Read the following and list all the lies, falsehoods, misrepresentations, half-truths and propaganda techiniques employed -
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Boycott Action: Non-violent Protest in Front of American Apparel Store
Sponsored by Voices of Palestine (voicesofpalestine.org)
Co-sponsored by the Greater Seattle Chapter of Veterans for Peace (vfp92.org)
TELL AMERICAN APPAREL TO DISAVOW ITS LINKS TO APARTHEID AND CLOSE ITS STORES IN ISRAEL
HELP BUILD AWARENESS OF THE GLOBAL PALESTINIAN BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, AND SANCTIONS (BDS) CAMPAIGN
Media Contact: Shelley Day, shelleymday@gmail.com
When: Saturday, March 6, 2010 from 12 noon until 2 PM
Where: American Apparel, NE 45th St. & University Way NE, Seattle (map)
Why: American Apparel (AA) bills itself as a socially conscious producer and vendor of "hip" clothing but there's nothing progressive or admirable about supporting Israeli apartheid. On AA's web site it is proudly asserted that AA "is part Israeli, literally." When a pro-Israel blogger produced a parody "Zionist Apparel" ad, AA's webmaster thought it was great and added it to their web site.
More importantly, contrary to the 2005 call of Palestinian civil society for "broad boycotts ... against Israel," AA has opened two stores in that country, one in Tel Aviv and another in al-Quds (Jerusalem) with plans to open another in Haifa. As the authors of the 2009 Toronto Declaration noted: "Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and ... the city of Jaffa, Palestine's main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population." The Tel Aviv store is in the Dizengoff Center, named after Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv. Dizengoff, who was born in Imperial Russia, first traveled to Palestine under the auspices of Baron Edmond de Rothschild's colonization scheme.
While scouting locations for the al-Quds store, an AA employee took time out to mug for the camera with two armed soldiers from North America serving in an Israeli combat unit. The al-Quds store is located in/near the historic Mamilla district, "one of seven mixed or mainly Arab neighborhoods" that was "emptied of its Arab inhabitants" during the 1948 war (Bernard Wasserstein, Divided Jerusalem, p. 163). Today, despite protests and lawsuits a branch of the Museum of Tolerance is being built in an historic Muslim cemetery a couple of hundred meters south of AA's al-Quds store (see mamillacampaign.org).
The planned location of AA's third store is Haifa, one of the largest cities of Palestine to be ethnically cleansed during the Nakba--"Out of the 61,000 Palestinian Arabs who used to call Haifa home, only 3,566 Palestinians were allowed to stay."
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4 comments:
Better than worrying about all the lies in the article would be to visit the shop and BUY the items sold there, keeping them in Israel! After all, in fact, BUSINESS speaks louder than protests... (see example of Coca Cola).
dont we know that sanctions and boycotts never work and what is more- the target audience of such action never really suffer from it...
Suzanne, I don't agree. You can do both.
First, al-Quds is one of several Arabic names for the city. Another one of them is Urshalim al-Quds. This makes it clearer that al-Quds is taken from the Hebrew haQodesh [the holiness or the holy place]. Jerusalem was and is often identified in Hebrew as Yerushalayim `ir haQodesh, rendered into Arabic pronunciation as Urshalim al-Quds. The first Arabic name for the city, which appears on only Arabic coins minted here was: Iliya, an Arabic pronunciation of the Roman name Aelia, short for Aelia Capitolina, which name the Emperor Hadrian gave to Jerusalem after his forces [including Arab troops] had defeated the Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba. This was at the same time [circa 135 CE] that Hadrian changed the name of the Province of Judea [Provincia Iudaea] to Provincia Syria-Palaestina. That was the first use of any form of the name Palestine by any power actually governing this country.
Tel Aviv was built originally on sand dunes north of Jaffa in the Ottoman period, before WW One. Would the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim state, have allowed Jews to build on top of Arab villages?? One of those who has tried to insinuate what is claimed by the boycott Israel group quoted by YM is Prof Mark LeVine of the Univ of Calif [I think at the Irvine branch of U of C]. But his book on the origins of Tel Aviv does not quite go so far, although he errs by omitting from his account of early Tel Aviv such events as the expulsion of the Jewish population [about 8,000 to 10,000 people] by the Ottoman govt in April 1917 [which some may see as similar to the first measures against the Armenians].
As to Yerushalayim `ir haQodesh, it had a Jewish majority population already in 1853, according to French diplomat and historian, Cesar Famin, who lived at that time. Many accounts agree that Jerusalem had a Jewish majority throughout most of the second half of the 19th century. And it still has a Jewish majority more than 156 years since Cesar Famin wrote his book.
Eliyahu - while what you write is fine and good, it won't make any impact on those who support this boycott of a company which wants to do business in Israel.
Stop "preaching to the choir" and buy the products so the company will stay in Israel. Or don't buy the products and they'll leave - the boycott will have worked and your history lesson will be for nothing - as I said, it's not important anyway for the people in question.
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