Pizza Hut Apologizes For Joking About Palestinian Hunger Strike
Pizza Hut is facing calls for a boycott after its Israel branch mocked Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti for breaking his prison hunger strike with a candy bar and some cookies.
“Barghouti: If you’re going to break the strike, isn’t pizza better?” Pizza Hut in Israel tweeted, showing footage from the Israel Prison Service showing Barghouti eating.
The tweet was deleted and Pizza Hut’s international arm apologized on Twitter after the post set off a firestorm.
“Pizza Hut International apologizes for any offense caused by a recent post on Pizza Hut Israel’s Facebook page. It was completely inappropriate and does not reflect the values of our brand,” read the mea culpa.
Barghouti, who is serving a life sentence in Israeli prison due to supposed terror activities, launched a hunger strike with other Palestinian detainees demanding that authorities improve conditions in the penal system. His attorney said that Israel may have planted food in his cell in order to set him up to break the strike.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO