Apple blacklists customers on basis of race
Racial profiling carried out in Apple store
22 Jun 2012 09:09 | by Nick Farrell in Rome
Jobs' Mob has been branded a bunch of racists after one of its stores refused to sell shiny toys to some swarthy types who were not speaking English.
WSB-TV interviewed two customers who were denied the right to buy an iPad or an iPhone after store personnel heard them speaking Farsi. Farsi is the language of Ancient Persia and once was the lingua franca between merchants.
The Apple staff apparently decided to refuse the sale because, in the opinion of its genius managers, the two must be buying the gear to sell to their evil terrorist mates in Iran. Apparently they even quoted laws that prohibit the export of products to Iran.
The only problem is that the law does not forbid you selling technology gear to people in your own country or US citizens. The US happens to have a fair number of US citizens who are Iranian and so the move seems to be to blacklist them from owning gear using the made-in-China Apple logo.
Sahar Sabet, a 19 year-old student at the University of Georgia, who already owns other Apple products, said she walked out of the store in tears.
She told the TV station that an Apple employee said he could not sell an iPad to her "because our countries have bad relations".
There is nothing to stop people buying Apple products online, but it seems staff in two separate stores have been told to make arbitrary racist assumptions about customers.
It is not clear if any other nationalities are included under Apple's policy.
It would be tricky for Apple staff to tell if someone speaking Korean was from the North or the South.
The news channel sent a reporter back to the store and taped the same employee repeating it is Apple policy not to sell to anyone from Iran.
The store manager used Apple's Export Compliance policy, that says the exportation sale or supply from the US to Iran of any Apple goods is strictly prohibited without authorisation by the US government.
Both Sabet and Jafarzaddeh, who's from Virginia, told the station that they are victims of racial profiling. Jobs' Mob's anti-Iranian stance has floored the US State Deparment too, which did not know that the company was enforcing the law in that way.
Not surprisingly, the National Iranian American Council posted an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook demanding the company end its "discriminatory policies."
VIDEO: news.techeye.net |
