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