Tempest In A Coffee Cup

It took a couple of minutes for the Saudi newspaper editor to notice that his 21-year-old daughter was standing outside the Starbucks window. Veiled, as most women are on the street in Jeddah, she was gesturing furiously for him to come talk.

He excused himself from his majlis, as he calls his morning coffee klatsch with friends. "How could you?" his American-educated daughter demanded. The editor was a little puzzled. "Don't you know," she scolded, "that the CEO of Starbucks is a terrible Zionist?" Actually, the editor hadn't given it much thought. "Promise me," said his daughter, "you'll never drink coffee here again." And so, since April, the editor has been finding his cappuccinos elsewhere-though he admits he still misses Starbucks.

These days, such scenes are common throughout the Arab and Islamic world, and Starbucks is only one of the targets. Since last spring, any product identified with the United States-and therefore with American support for Israel-may suddenly find itself unwanted by consumers in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Indonesia and Lebanon. Arabs have long seen themselves as Marlboro men. No longer. McDonald's and KFC also have taken hits. "In the supermarket, all you hear people talking about is what's made in America, and not to buy it," says one Saudi housewife.

The boycott of U.S. goods, at once trivial and massive, populist and postmodern, is unlike any other grass-roots political movement the Muslim world has ever seen. And it's a reminder-even as President Bush calls for democratic elections as a condition for a Palestinian state-that when people really learn to speak out, they may not say what the United States and its friends want to hear.

A veteran U.S. official in the region recently drafted an extraordinary memo that tried to put the phenomenon in perspective for American businessmen as well as his superiors in Washington. "For the first time (maybe ever) the least-enfranchised elements of a harshly repressed society feel that they as individuals can make a difference," says the memo, privately e-mailed to executives and diplomats with interests in the Middle East and obtained by NEWSWEEK. "They feel that even a 5-year-old child has an opportunity to do something meaningful, and can influence domestic and international events."

Details about which American products to boycott are spread with lists posted on the doors of mosques, to be sure, but also on Web sites and even through the little digital text messages that teenage boys and girls send each other from mobile phones. "Everyone is wired now," as the U.S. official puts it. Popular sentiment for the boycotts is built in the media, with Arab satellite television stations showing graphic footage of Israeli violence in the occupied territories. The images inflame the commonly held opinion that poorly armed Muslims are under ferocious attack by an enemy using American guns, American helicopters, American jet fighters. The effect is "an emotional and visual conflict reaching to the heart of the identity of every citizen as an Arab or a Muslim," says the memo.