there were any ways around this barrier.  But the supervisor ultimately told Amawi that there were no alternatives:  Either she would have to sign the oath, or the district would be legally barred from paying her under any type of contract.

To the best of her knowledge, Amawi is the only certified Arabic-speaking child’s speech pathologist in the district.  It is therefore possible that the district’s refusal to renew her contract will leave dozens of children without any competent expert to evaluate their conditions and treatment needs.  In other words, the no-boycott requirement affects not only Awawi’s political freedom but the lives of the children she serves.

“The bill’s language is so sweeping,” one account reports, “that some victims of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Southwest Texas in late 2017, were told that 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 law has also been applied to universities in the state, most notably at the University of Houston, where an administrator resigned after officials found she had falsified the signature of a campus speaker who refused to sign the no-boycott pledge.  A university representative said that in April the state attorney general’s office told the school that it could exclude campus speakers from the law, although the Houston Chronicle could not confirm such guidance was issued.  In August a university representative reiterated that any “external person invited to give a speech or to review tenure or promotion issues is not a company or providing the service for profit” and would therefore be outside the purview of Texas BDS law.

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, with passage in Texas at least seventeen states had enacted  legislation imposing punitive measures against supporters of the BDS movement.  As of now, BDS supporters claim, 26 states have such laws on the books (although the extent to which these all violate free speech rights is unclear, at least to me).  Bills are pending in 13 additional states.  See this map compiled by Palestine Legal:

Earlier this year federal judges in Arizona and Kansas issued injunctions against the enforcement of laws similar to that in Texas and Arkansas.  The Kansas judge later dismissed the case after the legislature altered its law, although the state was still required to pay the plaintiff teacher’s legal fees.  At the federal level, versions of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act have been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, but neither has come up for a vote.  The ACLU issued a statement vehemently condemning those bills as an attack on core free speech rights, one which “would punish individuals for no reason other than their political beliefs,” and has repeated that warning as, in recent days, word spread that a revised version is under consideration during this month’s lame-duck session.

In August, AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure issued a statement that reaffirmed the AAUP’s opposition to academic boycotts, including an academic boycott of Israel, but warned that efforts by American colleges and universities to compel BDS supporters to disavow their views “conjure the specter of loyalty and disclaimer oaths, mainstays of McCarthyism.”  The statement concluded: “At a time when there is widespread interest in making sure that speakers on all points of the political spectrum are able to make themselves heard on American campuses, the contradiction in seeking to ban advocates of this particular position is obvious and unacceptable.  We therefore call on all institutions of higher education in the United States to challenge the required renunciation of BDS and uphold freedom of speech and belief for all members of the academic community.”

Amawi’s complaint declares, “Political speech on issues of great national and international importance is central to
the purposes of the First Amendment.  Speech and advocacy related to the Israel – Palestine conflict is core political speech on a matter of public concern entitled to the highest levels of constitutional protection.”  The complaint adds, “The First Amendment protects the rights of speakers to call for and participate in economic boycotts as a means of amplifying their message.  Joining voices together to participate in and call for political boycotts is protected association under the First Amendment.”

To reiterate, the AAUP opposes all academic boycotts, including an academic boycott of Israel, as hostile to academic freedom.  I agree with this position; Amawi may not.  But so what.  As I wrote in August, “The right of individuals to engage in or advocate boycotts is well established in the United States; any attempt to limit that right is clearly unconstitutional under the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.  No one is obligated to support a boycott, but opposition to a boycott does not justify silencing its advocates.  Just as the AAUP defends the right of faculty members to make extramural comments that most of us may find repulsive, so too do we defend the right of faculty members to support policies we may oppose, including policies that may threaten academic freedom.”

These laws are clearly abhorrent to the basic principles of free speech and hopefully will be ruled unconstitutional.   As journalist Glenn Greenwald explains,

Imagine if, instead of being forced by the state to vow never to boycott Israel as a condition for continuing to work as a speech pathologist, Amawi was instead forced to pledge that she would never advocate for LGBT equality or engage in activism in support of or opposition to gun rights or abortion restrictions (by joining the National Rifle Association or Planned Parenthood), or never subscribe to Vox or the Daily Caller, or never participate in a boycott of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, or Russia due to vehement disagreement with those governments’ policies.

The tyrannical free speech denial would be self-evident and, in many of those comparable cases, the trans-ideological uproar would be instantaneous. . . .

Whether or not you agree with her political view about Israel and Palestine, every American with an even minimal belief in the value of free speech should be vocally denouncing the attack on Amawi’s free speech rights and other Americans who are being similarly oppressed by these Israel-protecting censorship laws in the U.S. . . .

Put simply, it is impossible to be a credible, effective, genuine advocate of free speech and free discourse without objecting to the organized, orchestrated, sustained onslaught of attacks on the free speech and free association rights undertaken specifically to protect the Israeli government from criticism and activism.  Self-professed free speech defenders who only invoke that principle when their political allies are targeted are, by definition, charlatans and frauds.  Genuine free speech advocates object to censorship even when, arguably especially when, the free speech rights of their political adversaries are assaulted.

Anyone who stands by silently while Bahia Amawi is forced out of the profession she has worked so hard to construct all because of her refusal to renounce her political views and activism — while the young children she helps are denied the professional support they need and deserve — can legitimately and accurately call themselves many things.  “Free speech supporter” is most definitely not one of them.

I haven’t always been a big fan of Greenwald’s work, but here I must agree 100%.  These laws pose a serious threat to freedom of speech and, by implication, to academic freedom as well.