LONDON – British department store John Lewis has warned an anti-Israel campaign
group that it will take further action if it continues to fabricate a falsehood
that the store is boycotting Israeli cosmetic products.
Earlier this
month, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) claimed that John Lewis, the
award-winning British retailer, had stopped stocking Ahava products on account
of representations made by the radical fringe group.
RELATED:British retailer denies boycotting Israeli cosmeticsPro-Palestinian activists blockade Ahava store in London“Ahava’s goods,
processed on stolen Palestinian land, are becoming too hot to handle. Leading
British retail business John Lewis is now refusing to stock this toxic brand,”
claimed the PSC, a radical fringe group that supports Hamas, the boycott of
Israel and a one-state solution.
John Lewis emphatically denied the
charge, accusing the PSC of creating “false and misleading”
information.
A spokesman for the retail giant said it had stopped
stocking Ahava products in 2008, a number of years before PSC made any claims,
on account of performance levels and that it was purely a commercial decision.
It added that it still stocked Israeli goods and would continue to do
so.
“The Ahava range was deleted at the end of 2008,” a John Lewis
spokesman told
The Jerusalem Post. “I have seen the sales figures report and can
absolutely corroborate this. There were a few sales of products in 2009-10 but
these were reduced residues selling through.”
This week, John Lewis wrote
to the PSC for the second time after the group again included the story in its
weekly email newsletter. The John Lewis spokesman told the
Post that it has been
very clear that the group was misleading and misquoting.
“We have written
to the PSC pointing out the facts regarding Ahava and have followed this up,
expecting the PSC to stop distributing the original article of 14th January,
which contains ‘quotes’ which are false and misleading.”
“We have stated
how disappointed we are that John Lewis’s decisions, which were for purely
commercial reasons back in 2008, have been used out of context by the PSC,” the
spokesman added.
The spokesman said that it would take further action if
the PSC continued to distribute the story.