Dunkin Donut's Keffieh Glazing

What a sugar-burst of ironies. Grab a doughnut (at least for your back) and follow this time-line, if you can bear it.

On May 7, Dunkin’ Donuts began running a Web ad featuring Rachael Ray, the celebrity chef, holding a cup of iced coffee and wearing a black-and-white keffieh.

On May 23, Little Green Footballs, the wise-cracking reactionary blog, posted an item entitled "Mainstreaming Terrorism to Sell Donuts." Like Pangloss deducing that noses exist for the sake of spectacles, Little Green deduced that because Palestinians have worn the keffieh--and because, in Little Green's paler deduction, Palestinians are automatically terrorists--Dunkin Donut was "promot[ing] the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada."

The same day, a more frenzied but more popular kin of Little Green picked up the tale, and off the story went into the stratosphere.

On May 24, Dunkin Donuts pulled the ad. We did our bit here at About, of course. But by then it was too late. Wrapping a bit of fashion sense around the keffieh didn't keep it from being among the latest victims of malinformed American hysteria.

Here's where the time-line gets interesting--where Dunkin Donut's rubbery hypocrisy hit the road.

Would You Like a Keffieh With Your Coffee?

On June 1, Dunkin Donuts opened its biggest kitchen outside the United States, a 30,000-square-foot ziggurat of a bakery capable of producing 50 million donuts in 50 varieties per year. Where did that kitchen open? In the United Arab Emirates, where keffieh-like headgear (the scarves tend top be all white rather than checkered there) is as common as, well, Dunkin Donut coffee (by the chain's own count, it has served 60 million donuts and 10 million cups of coffee since opening its first store in the UAE in 1997.) Wait, it gets better.

On July 5, Dunkin Donut opened its 50th store in the UAE. "UAE is an important market for the brand within the Middle East and Europe with ground-breaking innovation, like the opening of the first drive-through," Michael Cortelletti, Europe & Middle East director for Dunkin' Brands Inc., said. "The highest concentration of Dunkin' Donuts stores has been achieved so far in the UAE," he added.I'd doff my keffieh to that if it weren't for the company's astounding duplicity.

Which brings us back to Dunkin's yankin' of the Rachel Ray ad (now that the foam has settled at the bottom of the reactionaries' cups) and today's news: Jillian York, whose sunny prose often manages to outshine the suns of Morocco and other parts of the Middle East she covers for Global Voices and other sites, wrote this week of doing two things: boycotting Dunkin Donuts (even though she loves the iced coffee in question) and writing the company to let its beancounters know why.

A Truly Unfortunate Answer

Today, York got an answer, though I'm afraid her translation is more interesting than Dunkin Donut's original. "Is it me," York wonders, "or does it seem like that was written by a summer intern?" The that in question was this: "Given the surprising and truly unfortunate interpretation of this ad from some of our consumers, we decided to pull the ad and replace it with another as it is no longer serving its intended purpose, which was to simply promote our iced coffee—nothing more, nothing less."

If that's so, and if the surprising reaction truly was "truly unfortunate," wouldn't Dunkin have done better to let the unfortunates make their stereotypically idiotic deductions and let the rest of the world move on with its coffee and doughnuts? Dunkin Donut certainly did--smack into the Arab world, where it's been making a killing and stands to make more in the years ahead.

What would Dunkin Donut do if some lurid (and luridly popular) reactionary blog suddenly discovered that the Massachusetts-based company made some of its $5.3 billion in 2007 sales in the UAE, the country that also served as the financial hub of the 9/11 terrorists? What if it was discovered that some of the terrorists, in one of their many lay-overs in the UAE, actually enjoyed a cup of Dunkin Donut coffee and an actual, glazed doughnut with sprinkles on top? Wouldn't that make the company a promoter of al-Qaeda terrorism? Of course it would-about as much as Rachel Ray wearing a keffieh made Dunkin a promoter of "Palestinian terrorism" (whatever that hopelessly broad and undefinable thing is anymore).