Re: Request to Mini DebConf Montreal Organizers: Fight Israel not the DC20 Team
Didier 'OdyX' Raboud writes:
> Le mercredi, 19 février 2020, 16.17:00 h CET Sam Hartman a écrit :
>> Debian is Asked to Support a Protest of a Debian Activity
>> =========================================================
>>
>> The Montreal organizers could have simply organized an alternative for
>> those who were not traveling to DC20 for whatever reason.
>> That's something Debian could support with no reservations.
>>
>> By making the political statement in their announcement, they have
>> turned the conference into a protest. It's being billed as an
>> alternative to DebConf for political reasons.
>>
>> (…)
>>
>> So in effect the Debian Project is being asked to support a protest of
>> its own activity.
>
> The crux of my strong disagreement is here: as DPL, you just _framed_ the
> Montreal miniDebConf as a protest.
I think the announcement by the organizers framed the conference as
being organized specifically to support the BDS movement, a movement
that is uncontroversially seen as antisemitic. They could have chosen
not to frame the announcement this way, but they did not.
So the announcement forced the question to be whether Debian should
officially support such a movement or not by providing resources to
events organized in support of BDS. And honestly if people want to drag
the project into supporting something like the BDS movement, maybe we
should rather have a GR about it (including the option to explicitly
*NOT* support it). Though arguably the diversity statement should pretty
much include rejecting antisemitism and thus BDS...
And before people complain too much about BDS being antisemitic being
controversial: a resolution passed by the German parliament includes
comparisons of BDS with 'Kauft nicht bei Juden!' calls that were popular
sometime last century[1]; the US has adopted [2]. These resolutions
were pretty uncontroversial and adopted with very wide support from
pretty much all parties: the resolution in Germany was supported by at
least CDU/CSU/SPD/Grüne/FDP, so ~80%+, Die Linke had a different
resolution which also included "Reject BDS movement" even in its title,
so 87%+ reject BDS); the US resolution got something like 398:17 votes.
And because we are talking about Canada and Toronto: Wikipedia says that
Ontario in 2016 passed a motion condemning BDS as well, because "The
motion was necessary because of growing concern on Ontario’s university
campuses where members of BDS movements have harassed and targeted
Jewish students under the guise of free speech"[3]. The two largest
parties supporting the motion held 82 of 107 seats at the time. So
again pretty uncontroversial.
Ansgar
[1]: http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/19/101/1910191.pdf
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/246/text
[3]: https://torontosun.com/2016/12/01/ontario-mpps-reject-bds-movement/wcm/12c5c198-aa3a-459d-b34b-2c1d47c1475a
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