A masked activist demonstrating at the East Centre mall in Toronto said in a moment captured on video, “I’ll put you six feet deep,” and “If you’re a man, come touch me.”
Former Canadian senator Linda Frum asked in response to the video: “How is it possible that you can say to a Toronto police officer’s face, ‘I’ll put you six feet deep’ and not be arrested? This makes us all unsafe.”
The unidentified man appeared at the Zara fashion store at the mall as part of a coordinated series of protests at the Spanish company’s locations. Other stores with protests in Canada included Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre and Ottawa’s Bayshore Shopping Centre. Internationally, the “Boycott Zara” campaign hit stores in Istanbul, Turkey; Hanover, Germany; Melbourne, Australia; and twice in Glasgow, Scotland.
The boycott campaign originated when anti-Israel activists drew a visual connection between the imagery in a Zara fashion marketing campaign called “The Jacket” and wrapped-up dead bodies of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.
Zara said it planned the advertising efforts during July and shot the photographs in September. It features an artist packing up sculpted statues wrapped in white, as well as mannequins with missing limbs.
It said in a statement: “Unfortunately, some customers felt offended by these images, which have now been removed, and saw in them something far from what was intended when they were created.”