talkpolitics | Lidl: the backlash

asthfghl posting in

Notice something wrong on these pictures? Well yeah, duh! A famous church in Santorini, Greece, was used to advertise a Greek cheese product in one of the Lidl stores (a German chain). Except, the most prominent feature of that landmark (beside the blue roof) was removed:

Lidl airbrushes Christian cross from church pictured on its Greek food range because the supermarket chain 'does not wish to exclude any religious beliefs'

Well, guess what. You've done just that - excluded a religious belief. And I'm saying it as non-believer. Savor the irony.

There was indeed a huge backlash (mostly around the social networks) about this picture. Lidl even had to come up with an official apology for screwing up on this one. People were shocked, shocked I tell you! Selling Greek products while trying to remove an important part of the Greek identity from sight. People have called for boycott. And probably rightly so. Why?

Because it's one thing to be sensitive to religious and ethnic identities, be inclusive, tolerant, etc. But it's quite another to bend over backwards and scrap one identity for another, for the sake of pandering to a particular customer segment. This is just business, some would say. You're free to go buy crappy food elsewhere. Sure thing, Ahmed! (HA!) And that's exactly what people are doing here. Voting with their feet. And with their wallets. You wanted to appear super-tolerant and super-inclusive, and attract a few Muslim customers? (Hey, Lidl may claim they don't want to offend anyone so they prefer to remove all religious symbols from their shelves, but how do you explain the fact that their German and Dutch stores have entire sections dedicated to Halal food!?) I guess you were prepared for the backlash from non-Muslim customers, then! Being inclusive through exclusion - how does that work, Ahmed?

Removing the cross from a Greek landmark is NOT an act of religious neutrality. It's an act of cowardice. It's removing the very identity of that landmark, the part that makes it Greek. The cross is probably 80% of the "Greekness" in that Greek landmark, like the crescent is 80% of what makes a Saudi, Saudi. And to use Photoshop to delete this, and hope no one notices? Wow. You've got to have balls for that much cowardice (amazing, huh?)

That's cultural castration, sorry to say it. It's multicultural idiotism. It's PC schizophrenia. And no, this isn't just about some food store, or just about a business, one of many. It's a symptom of a much wider phenomenon. The same one forcing German mayors to look their own constituents in the face and advise them to avoid walking near certain areas of town while wearing short skirts from now on, lest they offend the refugees residing there.

I'm all for cultural inclusiveness. But this is not right. It just isn't.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

0rder

Also, I have to call out the Islamophobia going on in this post. Muslims are not the only ones who might feel excluded by the cross, and the choice to refer to some hypothetical Muslim by "Ahmed" is tantamount to employing an Islamophobic slur, like referring to a hypothetical black person in the U.S. as "Deshawn."

From:

asthfghl

Fine. Not Ahmed then. If that would appease your sensitivities. (See what I did there?)

From:

airiefairie

That's what Jon Snow said to Daenerys, right? "All right. Not Dany then".

From:

asthfghl

Eagle's eye indeed.

From:

0rder

Not sure that I do. Did you contribute to the downfall of western civilization, just now?

From:

asthfghl

Only if you want to.

From:

fridi

Your selective outrage at the use of a term rather than the core of what is shaping up to become a rather serious issue, the way you got triggered by a word, and the way you easily throw around labels ending with ~ist and ~phobe, only betray your bias. Your comment reminds me exactly of the hypocrisy of all those social justice warriors who used to welcome single young men who were economic migrants posing as "refugees" with teddy bears at the railroad stations around Germany, and who are now suspiciously silent when Middle Eastern radicals scream Allah Aqbar and plunge vehicles into crowds of pedestrians, or when courts pardon rapists even after having all the evidence that indeed, they did rape their victims; or when city mayors tell their people that they should change the way they dress, the way they behave, the way they talk, and abandon the places they usually visit, because some foreigners find that offensive.

I would've said that the minute I hear a term ending with ~ist or ~phobe I immediately stop taking the person using them seriously, but that wouldn't be entirely true. Because I've seen first-hand what people like the ones making exactly your point exactly the way you did it, can do to a community. I don't know if you're part of the problem, but you're definitely not part of the solution to it. People like yourself would rather go to tremendous lengths to derail what is attempting to be an honest debate on cultural conflict - be it through nitpicking on the use of a term, or through resorting to subtle ad hominems - than propose viable solutions to the issue at hand. Such people are probably even more dangerous than a dozen violent radicals, because they're like the Neville Chamberlains of our modern time.

I really don't understand the motivation behind the choice of such a stance - what purpose does it serve, whom does it help? Does "calling out" someone for using what you, in your wild interpretations are formulating as a racial slur, somehow remove or solve the problem that's being discussed here, namely the tendency of Western societies to betray their own identity for the sake of appeasing people who are not interested in getting integrated into said societies in the first place? How exactly?

Edited Date: 5/9/17 15:54 (UTC)

From:

kiaa

>> Because I've seen first-hand what people like the ones making exactly your point exactly the way you did it, can do to a community

If you mean the growing number of No-Go zones across Europe, I've seen plenty of those too.

From:

mahnmut

A bantustan sysem of some sorts. *scared*

From:

halialkers

As someone from Louisiana I envy a society that ever had rule of law consistently applied to everyone in living memory in the first place. :( You guys were so lucky.

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Lidl: the backlash

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