The Woodstock Free Speech Campaign

The town of Woodstock office building on

the Comeau property, (Photo by Tony Adamis)

Dear Editor:

The Woodstock Free Speech Campaign seeks to have the Woodstock Town Board pass a resolution that states that the right to boycott, as a component of constitutionally protected free speech, is important enough to the town of Woodstock and its inhabitants that we are willing to take a stand against Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s unilateral executive order that withholds state funding from organizations that promote boycotts against Israel for its human rights abuses of Palestinians.

Why should this campaign be important enough for Woodstockers and others to support? Why is it important for citizens to stop any and all encroachments on our First Amendment rights?

Free speech and the nonviolent expression of our views, whether popular or not, are the bedrock of our democracy. When the First Amendment rights of any one of us are limited or denied, can the denial of others be far behind? It’s the canary in the coal mine. It’s our early warning system. And if we ignore these first encroachments, then we are on a slippery slope.

In the next few months, there will be town educational and organizing events. Residents may sign a petition at www.woodstockfreespeech.org and share it with friends and neighbors.

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Nic Abramson

Shady, N.Y.

See her film!

I believe in looking past my own culture to “the other side of the story.” Not long ago, I attended Bard’s first Palestinian Film Festival.  A small group of students gathered first to listen to a Palestinian American poet, Suheir Hammad.   Suheir combined the parlance of Brooklyn (where she was born in 1973 and grew up) with the ardent cries of her grandparents, refugees from Palestine.  With hip-hop beat in her spoken-word pieces, she brought in her family, her community, Palestinian women. “I grew up with a sense of loss,” she says “that you can work generations to build something and suddenly lose it all.”  

Suheir’s passionate voice rises out of her Muslim tradition, her Palestinian heritage, her Brooklyn upbringing.  The title of one of her books “Born Palestinian, Born Black” says it all. The students were enthralled with Suheir’s voice. From her poetry “Drops of this Story,” to the film in which she stars “Salt of This Sea” (to be shown this Friday night at 7 as part of the Palestinian film series at Kingston’s UU), Suheir challenges over and over again the dominant history that attempts to erase her culture.  She brings home to us “Do not fear what has blown up.  If you must, fear the unexploded.”   Watch her TED talk!  Listen to her!  Read her poetry!  See her film!  

Jane Toby

Catskill

Part of the killing machine

We have to earn our living in this world. Some of us are reduced to drudgery, some make a reasonable living. What about those members of the population who feel unhappy or guilty about their work? I wonder how many Woodstockers fit into that category?

Our largest employer, Ametek-Rotron, manufactures war materials that are part of the killing machine that so much of this country’s endless war economy is based on. Has Ametek-Rotron ever considered conversion to peaceful production? Do any of the employees feel unhappy about the widespread murder of innocent children caused by the drones they help to construct? Do they rationalize those feelings with slogans, or do they ever imagine their finger on the trigger with the nearby Woodstock school blown to bits, with blood and fire and dust clouding the air over the golf course, or perhaps the restaurant there hosting a wedding party that has been attacked.

I can’t believe that any of them see themselves as happily maintaining that sort of life. So what do they think about in relation to their work? What do they feel? How do they resolve all this? Does conscience make cowards of us all?

Jay Wenk
Woodstock

Woodstock’s Bit Part In War Crimes In Yemen

Woodstock’s Bit Part In War Crimes In Yemen

This March, Amnesty International urged the US to halt all arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia, whose air force is leading an ongoing campaign of attacks on Yemen that have resulted in numerous civilian deaths (including hundreds of children). Hospitals and residential areas have been destroyed in what Human Rights Watch called “apparent war crimes”.

Amnesty added: “Saudi Arabia’s international partners have added fuel to the fire, flooding the region with arms despite the mounting evidence that such weaponry has facilitated appalling crimes and the clear risk that new supplies could be used for serious violations ... generating a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale.”

Two months later, the Royal Saudi Air Force needed spare parts for the F-15s that are its preferred vehicle for the bombs. On May 24, Woodstock’s largest employer, the weapons contractor Ametek Rotron, obliged by signing a contract for a rush order of components for delivery direct to the Saudi Defense Ministry in Jeddah.

If this makes you feel an uncomfortable dissonance with Woodstock’s worldwide association with peace and love, it’s worth considering the broader picture. We are a small, but iconic, community; we make correspondingly small, but crucial, parts of most major American weapons systems including warplanes, tanks, nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, and the rocket launchers that Saudi Arabia has also used to deliver cluster bombs in Yemen.

It’s time to move from a war economy to a peace economy. With our outsize reputation, our small town can take a lead in a wider movement towards creating an industrial base that produces windmills not weapons. A peace economy is a green economy. Companies, local governments, employees and residents can get together to envision a local economy that benefits everyone. A peace economy is a jobs economy.

May Peace Prevail On Earth, our Peace Pole proclaims. To get there we need to stop the flow of arms ... and where better than Woodstock to show the way?

Laurie Kirby
Woodstock

The true victims

And the hasbara (Israeli propaganda) is repeated. Same quotes from opinion writers and pro-Zionist sources which hardly constitute "facts." The reader should notice that rather then defend Israeli actions-- which are daily violations of International Law and the Fourth Geneva Conventions (Separation Wall found illegal by the World Court in 2004; collective punishment; settling land taken during an offensive war - 1967) and US law (using American weapons against civilian population) --claims are made that the true victims here, the Palestinian people, are the perpetrators.

What some do not want to understand is that an occupying power does NOT have a right under International Law to claim self-defense against those being occupied. Israel does this repeatedly. Israeli Zionists hope to sew confusion in America as to what is really happening. A fiction has been developed and spread far and wide in order to transform a brutal, criminal occupation into a benign partnership with many rewards IF ONLY those bestial Arabs weren't so ignorant.

I ask you this: Imagine after decades of illegal immigration, which the authorities would not stop, brutal acts of violence against you and your family led to your land, home, business and way of life being actually taken by those illegal immigrants. Any attempt by you to regain what was thieved was considered "terrorism" and was thwarted by not only the illegal immigrants but their superpower ally. International Law and the United Nations, while providing more than enough provisions for a legal rendering in your favor kept being ignored because, well, because that superpower ally wouldn't allow justice to prevail.

Would you simply give up? Or, would you be attempting to gain back what was illegally taken from you?

If you're honest, if you empathize with the true victims in the above scenario, then you should support Palestinians in their cause.

Steven L. Fornal

Please sign our online petition

Free Speech

Our First Amendment rights are under attack. On June 5th Governor Cuomo signed executive order #157 that divests New York State funds from any companies that support Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the State of Israel. It also creates a blacklist of those companies that is public and that will take input from the general public. And Governor Cuomo had the temerity to say that "we'll boycott those who boycott."

The Supreme Court in its 1982 NAACP vs Claiborne Hardware Co decision recognized boycotts as a First Amendment form of protected free speech. This means it is wrong for New York State to penalize those who engage in constitutionally protected free speech, whether Governor Cuomo agrees with their points of view or not. And having New York State assess our political motivations and then create a database of those it disagrees with is a serious threat to our civil liberties.

Boycotts have long been recognized as a legitimate and non-violent method of trying to change behavior. History is replete with examples: from our forefathers refusal to pay taxes to the British without representation, to Ghandi's Salt Strike, to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to the boycotting of South Africa, to today's boycotting of North Carolina for its discrimination against the Transgender community.

In reaction to Governor Cuomo's boycott ban, I and other Woodstock citizens are organizing a campaign to have the Woodstock Town Board pass a resolution that reaffirms our rights to free speech and our rights to boycott. It is important for individuals and communities to defend their basic human rights when they are under attack. We are planning a series of informational sessions and a petition campaign as a show of community involvement in a lead up to the introduction of the resolution for a town board vote.

If you believe in free speech, please sign our online petition and follow our progress at WoodstockFreeSpeech.org. Please inform your friends and neighbors and ask them to join us.

Nic Abramson
Shady, NY

McCarthyism is wrong

Whatever your views on Israel/Palestine . . . , McCarthyism is wrong                                                                      

Governor Cuomo’s Executive Order No. 157, which he signed on Sunday, June 5, should be of concern to each and every one of us. This executive order threatens the rights of Americans to take collective action to address injustice by using boycott as a form of free expression and as a powerful means of protest. Furthermore, the creation of the related discriminatory “blacklist,” which the New York Office of General Services will post on its website and update semi-annually, is blatantly dangerous.

Thankfully, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects our right to free speech. This means we are allowed to express, be exposed to, and receive a wide range of facts, opinions, and viewpoints – even when the ideas are unpopular.  Under this umbrella of free speech, Americans have the right to boycott, and we have a long history of using boycott as a tactic to achieve justice.  Let’s remember that before the American Revolution, colonists boycotted British goods (think, “no taxation without representation”?) and that, since then, American citizens (and corporations) involved in social justice movements have used boycotts for issues ranging from Animal Rights, Testing, and Welfare; to Civil Rights; to Environmental Health/Integrity; to Human Rights; to LGBTQ Discrimination; to Labor and Worker Rights; to . . .   

We can look back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the Civil Rights era to fight segregated buses; to Cesar Chavez’s boycott of grapes to fight the toxic spraying of insecticides; to the boycott of South Africa to end apartheid; to the more recent fast-food worker boycotts to raise the minimum wage; and to peoples/corporations current refusal to do business with North Carolina for its recent banning of local LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances and its requirement that transgender people use public bathrooms that match their birth certificates. The list goes on.

However, Governor Cuomo’s shameful signing of Executive Order No. 157 against institutions and companies that support Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), an international, grassroots, nonviolent movement to gain freedom, equality, and justice for Palestinians, goes against this history. Perhaps the only good news here is that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution still guarantees our right to advocate for change, to organize against injustice, to engage in boycotts, and, yes, to advocate for BDS. 

To learn more, go to palestinelegal.org/newyork. 

The #RightToBoycott is a constitutionally protected form of political free speech. 

We will not be silent.

Helaine Meisler