How Dunkin' Donuts Did Not Bungle the Rachael Ray Keffiyeh Incident

I wrote a while back about how Absolut ran an ad in Mexico showing a map of North America with the borders redrawn to pre-1848, meaning Mexico now occupied pretty much everything between California and Louisiana. Michelle Malkin and others in the conservative blogosphere got a hold of it, dubbed it virurently anti-American, and the baying for the blood of Absolut began. Absolut absolutely biffed its corporate response, offering mealy-mouthed cultural relativism and half-hearted apologies when gruff Red State decidering was needed.

A month or two passes, and again an advertisement is setting conservatives' blood on fire. This time, it's Rachael Ray, the quick cooking queen and Dunkin' Donuts spokeswoman, doing an online ad in which she's wearing a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh. The keffiyeh, besides being an accoutrement of fashion victims for a while now, also rose to popularity as the scarf of choice of Yassir Arafat, and is (rightly or wrongly) seen by some as a way to show support for Palestine. Michelle Malkin and others quickly moved to condemn, with Malkin saying:

Ray hawked Urban Outfitters scarves on her website before appearing in the Dunkin' Donuts ad. If she (or whichever stylist is dressing her) wasn't aware of the jihad scarf controversy before she posed for the Dunkin' campaign, she should have been.

Thank you for expressing your concern about the Dunkin' Donuts advertisement with Rachael Ray. In the ad that you reference, Rachael is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design that was purchased at a U.S. retail store. It was selected by the stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we will no longer use the commercial.

It's refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic jihad and its apologists. Too many of them bend over backward in the direction of anti-American political correctness.

Update: My colleague Dan Mitchell over at the BNET Industries Food blog already offered up his take on the situation, "Dunkin' Donuts Caves in to Nuts." His position is about as contra to my own as you can get, essentially that Dunkin' Donuts is throwing money away by ditching the ad, and setting up a dangerous precedent by "caving in to attention-mongering ideological nutbags" who then feel that they can dictate terms to the company. Which are both good points.

But Dunkin' Donuts is around to do one thing: sell coffee and donuts. And even "attention-mongering ideological nutbags" buy coffee and donuts. Michelle Malkin (with monthly site traffic around 225,000) and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (with monthly site traffic around 100,000) aren't exactly without influence within their particular demimonde. The pain for Dunkin' Donuts is going be much greater in attempting to take a stand on one web ad, and engendering the rage of these bloggers, then in just offering up an apology, killing the ad, and getting back to pushing éclairs and java.

Also, Sean Silverthorne, our blogger at The View from Harvard Business School, offers up his own, mostly neutral view and of the situation, along with some links on the pitfalls of celebrity spokesmen.