BEIRUT: A group that is being sued by Lebanese businessman Jihad Murr for holding a boycott in 2010 against a concert he organized called Tuesday for Arab civil society organizations to pressure him to drop the lawsuits.

Boycott National Committee, the Palestinian branch of Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Campaign in Lebanon, condemned the lawsuit filed by Murr in a statement it issued from Ramallah Tuesday.

“We call for dropping the lawsuit immediately as it inevitably serves Israel’s interests in undermining the boycott campaign which has become a major form of civil resistance to the Israeli occupation and Apartheid and has been growing steadily in Lebanon and the world,” the group said.

Murr, the head of To You To See, the company that organized a concert for the rock band Placebo, filed a lawsuit in June against the BDS, Samah Idriss, the director of Dar al-Adab publishing house and two other organizations for their involvement in a Lebanese boycott campaign of the band, demanding $180,000 compensation for losses allegedly caused by the campaign.

Lebanese activists called for the boycott against Placebo’s performance in Beirut to protest the rock group’s show in Tel Aviv, following Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.

Rania al-Masri, one of the organizers of the boycott and a defendant in the lawsuit, questioned Murr’s motives for taking legal action.

Speaking to The Daily Star Tuesday, Masri said that should this lawsuit succeed, this would jeopardize the Lebanese people’s right to freedom of expression and the implementation of the country’s laws, including the boycott law.

Masri said that Placebo’s performance was a violation of Lebanon’s boycott law from 1955, which calls on Lebanese citizens to boycott Israel and prohibits interactions with Israeli citizens or companies.

“If you read the law in its spirit, then yes, it constitutes a violation,” she said.

But in a phone call with The Daily Star, Murr said that the lawsuit was about intimidation, not expression.

“We support freedom of expression but not the kind that is used to impose a group’s ideas on others,” Murr said. “Having freedom of speech does not give you the right to intimidate people.”

According to Murr, demonstrations held at Placebo’s concert intimidated many people who were then reluctant to enter the venue, adding that would-be concert goers were also frightened after reading messages on websites that the venue might be bombed.

“We usually sell half of the tickets at the door, but we were only able to sell 10 percent last year [at the Placebo concert],” he said.

Masri says she remains undeterred by the lawsuits.

“If Murr is planning to lead a campaign against the boycott movement in Lebanon, he should be aware that it has become an international campaign,” Masri said.

“If he wants to open a fight, we welcome the opportunity … as we will have a bigger platform to explain why we are boycotting Israel,” she said.

The statement from the Boycott National Committee also accused Murr of using his resources and his media to promote the idea of separating art from politics and Israel’s policy of apartheid, but said that Placebo’s violation of the cultural boycott is a political stance and an act of complicity that serves Israeli propaganda.