A bill to outlaw the Arab boycott in Massachusetts remained stalled in the State Senate where serious opposition developed last week after the measure passed the State House of Representatives. Sen. Jack Backman (D. Brookline-Newton), one of the sponsors of the legislation, temporarily postponed action to provide additional time to clarify its language.
Backman said he agreed to the postponement “at the request of the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Boston” to allow its attorneys “additional time to work out some technical amendments to the bill which will eliminate any possible legal questions that have been raised by certain international corporations.”
The corporations most vigorously opposed to the anti-boycott bill are the Raytheon Corp, and the Perini Construction Co. Their representatives said at a meeting last week at the office of Senate President Kevin Harrington that while the firms do not favor the Arab boycott, they felt the
bill, as written, could be injurious to their business and was an unconstitutional state usurpation of federal power that could be harmful to U.S. trade abroad. Lobbying by Raytheon is believed to have turned many Senators against the pending legislation, seriously jeopardizing its chances of adoption in its present form.
NEED TO PREVENT DISCRIMINATION
Proponents of the bill who attended the meeting pointed to the need to prevent Arab countries from imposing their religious, racial and sex discriminatory practices upon American businesses. Albert Schlossberg, JGC president, who headed a delegation of the organization, and Matthew Brown a member of the delegation, stressed that anti-boycott legislation is imperative at this time when the nation is celebrating its bicentennial. Discrimination against Americans, white or Black, Jew or non-Jew, should not be tolerated and should not be traded away for fear of Arab retaliation, they said.
Martin Annis, president of American Science and Engineering, a firm that deals with Arab countries, also supported the bill. He said that anti-boycott legislation would not prevent American businessmen from obtaining Arab contracts and that the legislation was needed for healthy business relations.
Backman declared that he was “committed to passage of this bill to make certain that discrimination against Massachusetts business and individuals by the Arab boycott will cease. This form of boycott against Massachusetts people is economic blackmail which neither the Commonwealth nor the federal government should tolerate.” Backman said he was confident the bill would be approved by the Legislature once it was redrafted.
REPORTS COMPANIES ‘FEARFUL’
He said he was shocked to “have been told directly by some of our multi-national corporations doing business in Massachusetts that they are fearful of the Arab boycott.” The Raytheon Corp. is one of the 200 companies recently named by the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League as aiding the Arab economic boycott of Israel. Last March, according to a report in the Boston Globe, Raytheon was charged with violation of state and federal laws in connection with a technical school in Saudi Arabia. Raytheon recently concluded its largest cash commercial sale with Saudi Arabia for $1.1 billion which is believed to include at least six “Hawk” anti-aircraft missile batteries.
Schlossberg and Brown pointed out that “the Hawk missiles which Saudi Arabia has ordered from Raytheon can only be purchased from Raytheon and the Arabs will continue to trade with them as they have with other American or European countries whose products they need.”
In another boycott development, Rep. H. John Heinz (R.Pa.) charged before the House International Relations Committee last week that Aramco (Arabian-American Oil Co.) had deliberately backed out of a contract with the Delaware Port Authority because of anti-boycott measures currently pending in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. The Delaware Port Authority has jurisdiction over the port of Philadelphia. New York and Maryland have passed anti-boycott measures.
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