I actually read the thing right through. Not in one gulp! Kept it open and kept glancing over at it - until it got quite interesting as the judge starting laying out her/his reasonings on each issue point by point, then laying down judgments.
It was quite clear at the end who the judge thought was harassing whom over the approx. 8 years of legal threats leading to the case.
I wanted to see how the judge went about hearing and deciding the issues. The claimant's charges boiled down to the identical complaints of antisemitism we see here in I/P - even some of the same arguments. Which I think tells something of the case brought against BDS generally - that complaints against it rarely focus on trying to refute the actual grounds for BDS, claims of systematic institutional discrimination which when spelled out describe apartheid-like conditions. Rather, the attacks are on the persons of those who organize or support BDS, claims that these persons are racist. Thus e.g. the claimant in this case complains that the members of the U&C Union's action in bringing up the motion, and the motion being heard, contradicts the EU working definition of antisemitism, which when given an extremely broad interpretation implies that anyone who criticizes Israel's discriminatory laws and actions, is by that very action engaged and promoting antisemitism, discriminating against and harassing Jews for being Jewish. It's interesting how the U&C Union members, the lawyers for the Union, and the Judge hearing the case, handled that one.
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This is an interesting OP. I also notice that the US makes the anti-BDS case easy since the US introduced laws specifically to protect Israel from boycott actions.
Annie Robbins at mondoweiss explains how CREF trustees and officials themselves thwart their members' wishes.
http://mondoweiss.net/2013/04/tiaa-cref-asks-feds-for-ok-to-dodge-israeli-divestment-vote-at-annual-meeting.html
But then CREF removed Caterpillar (a BDS target) from its social choice funds, getting rid of $72 million in shares.
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/bds-victory-tiaa-cref-drops-caterpillar-from-social-choice-funds.html
But I'd be very interested in following a (BDS) case that challenged these US anti-boycott laws. On the very face of it the laws don't smell right. I can easily understand any state/gov't introducing laws requiring observation of state sanctions against targets, e.g. against doing business with Iran. But I can't understand the legal underpinning for laws that protect targets from boycotts. If the members of a certain financial trust, who united their financial holdings out of recognition of their common purpose whatever that might be, decide that investments (which in their nature thrive on mutual profitability) with some companies *don't* serve their general purpose while investments with other companies do, then how can the US justify outlawing the outcome of those investment decisions?
In Canada we have a lot of community trusts. People invest in them *just because* they have "ethical investment plans", which are plans that advertise that they explicitly boycott investments in enterprises which the members deem to be inconsistent with the way the world ought to be. Examples: clear cut logging, the Alberta tar sands, South Africa in the apartheid years, certain kinds of military activity, and the list goes on according as the members decide. The millions of people who invest in those trusts do so because they receive a certain satisfaction, one being profit, one being an understanding that they've done something, however passive, to slow degradation to the environment or whatever, and another being that such trusts commonly do invest in forward looking, progressive endeavors. IMO the gov't has no right to interfere in such business, disallowing decisions that it deems "in the national interests", as e.g. one can imagine the Harper gov't *wanting* to do w.r.t. the tar sands. Harper wouldn't dare!
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oops, SORRY! I go on and on. It's my greatest stupidity, as one friend told me.
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