[flagged]
replies(3):
The difference between the US and the rest of the world is that the US has the First Amendment, which it upholds. So, for example, in the US "hate speech" is not banned, and while inciting violence is banned, it must be literal incitement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
This is important, because freedom of speech was supposedly allowed behind the Iron Curtain as well, as long as it wasn't "going against the socialist order" or "promoting fascism" (with capitalism or social democracy being just light fascism). Various countries found ways to pay lip service to human rights, while being authoritarian.
The enlightenment era gave us two separate definitions of freedom. At its foundation, the US govt is granted whatever rights it has to constrain freedom by wholly autonomous and free individuals, and in the other (French, continental) conception freedom is both defined and granted by the state. Authoritarianism is baked into the definition.
It will take future historians living in more intellectually permissive times to give a full account as to why the first concept of freedom only ever took root in the US and why the majority of countries have adopted the second.
You can say a lot of awful shit, but you really can't openly oppose the State with any real threat of power. I mean, I wouldn't really call the US admitting to assassinating Malcom X, MLK, among others, the pinnacle of free speech... all theses people did was speak out against injustices that they observed... and that's just one incident. This happens everyday.
So the US only upholds 1A when it decides it wants to. In other words, no, it doesn't really uphold it.
(And for the record, I'm mostly fine with that! I'm tired of this idea that absolute free speech is a thing, that people actually have it in large numbers, and that if they did, it would actually be a good thing.)
I don't know what "absolute" means for you, but yes, free speech is good, the more free it is, the better. As to your popularity fallacy, consider that for most of our time on earth, constant war and slavery were normal, and our grand-grandparents knew both.
"The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to revive a newspaper's challenge on free speech grounds to an Arkansas law requiring state government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel, a policy the publication's lawyers called a threat to a constitutionally protected form of collective protest." [1]
1. https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-spurns-challe...
2. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/23/us-states-use-anti-boyco...
This is hyperbolic and obviously false.
Brain-dead and authoritarian though the anti-BDS legislation is -- it is ultimately a corner case with very narrow applicability.
On the whole, you are perfectly free to criticize Israel in the U.S., and of course countless people have been doing just that for multiple decades.