Select Board must reject IHRA examples
Strategic ambiguity is not a responsible option here.
On March 25 last year, Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by ICE while walking down the street in Somerville. The sole grounds given for her abduction was authorship of an opinion piece critical of Israel that, based on a Trump executive order that promoted the IHRA definition, could be branded antisemitic.
Memories are short. Acton’s Select Board gave the IHRA definition their seal of approval on January 27 of this year. In response to my Open Meeting Law complaints, the Select Board has admitted that their process was rushed and confused, and they have indicated they will revisit their proclamation at their April 13 meeting.
Defenders of the IHRA definition have fixated on its “non-legally binding” status or have asserted that it has not been adopted into official policy. But as the ACLU wrote in an urgent letter to our Select Board on January 27, government actions that are neither statute nor official policy can of course still promote viewpoint discrimination and chill political speech.
Others have relied on the potentially ambiguous status of the definition’s tendentious “contemporary examples” of antisemitism: Paul Boehm now says the Select Board didn’t endorse the IHRA examples at all but resists amending the proclamation to make this explicit. At the January 27 meeting he said they were just “for guidance.” Privately, he emailed Chair Mark Howell on January 26 that they were “not necessarily” endorsing the examples and pressed him not to “open up the meeting to a full discussion” for fear of starting a “political discussion.”
So are the examples in, or are they out? Strategic ambiguity is not a responsible option here. If the Select Board thinks freedom of speech is worth defending, they should amend their proclamation to explicitly reject these examples, or erase the IHRA definition entirely.
John Dilworth
Hubbard Street
