Among those opposed to the bill were Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Congressman Thomas Massie and conservative pundit Charlie Kirk.
(LifeSiteNews) — Conservatives defeated a bill that they say would have penalized Americans who engage in private boycotts of Israel.
Influencers as well as GOP lawmakers made their opposition to H.R. 867 known this past weekend, causing the bill to be pulled from the voting schedule.
“It is my job to defend American’s rights to buy or boycott whomever they choose without the government harshly fining them or imprisoning them,” U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said Sunday on X.
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk also expressed opposition to the bill, as did GOP Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and former Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz.
“Bills like this only create more antisemitism and play into growing narratives that Israel is running the U.S. government. In America you are allowed to hold differing views,” Kirk announced Sunday.
Gaetz echoed those concerns.
This law is “dangerous and unconstitutional.” We “shouldn’t … punish dissent or ‘thought crimes’ with prison," he said on X.
H.R. 867 is an amendment to the Anti-Boycott Act of 2018. It was introduced in January by New York GOP Rep. Mike Lawmaker and Democrat Josh Gottheimer. Twenty-two lawmakers are co-sponsors. Gottheimer’s office boasted that the update was intended to target “harmful and inherently anti-Semitic BDS efforts at IGOs, such as the UN, by extending protections already in place for boycotts instigated by foreign countries.”
The original Anti-Boycott Act of 2018 was approved to ban U.S. entities from boycotting certain American allies abroad. It states that "it is the policy of the United States to oppose restrictive trade practices or boycotts fostered or imposed by any foreign country against other countries friendly to the United States or against any United States person."
Zionist George Mason professor Eugene Kontorovich, who has Israeli citizenship, has pushed back against the bill’s critics. In a recent X post, he argued that the bill does little more than codify existing norms.
“All that the new bill does is add ‘international organizations’ like the UN & EU to the scope of the prohibition, since they too wield governmental power,” he said. “Federal courts have upheld the ‘Arab League’ boycott provisions against constitutional challenge — and adding the UN changes nothing.”
This past weekend, the Israeli government voted to approve an expanded ground game in Gaza as part of a larger plan to occupy the region, which Israeli has prevented from receiving medical aid for the past two months. The move has been criticized by international agencies as it is using food as a weapon to starve the people there in order to have them succumb to Israeli occupation.
