Anti-Israel shoe store boycott a PR failure
By JANICE ARNOLD, Staff Reporter, Canadian Jewish News
Thursday, 13 January 2011
MONTREAL — The anti-Israel boycott campaign has suffered a major setback in Quebec because it targeted a small family business and especially because of the intervention of Québec solidaire MNA Amir Khadir, the Quebec-Israel Committee (QIC) believes.
The organization’s research and communications director, David Ouellette, describes as unprecedented the repudiation in the French media of the campaign to convince the public not to buy Israeli products as a result of the singling out of the Boutique Le Marcheur on St. Denis Street.
The coverage has cast in a negative light both the campaign’s methods and the propriety of an elected official picketing a local store because it sells a line of shoes from Israel that comprises a small percentage of its inventory.
Ouellette has collected a thick dossier of newspaper, television, radio and online material to support that conclusion. Although unions and other broad-based organizations such as the Federation des femmes du Québec have officially endorsed the boycott of Israel in the past few years, the QIC maintains that the issue continues to garner “marginal” support from the Quebec public.
The appearance that the participation of Khadir – who, according to a recent poll, is the most popular politician in the province – has harmed the boycotters’ cause rather than helped it only bolsters that conclusion, Ouellette said.
“The media coverage aroused a wave of moral indignation,” Ouellette said. “There is no public support for BDS in Quebec. Quebecers don’t buy the ‘apartheid’ label.”
On Dec. 18, about 150 people, mostly francophones, journalists and other opinion-makers among them, swamped Le Marcheur while the picketing outside was in progress. It was the first organized anti-boycott action by non-Jews in Quebec, he said.
Commentators have questioned why Khadir seems concerned only with the human-rights record of one state and not more egregious violators, and they’ve rejected the contention that Israel can be compared to South Africa’s former apartheid regime.
Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) began Saturday afternoon demonstrations Oct. 2 outside Le Marcheur, which has been in existence for more than 30 years. The handful of demonstrators hold placards denouncing Israel’s alleged violations of Palestinian rights and hand out pamphlets explaining why Quebecers should not buy Israeli goods as a way of pressuring its government.
PAJU is the group that held weekly demonstrations outside the Israeli consulate for seven years until a couple of years ago, when the consulate moved from downtown to Westmount Square.
The picketing at Le Marcheur was ignored by the mainstream media until Khadir showed up on Dec. 11, when holiday shopping was at its height. Québec solidaire officially endorsed the so-called boycott, sanctions and divestment campaign against Israel in November 2009, and Khadir, the party’s sole MNA, has since tried to get the National Assembly to entertain a motion on the issue.
Soon after Khadir’s appearance, the Journal de Montréal ran a story quoting Le Marcheur owner Yves Archambault complaining that he was being “harassed” by the deputy for the adjacent riding of Mercier and charging that Khadir would do better to promote business in the Plateau Mont-Royal than thwart it.
Eric Duhaime, a columnist for the QMI Agency news service and leader of the new right-wing Réseau-Liberté Québec movement, was soon denouncing the leftist Khadir for his “radicalism.”
Duhaime was a guest on the TV talk show hosted by former Action démocratique leader Mario Dumont on the V network (the renamed TQS).
Other Journal columnists such as Richard Martineau and Joseph Facal also castigated Khadir and the boycott “crusade.”
In a lengthy analysis in the magazine L’Actualité, Jean-François Lisée concluded the term apartheid doesn’t apply to Israel.
But the most hard-hitting condemnation came from Lysiane Gagnon at La Presse. Under the headline “Khadir le fanatique,” she deplored his “obsessional anti-Zionism.”
In his retort, Khadir shot back that his party’s goal is to boycott Israeli products, not the merchants who sell them, and that he tried in vain to explain this position to Le Marcheur’s owner. Archambault has refused to give in to the protesters’ demands or meet them face to face.
“My intention was not to encourage the boycott of this merchant, and I hope that any misunderstanding will be finally cleared up soon, when PAJU will have re-evaluated its action and its approach.”
Khadir said he can’t accept being portrayed as “a fanatic motivated by hatred of an ethnic group,” and wondered why he hasn’t been labelled anti-Iranian for his 30 years of protesting Islamic rule in the country where he was born.
Anti-boycott activist Sharon Freedman agrees that targeting Le Marcheur has failed miserably, and she thinks Khadir is “in retreat” thanks to “the French media questioning his real underlying motives and agenda,” as well as the many people from inside and outside the Jewish community who have purposely patronized the store.
“Mr. Khadir, an MNA from a nearby area, is supposed to represent and promote all the businesses… He doesn’t care for the employees that could have lost their jobs if morally thinking people had not acted and remained indifferent,” she said.
Freedman raised more than $3,000, much of it her own money, to buy shoes at Le Marcheur, which she donated to the Welcome Hall Mission for homeless men before Christmas.
Jacob Kincler, another individual who is trying to counter the boycott, recently received a phone call from the president of Rishon Lezion-based Onyx Footwear Industries Ltd. which makes BeautiFeel, the brand Le Marcheur stocks.
Ami Bar-Nahor has been following the anti-boycott effort from the start and is grateful to the Montreal Jewish community and its supporters, Kincler said.