Arabs were furious:
"Why is it that Arabs are always shown as either oil-rich sheiks, terrorists, or belly dancers?" said Warren David, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC.Guess who got the Coke in the end?
Coca-Cola released an online teaser of the commercial last week, showing the Arab walking through a desert. He soon sees cowboys, Las Vegas showgirls and a motley crew fashioned after the marauders of the apocalyptic "Mad Max" film race by him to reach a gigantic bottle of Coke.
In its ad, Coke asks viewers to vote online on which characters should win the race. The online site does not allow a vote for the Arab character.
"The Coke commercial for the Super Bowl is racist, portraying Arabs as backward and foolish Camel Jockeys, and they have no chance to win in the world," Imam Ali Siddiqui, president of the Muslim Institute for Interfaith Studies, said in an email.
"What message is Coke sending with this?" asked Abed Ayoub, ADC's director of legal and policy affairs. "By not including the Arab in the race, it is clear that the Arab is held to a different standard when compared to the other characters in the commercial," he said.
But that didn't stop the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee from continuing their complaint with Coke.
Now, they are taking credit for this year's Coke Super Bowl commercial.
After the Coca-Cola Company has depicted Arabs in a stereotypical fashion in its last year Super Bowl advertisement provoking protest by Arab Americans, it promoted this year a more balanced ad showing diversity in American society, a press release by an Arab American group said on Tuesday.Coke ended up being a sponsor of the ADC convention in 2013.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) commended the Coca-Cola Company for airing an ad during Sunday night’s Super Bowl which celebrated America’s diversity.
“Over the course of the past year ADC has partnered with Coke to promote diversity,” it said. “The partnership developed out of concerns ADC shared with Coke in regards to its 2013 Super Bowl ads.”
This year's Coke commercial showed "America the Beautiful" being sung in seven languages.
Ironically, none of them appear to be Arabic. (According to this site, the languages were English, Spanish, Keres Pueblo, Tagalog, Hindi, Senegalese French, and Hebrew. Many of the commenters, experts in world languages, had trouble picking out the languages being sung because they were all done with heavily American accents.)
The Arabic version was filmed but ended up on the cutting room floor.
(During the game, some people tweeted some really racist things reacting to the commercial, but that's a different story.)
Here are screen shots of the Jewish guys in the commercial.
