Here's an excerpt from the Brookyn Paper's breaking story:
Sorry to tell my colleagues in the media, but Tuesday night’s
meeting of the Park Slope Food Co-op did not turn into the anti-Israel
paroxysm you all wanted.
Last week,
I became the lone journalist (in the nation, it appeared) who reported
the truth that the famously liberal, member’s-only supermarket on Union
Street was NOT — I repeat, not — considering a ban on Israeli-made or
-grown products.
All this talk of a ban — whipped up first by the Jewish Forward and
then repeated (like a blood libel?) around the world by bloggers who
seem to regard the 16,000-member market as some kind of anti-Israel
hotbed rather than a great place for hothouse tomatoes — stemmed from a
single stray comment by a woman at last month’s meeting.
“I don’t know whether or not we carry Israeli products,” said the
woman, who identified herself as Hima, “but I propose that we no longer
carry them.”
Of course, but that’s now how it works at America’s largest,
member-run food cooperative. Stray comments at a Park Slope Food Co-op
general meeting don’t become Co-op law until — and please believe me
because I know this from personal experience — extensive debate,
discussion and more mudslinging than at an organic composting facility.
And that’s just to get the item on the AGENDA for an upcoming
meeting! You should have seen the battle over selling beer! An earlier
proposal to sell meat nearly ended in murder (of humans, not cattle)!
Alas, the above fact didn’t matter to America’s blogosphere, which
ran with the story that the Co-op was considering a blockade of Israel,
from which it buys some persimmons and red peppers.