Bait-and-Switch: NY activists use fast food to push anti-Israel propaganda

The extremist group NJ PalAction is behind the activity, hoping to raise support for the BDS movement.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Anti-Israel activists are using fake offers of free fast food across New York City to bait locals into viewing propaganda smearing the Jewish state, The New York Post reported Saturday.

According to the report, QR codes posted recently in dozens of locations around New York City lead to anti-Israel propaganda rather than the promised freebies.

If customers scan the code offering free food on a flyer at a McDonald’s restaurant in Manhattan, for example, they will instead see a notice saying that the chain somehow provides meals to the IDF, accusing the establishment of “war crimes” and “McGenocide,” the report said.

Other codes lead to graphic images of wounded children with accompanying statements such as “Every dollar spent is an investment in genocide” and an invitation to peruse the BDS movement’s website.

The extremist group NJ PalAction took responsibility for the nefarious activity, hoping to raise support for the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state.

“Hitting BDS targets including Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Zara across 68 storefronts in Manhattan neighborhoods, activists enticed shoppers with coupon codes offering discounts and freebies,” the group acknowledged.

“This is part of a continuing campaign to shock New Yorkers and to disrupt New York with nothing less than Jew hatred,” said Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at The Lawfare Project, which pursues civil counterterrorism litigation to dry up terror organizations’ funding, and at #EndJewHatred, which works to eradicate antisemitism from Western culture.

He pointed out that the members of the PalAction group who posted the misleading codes have violated the law, both by vandalizing private property in taping up the messages without permission and by stealing intellectual property by misusing the companies’ names.

“It will be interesting to see if these companies do the right thing, which is to pursue that legal action,” Filitti wondered aloud.

For months earlier this year, illegal anti-Israel ads kept popping up in New York subway trains that also had QR codes leading to pro-Palestinian propaganda.

The unauthorized signs accusing the U.S. of using taxpayer money to support Israel’s alleged genocide and telling people to “fight back” were sponsored by the national PalAction and BDS movements, as well as by at least one U.S.-designated sham charity, Samidoun, which serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror organization.

The transit authority removed them, albeit too slowly for Filitti’s taste, who said in May that the New York officials were “dragging their feet” on the matter.