The company's invoices contained statements such as, "We certify that the goods enumerated in this Invoice are not of Israeli origin and do not contain any Israeli materials."
"Texas company fined for complying with Arab boycott," by Michael Freund for the Jerusalem Post, October 25 (thanks to Dionysios):
The US government has imposed a civil penalty on a Texas-based subsidiary of a German firm for repeated violations of American law regarding compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel.In a settlement announced earlier this month, Rohde & Liesenfeld Inc., a freight-forwarder based in Houston, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $108,000 to settle charges leveled against it by the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security.
The bureau, which oversees enforcement of US anti-boycott rules, had accused the company of 36 violations of the law between July 2002 and March 2003 in a series of dealings with the Syrian petroleum company Al-Furat.
In the transactions in question, Rohde & Liesenfeld supplied the Damascus-based firm with invoices stating: "We certify that the goods enumerated in this Invoice are not of Israeli origin and do not contain any Israeli materials."
Various Muslim and Arab states regularly ask foreign firms to supply documentation confirming that they have no business or financial ties to Israel. US law requires American companies, as well as their subsidiaries, to report requests for such information to the Commerce Department....
I'm a little confused here. Can someone clarify what law was broken in this case? I'm as pro-Israel as they come, but I do think business ought to be able to make their own decisions as to who to deal with.
Monte,
Best guess is the company violated the Export Administration Act of 1979, specifically Section 8.
I say "Three Cheers" to the US DoC for actually doing something worthwhile.
"business ought to be able to make their own decisions as to who to deal with."
-- from a posting above
Why do you think that? Do you think American companies should not, during the Cold War, have been subject to export controls? Did you approve of the deals that, even while not subject to export controls, were made by such people as Armand Hammer of Occidental with the Soviet government?
What about all the Western companies that helped make possible, through their own rapacity and heedlessness, the nuclear bombs of Pakistan? Or those who have helped Iran, also incapable of producing the components needed?
Of course governments should interfere, in such cases.
And they should also interfere to break the power of the Jihad wherever it is conducted. If the Arabs attempt a boycott of Israel, then the American (and other Western powers) still have the economic power to force non-compliance with that boycott. And should the Arabs and other Muslims attempt to punish Denmark, or The Netherlands, through similar economic boycotts, there are ways for the Western world to deal with that as well.
The financial or economic weapon is wielded, whenever possible, by Muslims. It ought, whenever possible, to be wielded by those in the Infidel lands attempting to defend themselves from the Camp of Islam. Companies seeking private gain cannot, alas, be trusted always to do the right thing; there is much evidence to the contrary. Hence the need for laws to force them to do the right thing.
This is no time for free-market fundamentalism.
I had no idea about that law but I'm glad that it exists. You can't boycott Israel and be a remotely civilized society anyway. You can't go to a hospital, use a cameraphone, use Windows, have the polio vaccine, etc., etc.
Here's what you would have do without in order to boycott Israel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU221GA5-u8&eurl=http://reutrcohen.blogspot.com/
It's a long, long list of things that we all take for granted every day but could never do without.
Yet another reason why Muslims are doomed to live in hell on earth no matter where they might be, and yet another reason why Judeophobic nations cannot prosper or progress.
Ok, here's the sam evideo with a link that works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU221GA5-u8
I just wish Israel would totally boycott the Arabs for all time. Not allowing them into its country, or allowing them hospital visits, or anything at all across its borders.
Egypt can do all that.
Some confused thinking on this post.
In this case US law is punishing the US subsidiary of a German company for complying with a Syrian boycott of Israeli products.
Hugh's argument is that the US needs to be able to boycott trade with countries which could be hostile to the US. This is a fair point, but irrelevant to this argument. Here the US government is punishing a domestic company for complying with a foreign country A's boycott of foreign country B.
Imagine the German subsidiary of a Japanese company complying with the US boycott of Cuba. Would the EU fine that company? Would the US accept that it was completely fair and reasonable for the EU to fine that company?
George, we do not hold our citizen to EU (non) standards, thank God. At no point and for no reason can we trade with Israel-boycotting nations. Very few Arab nations actually enforce the boycott anyway because it's nearly impossible. They would have no cell phones or PCs.
I wish we never did any business or engaged in any diplomacy with nations which don't back Israel 100%, which just so happen to be the same nations which also don't hold regular, free elections, uphold the UDHR, and which didn't sign onto the Geneva Conventions.
Posted by: georgesdelatour
If your statement is a criticism of the USG, then read the link in post # 2.
I doubt very much they would do so. You can read this criticism of the Helms-Burton Act for the answer.
"Hugh's argument is that the US needs to be able to boycott trade with countries which could be hostile to the US. This is a fair point, but irrelevant to this argument. Here the US government is punishing a domestic company for complying with a foreign country A's boycott of foreign country B."
-- from a posting above
Foreign country B in this case is Israel, a member of the Western alliance that until recently has been the most obvious target of Jihad, though "Jihad" is still not the word that either Israel's government forthrightly dares to call it.
So let's offer a verisimilar hypothetical. Let's suppose the target were to be Denmark, a member of NATO, and it were to be subject to an economic boycott until the Danish government agreed to try and then to execute the publishers of the Muhammad cartoons. And the members of NATO agreed that they would do everything they could to break that boycott. And that meant they would not countenance even the supplying of paperwork designed to assure a boycotting country that nothing, say, came from Denmark.
Let's assume an American subsidiary of, say, a Japanese company, has certified to Syria that it has not (now follow here with the same language about Israeli goods that the Houston company supplied, but with "Danish" substituted for "Israeli"). Now assume that the American government, and the governments of other NATO countries, out of intelligent solidarity with Denmark, then fined the American subsidiary, in order to discourage both it, and its Japanese owner, from complying with the Muslim or Arab boycott of Denmark.
What's wrong with that?
If the entire West, by the way, were always and everywhere to take a firm stand against any boycott by Muslims or Arabs, there is nothing they could do. They are hopelessly dependent on the West for goods and services. We, in the West, tend to forget this, and we also tend to assume that they are selling us oil as some kind of favor. The absolute panic in OPEC at the moment shows exactly how reliant they are on oil, and also points up something else, which needs to be considered right now: the first act of a new President should be to slap a tax on gasoline, and on oil, and to explain, uncomrpomisingly, that the tax is there not only to stay, but to rise in steady and well-known increments. And that will dampen demand, and shift it over to other sources of energy. There should be no backsliding on pulling out of oil, for two reasons. The first is the need to quickly get off fossil fuels, and start building those nuclear reactors that ought to have been steadily built over the past forty years (as was done in France), in using the revenues from such taxes to rebuild a railroad system, to pay for tax breaks for the use of solar and wind energy by individuals, to subsidize mass transit and to do whatever else can be done to diiminish the use of oil and then other fossil fuels, including coal. The second is to deprive Muslims of the Money Weapon. Think back to 1950, and the power of the Muslim states then, and the amount of damage they were then capable of doing in spreading Islam to every nook and cranny of the Lands of the Infidels, and just look at them now.
And they only got that way with infidel technology and manpower. Cut off from the Free World, the Muslim world would be living in 10,000 BC. I don't know about nuclear power, though. I know there's goingto be a civil war in Europe, probably one that will start in France. If the Muslims aren't driven out then it will be Muslims in charge of those nuclear reactors in 30 years and that is not a reality that I am willing to face.