Thursday, January 14, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
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Jerusalem, January 14 - Proprietors of a neighborhood establishment specializing in pastries, breads, and various confections has to date not voiced opinions on behalf of the enterprise regarding the ongoing political turmoil in the US, thus defying a recent trend that has seen business after business jump onto the political stability concern bandwagon.
Political observers noted with surprise today that the Mahane Yehuda franchise of the English Cake chain has placed no signs or placards in its windows denouncing or expressing worry over the developments in Washington over the last week, nor has its social media presence devoted even a single tweet or Facebook post to the violence in and around the US capitol building, the president's apparent encouragement of that violence, mutual right-left recriminations over treatment of the violence versus the various social justice confrontations over the last several years, the mass purging of conservative voices from said social media, or other burning issues of tremendous political or societal import.
"It's just business as usual," noted a shocked Haaretz journalist. "The folks running this place don't seem to feel the visceral, dare I say universal, or at least it should be universal, drive to filter everything through political biases and interpret every development in a way that confirms those biases. I confess I don't know how they do it without fear of being totally crushed on Twitter, or at least left behind when everyone *I* know can tell what political basket they should put their eggs in."
Others noted that the establishment's previous political behavior aligns with its current silence on Trump. "This isn't anything new for this branch of English Cake," observed Israel Democracy Institute fellow Dunning Kruger. "They remained mum during the first Trump impeachment brouhaha as well. And I can find in their social media history not a single mention of Black Lives Matter, the Proud Boys, the wall with Mexico, the Muslim ban, or any other pivotal issue of our time. Not even the Iran nuclear deal. One wonders how a business can even function if it focuses only on production, quality control, marketing, management, and accounting, and totally ignores its relationship with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle."
Perusal of the franchise's Instagram account bore out that claim; it also revealed a troubling lack of diversity among the few staff members whose photos feature there, none of whom appear to be transqueer Muslim immigrant women of color.
