The Guardian just launched an online poll on the ScarJo controversy. So far it’s a blowout: 87% of voters (number unspecified) says yes, Oxfam should sever its ties with its recently appointed “brand ambassador.” I suspect, though, that SodaStream’s friends have not yet mobilized their forces – look for a big surge in the “no” column when they do. Still, we should be able to win this one – vote now, and spread the word.
Poll closes in seven days (Tuesday, Feb. 4).
I have a feeling that all this only helps the PR of SodaStraem PR. With so much publication it might end up rivaling Coca Cola….
Well now its 85% for yes and 15% for no, but when aipac see this it will probably end in reverse.
Good for the guardian to bring attention to this though.
I voted.
But how do you see the results?
I don’t think you voted. The same thing happened to me; I voted twice but no results appeared. My browser was blocking the cookies. I unblocked the cookies and when I voted a third time the results appeared.
I wholeheartedly support the call for Scarlett Johansson to sever all her ties to Soda Stream immediately. No lessening of Palestine solidarity pushback should occur until this is done. If she fails to do so in short order then the call for Oxfam to sever all their ties with her is also appropriate and essential.
Her comments to date are not encouraging but we must ask ourselves if she has been “birthrighted”: has she been spoon-fed a diet of hasbara pablum? Has she had her perceptions of Zionism exquisitely fine-tuned so as to cause her to support Soda Stream and blinded her to the moral legitimacy of Palestinian resistance? We need to know if she a rational Zionist player or is she being played by Zionism? I wrote to Oxfam several days ago urging them to require her to choose between “Oxfam or Occupation” but I wonder if there isn’t something else we can do before calling for her ouster from Oxfam? Perhaps there is a way to translate this pushback into a genuine Palestine learning experience for her and the general public?
I suggest we ask Oxfam to invite her to visit Palestine officially as an Oxfam Global Ambassador. If she accepted she might have the same kind of transformative experience that many other Americans have had: coming back from Palestine as radically changed people.
Rather than working merely to neutralize her can we offer a different model for dealing with anti-Palestinian propaganda? Zionists play hardball 24/7 and employ censorship, shunning, threats and proscription as the first order of battle because they see the world through the lens of inculcated xenophobia. It’s all they have. Palestine solidarity does not have to mirror Zionism: we can urge Oxfam to invite Johansson to visit Palestine as an Oxfam Global Ambassador and let her learn heuristically—the purest form of education—about the justice at the heart of the Palestinian narrative.
Would it not be a good thing to have someone who inhabits the eye of the media storm visiting and speaking publicly about Palestine? How is that not a good thing? Of course, we cannot know if she would accept Oxfam’s offer (or if they would offer it) or if she did how she might be affected. What we can say is that if we believe in the justice of Palestine’s case and the phenomenal power of the authentic Palestinian narrative to touch the human soul then we lose nothing and gain much by offering Johansson an opportunity to see Palestine firsthand as an Oxfam Global Ambassador.
Might it be possible to get her not merely to abandon Soda Stream but to reject Zionism outright? This kind of person-to-person experience might work for Bill de Blasio as well (it helped him come to see the justice of the Nicaraguan struggle against Somoza). It might become a new meme to demand of politicians and celebrities reflectively critical of Palestinians or Palestine solidarity that they actually visit Palestine in much the same way that many of them have accepted AIPAC-packaged visits to Israel as a way of claiming some form of knowledge of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.
It is one thing to wound a tyrant: it is something else entirely to have his rank-and-file defect to Palestine.