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by kjellWho 1529 days ago
I wonder how someone who publicly joked about supporting ISIS or Al-Qaeda and hoping they strike the new WTC would be greeted if they arrived to the US.
3 comments

I don't know about the US but in some parts of Europe I'd agree the result would be similar to what happened here:

>In 2013, a French mother was sentenced for “glorifying a crime” after she allowed her son, named Jihad, to go to school wearing a shirt that said “I am a bomb.”

I wonder if the outcome would have been any different if the shirt said "I am the bomb."
There is a significant difference between snarky jabs at a regime and open support of groups who have in the past (and seek to again in the future) commit violent international terrorism.

If you openly support those kinds of groups, you absolutely SHOULD be stopped and interviewed/interrogated at the border. The 'humor' part has to be evaluated (e.g. if someone is always cracking weird jokes vs someone who suddenly pulls a Trumpian rant-one liner and tries to pass if off as ha-ha when it's really just the quiet part out loud).

To be fair, the US is hardly a good example for a civilised/normal Western country.
If we were to rank "civilized" by restrictions on speech, as you seem to be doing here, the US would be so far ahead that it's not even a comparison. Like of all things to go "America bad, europe good" on, free speech is absolutely not it.

(Yes, the excuse is that Europe has a different definition of free speech but the UAE would probably say the same. And even then I don't see how the US would be uncivilized according to the european definition of free speech lol)

Try talking about Palestine in US?
Are you implying you'd get arrested? I remember attending a Palestine/BDS protest in NYC a few years ago and nothing happening to me even as a canadian (muslim arab) visitor.

I agree though that the restrictions on supporting BDS in some parts of the US are completely absurd. And I always find it funny that conservatives turn a completely blind eye to those laws (especially since it's in Texas! Pretty ironic). Yet the same laws often also apply in europe, and they are usually a lot stricter so my original point stands.

>Hervieu pointed to a recent ruling by the Court of Cassation, France’s court of final appeal, which upheld the criminal convictions of 12 BDS activists who burst into a supermarket in 2009 wearing “Boycott Israel” shirts and handing out fliers that read, “Buying Israeli products means legitimising crimes in Gaza.”

>The legislation means that what BDS activists regarded as political statements denouncing Israel’s violations of international law could be – and indeed were – treated by French courts as an "incitement" to hatred.

https://www.france24.com/en/20160120-france-boycott-israel-b...

The left pretty solidly supports Palestine over Israel. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashida_Tlaib
Hmmm? The nearest Palestinian flag that I can think of on display in my neighborhood is just a few blocks from my house.

Do you mean that the U.S. treats Palestinian activists poorly for visa purposes?

I wonder where you get this theory from. Because it's illegal IN GERMANY to lie about the holocaust?

The US' "free" speech mantra has become a running gag with the post-9/11 developments already. I is peaking right now with all the evangelically influenced madness that is happening there.

What would be a better one?