#BoycottZara

[mariacallous]

On Boxing Day pro-Palestine demonstrators met customers at the Zara sale in the Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London. They were not there to wish them the compliments of the season.

‘Bombs are dropping while you’re shopping,’ they chanted, as police stood by to make sure the protests did not turn violent. ‘Zara is enabling genocide,’ their placards read.

Quite what they wanted bargain hunters to do about the Israeli forces bombing the Gaza Strip, they never said. Lobby their MPs? Politicians are on their Christmas holidays. Join the Palestinian armed struggle?  It was unclear whether the shopping centre had a Hamas recruitment office.

But on one point the demonstrators were certain: no one should be buying from Zara. Even though the fashion chain has not encouraged Israel’s war against Hamas, earned income from it, or supported Israel in any material way, it was nevertheless “exploiting a genocide and commodifying Palestine's pain for profit”.

Zara, in short, has become the object of a paranoid fantasy: a QAnon conspiracy theory for the postcolonial left.

The Zara conspiracy is an entirely modern phenomenon. It has no original author. Antisemitic Russians sat down and wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 20th century. There was an actual “Q” behind the QAnon conspiracy: a far-right activist who first appeared on 4chan message boards in 2017 to claim that a cabal of child abusers was conspiring against Donald Trump.

The Zara conspiracy was mass produced by social media users: an example of the madness of crowds rather than their supposed wisdom. The cause of the descent into hysteria was bizarre.

In early December Zara launched an advertising campaign featuring the model Kristen McMenamy wearing its latest collection in a sculptor’s studio. It clearly was a studio, by the way, and not a war zone in southern Israel or Gaza. McMenamy carried a mannequin wrapped in white fabric. The cry went up that the Spanish company was exploiting the suffering of Palestinians and that the mannequin was meant to represent a victim of Israeli aggression wrapped in a shroud.

The accusation was insane. No one in the photo shoot resembled a soldier or a casualty of war. Anyone who thought for 30 seconds before resorting to social media would have known that global brands plan their advertising campaigns months in advance.

Zara said the campaign presented “a series of images of unfinished sculptures in a sculptor’s studio and was created with the sole purpose of showcasing craft-made garments in an artistic context”. The idea for the studio setting was conceived in July. The photo shoot was in September, weeks before the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October.

No one cared. Melanie Elturk, the CEO of fashion brand Haute Hijab, said of the campaign, ‘this is sick. What kind of sick, twisted, and sadistic images am I looking at?’ #BoycottZara trended on Twitter, as users said that Zara was ‘utterly shameful and disgraceful”’.

To justify their condemnations, activists developed ever-weirder theories. A piece of cardboard in the photoshoot was meant to be a map of Israel/Palestine turned upside down. Because a Zara executive had once invited an extreme right-wing Israeli politician to a meeting, the whole company was damned.

Astonishingly, or maybe not so astonishingly to anyone who follows online manias, the fake accusations worked. Zara stores in Glasgow, Toronto. Hanover, Melbourne and Amsterdam were targeted.

What on earth could Zara do? PR specialists normally say that the worst type of apology is the non-apology apology, when a public figure or institution shows no remorse, but instead says that they are sorry that people are offended. Yet Zara had not sought to trivialize or profit from the war so what else could it do but offer a non-apology apology? The company duly said it was sorry that people were upset.

“Unfortunately, some customers felt offended by these images, which have now been removed, and saw in them something far from what was intended when they were created,” it said on 13 December, and pulled the advertising campaign

That was two-weeks ago and yet still the protests in Zara stores continue. On 23 December activists targeted Zara on Oxford Street chanting , 'Zara, Zara, you can't hide, stop supporting genocide', even though Zara was not, in fact,  supporting genocide. On Boxing Day, they were at the Stratford shopping centre.

Zara has apologised for an offence it did not commit. There is no way that any serious person can believe the charges against it. And yet believe them the protestors do. Or at the very least they pretend to believe for the sake of keeping in with their allies.

Maybe nothing will come of the protests. One could have argued in 2017, after all, that QAnon was essentially simple-minded people living out their fantasies online. Certainly, every sane American knew that there was no clique of paedophiles running the Democrat party, but where was the harm in the conspiracy theory?

Then QAnon supporters stormed the US capitol in January 2021. Will the same story play out from the Gaza protests? As far as I can tell, no one on the left is challenging the paranoia. I have yet to see the fact-checkers of the BBC and Channel 4 warning about the fake news on the left with anything like the gusto with which they treat its counterparts on the right.

To be fair, the scale of disinformation around the Gaza war is off the charts, and it is impossible to chase down every lie. But when fake news goes from online fantasies to real world protests, from 4chan to the Capitol, from Twitter to the Westfield shopping centre, it’s worth taking notice.

Sensible supporters of a Palestinian state ought to be the most concerned. No one apart from fascists, Islamists and far leftists believes that Israel should not defend itself. And yet the scale of its military action in Gaza is outraging world opinion. Mainstream politicians, who might one day put pressure on Israel, remain very wary about reflecting the anger on the streets.

They look at the insane conspiracy theories on the western left and see them as no different from the insane conspiracy theories that motivate Hamas, and they back away.

The Palestinians need many things: an end to the Netanyahu government, and an end to Hamas. But they could also use allies in the West who do not discredit their cause with dark, gibbering fantasies.

[aichabouchareb]

Zara announcing its exclusive collection of shrouds, it seems to mock the Palestinian victims, their bodies, and the destruction in Gaza.

#Boycottzara 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

#zara #palestine #palestine resources #free palestine #gaza #humanity #blood #save palestine #palestinians lives matters #talk about palestinians #boycott zara #boycott #boycott israel

[phoenixprincemerlin]

#FreePalestine_Now #StopGazaGenocide #StopGenocideInGaza #BoycottHP #BoycottMarvel #BoycottIsraeliProducts #BoycottIsrahell #BoycottZara #BoycottZionists #boycottzaraforever

[thenewsexplainer]

Why BoycottZara is Now Trending

Zara, a clothing brand from Spain, is currently in hot water. Their new ad campaign, ‘The Jacket’, has stirred up a storm. The reason being, the photos from the campaign are eerily similar to the distressing scenes from Gaza. Read why BoycottZara is now trending BoycottZara The Issue People on the internet have voiced their concerns, stating that the photos remind them of the harsh realities in…

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[rebelwithacauze]

Ask yourselves:

WHY did Zara resort to such unscrupulous behaviour by using the Palestinian genocide which is currently happening in real time ?

Why did the retail giant risk a boycott at this time of the year when people are on a spending spree?I have 2 possible reasons:

One- their marketing team promoted the bloody campaign as a show of solidarity with Israel indirectly supporting the genocide in Gaza .

And Two : Israel is using the retail company as a propaganda tool, obviously at a hefty financial price.

Bottom line,no CEO or a marketing team with a sizable profit in sight will resort to such perilous conduct that could subject its financials to a massive blow!

You don't need to be a genius to figure this out!

@ZARA @Israel #boycottzara #PalestinianLivesMatter #gaza #GazaGenocide #Spain #Spanish #retail #Israel #IsraelLies #propaganda #ZaraBoycott #BDS #peoplepower #ziowood

#settler colonialism #palestine #wakeupworld #voiceforgaza #freepalestine #israeli #israel #gaza #palestinian #jerusalem #humanity

[vedicastrologyy]

उत्पन्ना एकादशी कब है 8 या 9 दिसंबर 2023 | Utpanna Ekadashi 2023 | कब है उत्‍पन्‍ना एकादशी

Ekadashi Vrat 2023: मार्गशीर्ष मास के कृष्ण पक्ष की एकादशी तिथि के दिन उत्पन्ना एकादशी मनाई जाती है।

https://www.vinaybajrangi.com/blog/vrat/ekadashi-vrat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3_wZm7TJ3U

#utpannaekadashi2023 #ekadashi2023 #indianastrology #ekadashi_special #SalaarComingBloodySoon #BoycottZara #AnushkaSharma #INDvPAK #JammuAndKashmir #KaateraSecondSingle #Arrest_Tavleen_Singh #MAGA #AmericaFirst #AlexJones #Truth #TheBestIsYetToCome

#youtube

[msmemaaaa]

How disgusting the world we live in, how disgusting humans are when there is no humanity!!

This is pure evil and disgusting!

#BoycottZara

#free palestine #gaza genocide #israel is a terrorist state #zara #boycott zara

[kashmirmonitor]

#BoycottZara: Palestinians launch campaign to boycott Spanish fashion giant after it hosted Israeli far-right leader

#BoycottZara: Palestinians launch campaign to boycott Spanish fashion giant after it hosted Israeli far-right leader

Spanish fashion giant Zara is under fire for hosting Israeli far-right leader Itamar Ben Gvir at a campaign event. Palestinians have called for Zara after the company’s franchisee for its Israeli stores hosted Itamar Ben Gvir at a campaign event. Ben Gvir had called for killing and displacing Palestinians. He has been a proponent of settlers’ incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque and the…

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#fashion #Israeli #Palestinians #Spanish

[mariacallous]

The war in the Middle East is a laboratory for new means of spreading fake news. Propagandists across the world are watching and learning. This year will see democracy’s biggest test: more than two billion people across 50 countries are expected to go to the polls. And a fair proportion of them will be on the receiving end of disinformation techniques refined in Gaza.

The extent of the lying is breathtaking. The BBC’s Verify unit says it has seen nothing to compare to the ‘volume of dehumanising rhetoric posted during this war’.  Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative website Bellingcat says the level of disinformation in the Israeli-Gaza war is ‘unique to this conflict’.  The Israel and US based security company Cyabra, which monitors fake news on social media, adds that about 20 percent of accounts participating in the online conversation about the war in the days after 7 October were fake. On social media, X (the bin fire formerly known as Twitter) and TikTok were the favourite sites for disinformation, as you would expect.

The explosion of lying reflects a grim truth: for state and private actors, it has never been cheaper or easier to establish credible sock puppets, and then order bot armies to spread falsehoods.  I could look at horrible  claims that a Palestinian mother was just pretending to cradle her dead baby (see picture above), or that Israelis giving accounts of their sufferings at the hands of Hamas were just actors.

However, to show the extent of the new world of lies I want to return to the story I covered last week: the fake news that an advertising campaign by Zara was somehow mocking or exploiting the war-ravaged people of Gaza. Like the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, the story matters more than the usual online rubbish because it was a lie with measurable consequences.

Across the world, pro-Palestinian protestors targeted Zara stores. In the US, Canada, Spain, and Sweden, they vandalised them. A video on social media showed that disgusted customers had thrown piles of clothes in front of the Zara store in Times Square, New York. Or at least so the accompanying propaganda claimed.  The video turned out to be footage of an old protest against another brand.  

As I said at the time, the demonstrations showed the madness of crowds in action. They decided to hate a clothing chain that had done nothing to justify their rage. Zara’s agency shot the ad campaign long before Hamas attacked Israel. No one in the photo shoot resembled a soldier or a casualty of war. The pictures showed a model in a sculptor’s studio posing with a mannequin, which was clearly not meant to refer to the corpses of slain Palestinians

And yet even after Zara apologised for an imaginary offence and withdrew the ads, demonstrators continued to target the company. Only a few days ago, they closed the Zara  store at the Trafford Centre in Manchester.  

But I only told half the story. The truth was that much of the rage was confected.

Cyabra uses machine learning scanners to study social media sites and identify fake accounts. They process scores of clues: whether the account is posting 24/7, whether it is posting in multiple languages. The company scanned X, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, and noticed that Zara was initially criticized for being oblivious to the war and its victims. But the conversations quickly adopted a conspiratorial tone, and you could guess that someone was raising the stakes by looking at the trending hashtags

What began with the hashtag ‘#BoycottZara’ turned to the false ‘#Zara_is_a_zionist_brand,’ and  the frankly mad ‘#ZaraSupportsGenocide.’

Faced with what it thought was genuine anger, Zara pulled the campaign. The BBC, the Guardian, Business Insider  and scores of other news sites reported the climbdown and treated the allegations that Zara was exploiting Palestinian suffering seriously.

When they did, they missed the role of well-resourced and malicious actors. Cyabra said that 39% of the profiles that interacted with Zara were, in fact, fake.  The bots were also far more active than real protestors, it found.

Bots ‘were prominently pushing the hashtags “#Zara_is_a_Zionist_brand” and “#ZaraSupportsGenocide,” the security firm said. ‘They were actively engaged in conversations about the Israel-Hamas war, making sure to regularly tag Zara and interact with the brand while advocating a boycott.’ They were giving protests against Israel more weight, by turning then into demonstrations against the evils of global capitalism.

Journalists covering the story had no way of knowing this. They and Zara did not have the tech to analyse tens of thousands of social media accounts, and nor did their readers and viewers. Suppose they did. Suppose the media reported that, while there were undoubtedly real people who disapproved of Zara’ photoshoot, almost four out of ten of the accounts attacking the firm were fake, and looked as if they were part of a coordinated influence operations campaign possibly run by Iran or Russia.

Exposure would make all the difference, as would the exposure of any other campaign boosted by malicious actors. If readers suspect a trick, they will be on guard.

It is about to get significantly harder for readers and journalists to realise that they are being tricked. For Gaza is also showing that the quality of the lying is increasing as fast as the quantity of lies.

We are in the very early days of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution which presages an anarchic future for open democracies. Put simply, the fake news AI creates is more believable. AI can tailor the messages from social media accounts so they appeal to a precise target audience.  Until now, targeting has been a difficulty from propagandists. If they wanted to spread conspiracy theories to, say white working-class men, they needed a different tone and vocabulary than if they were targeting wealthy retirees. A Russian propagandist may well not know how to do that.  

Campaigns to persuade US Republicans to abandon Ukraine need to be in authentic American English not British or international English.  ChatGPT can now translate propaganda into the required dialect in seconds and ensure that it doesn’t sound as if the message was composed in a Petersburg basement.

What applies to words, applies to images. In the past, bad actors creating automated profiles at bot farms had to use generic stock images for profile pictures, or steal a real person’s photo and risk being caught. Today AI image generators give them what they need.

Rafi Mendelsohn, marketing vice president Cyabra, described an exponential process to me. Tactics used to twist elections are applied to war zones, refined, expanded, and then sent back to be used to influence the next political campaign.

What should we do? Can we ban TikTok, because the Chinese Communist Party exploits it? Should Western governments build their own troll farms?  Should the security services monitor social media and issue fake news warnings? It’s not that western democracies do not know how to answer these questions, we barely know how to ask them.

When the security services are warning that by 2025 generative AI could be ‘used to assemble knowledge on physical attacks by non-state violent actors, including for chemical, biological and radiological weapons,’ we are in a new world.  It strikes me as a world that Western democracies with their liberal protections for freedom of speech find strange and baffling, but one in which the West’s dictatorial enemies feel entirely at home.

[diaryofanangryasianguy]

06/17/21

#BoycottZARA trends after head designer’s anti-Palestine message

Head of design for the women’s department for the international fast-fashion chain Zara, Vanessa Perilman, sparked a widespread on social media after she made racist comments in an Instagram conversation with a Palestinian model Qaher Harhash, amid calls for a boycott of the company and its products. During the conversation, Perilman defended Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, blamed the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, whom she described as terrorists, and attacked the Islamic faith and Muslims at the same time.

Vanessa Perilman has deleted her Instagram account due to backlash and widespread calls for a formal apology from her and the company, which is criticized for failing to explicitly condemn her employee’s remarks. Qaher Harhash, who has worked with brands such as Vogue, Ukraine and Versace, used his Instagram account to raise awareness about the forced displacement of Palestinian residents from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem.

#free palestine #instagram #islamophobia #news #palestine #tw sensitive material

[phoenixprincemerlin]

#FreePalestine_Now #StopGazaGenocide #StopGenocideInGaza #BoycottHP #BoycottMarvel #BoycottIsraeliProducts #BoycottIsrahell #BoycottZara #BoycottZionists #boycottzaraforever

[distrolord]

#Repost @khaledbeydoun Dear @Zara, Your head designer is entitled to her political opinion. However, this is vile anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic rhetoric. Let me remind you, @Zara generates millions upon millions of dollars from “Muslim majority” countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, the UAE and Turkey. I’ll also remind you that billions — yes billions — of Muslims globally buy your products from your main store, but also @zaraman and @zarahome. Apart from being sheer hate and racism, this is bad for your business. Racism of this kind, for a global brand like yours, is immensely damaging. Millions are already calling for a boycott. The hashtag #boycottzara is already trending. A slap on the hand is not enough — Do you endorse Ms. Perliman’s hateful views? * Zara is owned by mother-company Indetex, which also owns: Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, and Uterqüe Companies like yours only seem to act when it hurts your bottom line… #fashion #racism https://www.instagram.com/p/CQIykMzgIuq/?utm_medium=tumblr

#repost #boycottzara #fashion #racism

[vedicastrologyy]

साल 2023 में कब मनाई जाएगी विवाह पंचमी | Vivah Panchami 2023 | विवाह पंचमी 16 या 17 दिसंबर कब है

Vivah Panchami Date: प्रत्येक वर्ष मार्गशीर्ष माह के शुक्ल पक्ष की पंचमी तिथि पर विवाह पंचमी मनाई जाती है,

https://www.vinaybajrangi.com/vrat/amavasya.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFpC_AffWKU

#vivahpanchami #panchami #indianastrology #vinaybajrangi #vivahmuhurat #indianastrologer #SalaarComingBloodySoon #BoycottZara #AnushkaSharma #INDvPAK #JammuAndKashmir #KaateraSecondSingle #Arrest_Tavleen_Singh #MAGA #AmericaFirst #AlexJones #Truth

#youtube