One of the most celebrated Turkish journalists, Burak Bekdil, wrote for the leading paper Hürriyet for 29 years, and then lost his job, as he put it, for “telling the truth about Turkey,” in an Erdogan-prompted purge of the media. He continues to to write for online Western outlets about Erdogan, Turkey, and Islam. Several weeks ago, he described one more Muslim conspiracy theory, one that is decades old, and according to which the soft drink Pepsi-Cola turns out to be linked to support for the hated Zionists.
Pro-Palestinian Muslims have refused to drop their decades-long conspiracy theory that Pepsi Cola is essentially the code name for a Zionist plot – “Pay Every Pence to Save Israel.”
This columnist first heard of the theory when he was a teenager in early 1980s. “Don’t buy Pepsi Cola. Buy Coca Cola,” warned the always pious grocery store owner in the neighbourhood, then explaining why I should not buy Pepsi Cola. “It’s a sin. Good Muslims never drink Pepsi Cola.” I asked him: “So why do you sell Pepsi Cola?”
Ironically, members of the radical left, too, would hate Pepsi Cola, and for the same reason. Neighborhood kids belonging to the “Turkish revolutionary left” looked like street campaigners for Pepsi Cola’s American rival, sporting their Coca Cola bottles and arguing: “If you buy Pepsi you help the Zionists and American capitalism.”
In the early 1990s when your columnist was an MSc student in Britain Arab and other (most notably a Malaysian) Muslim friends would vigorously warn him not to buy Pepsi or otherwise “you could be viewed as a Zionist and face the consequences.” “What consequences?” I once asked the ‘Malay Prince.’ “Your guess,” he answered, smiling.
Folly is a persistent thing. Even in recent years a member of Hamas, the darling of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his fellow Islamists, (Hamas member of parliament) Salem Salamah, told Hamas’s television station Al-Aqsa TV: “There are companies established by the colonialists and occupiers – large companies with branches all over the world, like Pepsi, Pepsi Cola. This is a well-known company. Pepsi is an acronym. P-E-P-S-I – Pay Every Pence to Save Israel. Pay every pence – pence is one-hundredth of a dollar – to save Israel. Pay every pence to save Israel…”
Egyptian cleric Hazem Abu Ismail called for a Muslim boycott of Pepsi because it stands for “Pay Every Penny Saving Israel.” He explained: “They took the first letter of each word – ‘Pay Every Penny Saving Israel’ – and they formed the word Pepsi. When you pay [to buy Pepsi], you are saving Israel … My little son knows more about the boycott than me. When we go shopping, he says to me: ‘Buy this, don’t buy that.’ He knows them by heart.”
I recalled all that man-made nonsense when a newspaper headline heralded that Mr Erdoğan inaugurated a $150 million Pepsi factory in western Turkey. Since Mr Erdoğan cannot be a crypto Zionist his fellow Islamist conspiracy theorists should rethink their “Pay Every Penny Saving Israel” acronym.
How amusing that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is a dab hand at finding “conspiracies” himself, such as those pertaining to his arch-enemy Fethulleh Gulen, is now in the position of dedicating a Pepsi-Cola factory in Turkey. Apparently the benefit to the Turkish economy of this 150-million-dollar factory was too great to let any conspiracy theory get in the way; Erdogan now finds himself effectively denying one absurd conspiracy theory, while continuing to harbor many others, some even crazier, about the diabolical Israelis and their conspiracies.
Did, really, the Turkish Islamists have to wait for decades to shyly ignore one of their millions of conspiracy theories? Did they have to wait so long until one of them merrily inaugurated a $$$$ plant owned by a Zionist soft drinks producer? Is drinking Pepsi halal now that Mr Erdoğan himself attended the ceremony?
Now, dear Islamists, enjoy your soft drinks and get lost.”
One might explain to those Muslim conspiracy theorists — and there are so many of them, wallowing in so many of these theories, dozens or hundreds of them, each more absurd than the last — that the soft drink Pepsi-Cola was first concocted in New Bern, North Carolina in 1893 by a pharmacist, Caleb Bradham, under the name “Brad’s Drink,” that it was renamed “Pepsi-Cola” in 1898, with “Pepsi” taken from the word “dyspepsia” (indigestion, which the drink would supposedly cure) — and thus Pepsi-Cola came into existence half a century before Israel was even founded. Both etymology and chronology point up the absurdity of the belief that “Pepsi” means “Pay Every Pence Saving Israel.”
But facts do not matter to Muslims in thrall to conspiracy theories. They come in so many different forms. Turks who opposed Ataturk’s reforms were convinced that he must have been Jewish, and still today, there are endless videos and posts online denouncing Ataturk as “a nasty kaffir” and “a Jew who hated Islam.” No evidence is presented for this claim, for none exists. Other Muslim conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews include the claims that the Zionist Jews spread poisons, spread AIDS, engage in blood rituals, lead an international conspiracy against Islam, and have created the “myth” of the Holocaust. These theories have been taken seriously not in some minor outlet, but in Egypt’s Al-Ahram, the most important newspaper in the most important Arab state.
Still other conspiracy theories circulating in the Muslim Arab lands hold the Jews responsible for killing American Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and causing the French and Russian revolutions. Zionists are seen as a threat to the world. A widespread conspiracy theory after the September 11 attacks blamed Israel and Mossad for the attacks.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous forgery purporting to be a Jewish plan for world domination, is commonly read, promoted, and believed, in the Muslim world.
Conspiracy theorists in the Arab world have claimed that ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is in fact an Israeli Mossad agent and actor called Simon Elliot. The rumors claim that NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal this connection. Snowden’s lawyer has called the story “a hoax.”
What should we make of this bizarre “Pepsi” tale? It’s one more illustration of the fantasy world that so many Muslims, especially Arabs, succumb to. They can’t allow themselves to believe that the Israelis alone could have successfully withstood the armed assaults of so many Arab states. They must therefore have had, and still have, all kinds of secret help, a cabal of rich and powerful Jews, whose support explains Israel’s otherwise inexplicable victories. And if something makes Muslims look bad, then it must really have been a plot by Jews. 9/11 was surely a Mossad plot, diabolically conceived so that innocent Muslims would be blamed. No Jew went to work on 9/11 at the Twin Towers. It’s a fact. They called in sick, every last one of them. But the Jews own the media and didn’t let this get out. As for the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, he makes Arabs and Muslims look bad, so of course he must be a Jew, a Mossad agent. Don’t be naive — what else could he be? And Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel, so Sadat must have been a Jew. That’s taken for granted in Egyptian Islamist circles. Who else would conclude a peace treaty with Israel?
The “Pepsi conspiracy” is one of the many ludicrous examples of these conspiracy theories which can be found all over the Arab and Muslim lands. A brand name that is clearly meant to allude to the drink’s soothing efficacy in curing “dyspepsia” has nothing to do with gathering “pence” — money — for Israel. But even now, somewhere in the Middle East a group of Muslim Arabs who don’t care for Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism are meeting, and having just learned about his dedicating the Pepsi-Cola plant, will solemnly take this as a sure sign that he is, despite his seeming antisemitism, one more Mossad agent doing the work of the Zionists. For if Erdogan weren’t a Mossad agent, why else would he be so exaggeratedly anti-Israel?
Peter Buckley says
You can follow Burak Bekdil, and find out far more than other Westerners about what is happening in the ME, at Gatestone:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/author/Burak+Bekdil
With all these articles, please follow the links contained therein.
mortimer says
PEPSI WAS CREATED 50 YEARS BEFORE THE STATE OF ISRAEL and the name has NOTHING to do with ISRAEL.
Pepsi was first introduced as “Brad’s Drink” in New Bern, North Carolina, United States, in 1893 by Caleb Bradham, who made it at his drugstore where the drink was sold. It was renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898 after the root of the word “dyspepsia” and the kola nuts used in the recipe.
This STUPID ISLAMIC CANARD about Pepsi’s name is an example of how Islam works. Islam is ENTIRELY based on hearsay … which is mostly invalid in a court of law. Islam has NO original source documents. ALL of the Koran and ALL of the hadiths and ALL of the Sira are hearsay.
Sobieski says
That’s what they want you to think!
But you have failed to account for the time-traveling tactics of the Zionists.
“Brad’s Drink” was an acronym for “Be Righteous And Drive Sunnis Down; Revive Israel’s Nachash King”
Nachash means snake in Hebrew; it also means to practice sorcery. Time travel is a form of sorcery.
By the mid-20th century, when Israel was created, the plan for the Nachash King was well under way. But they decided that they needed more funds to finish the job.
So, the Jews time-traveled back to the late 1890s in order to chang the name to Pepsi, so they could remind all of their cohorts to Pay Every Penny (to) Save Israel.
Their plan will succeed unless we boycott Pepsi!
Wake up!
gravenimage says
🙂
Anjuli Pandavar says
“This STUPID ISLAMIC CANARD about Pepsi’s name is an example of how Islam works.”
—
And of how ignorant Muslims are.
The good side to this is that Muslims, having their own, self-imposed ignorance thrown back in their faces, have no answers. They stumble around in a daze of “what the Hell just happened?”, wounded egos, embarrassment, offence and helplessness. Just take a look at all the Christians and atheists massacring them at Speaker’s Corner, using the Muslims’ own sources.
Take heart. WE now know the Islamic sources better than most Muslims do, and those Muslims who know those sources better than us are simply being dishonest. The ignorant fools: we quote the Qur’an directly and they still insist that we’re lying. What else can they say? Their entire existence for the last 1400 years has been built on ignorance, fear and submission. They still haven’t grasped that they’re trying to dhimmify *free people*, people who think *for themselves* and want to know *for themselves*. We’ve been learning, reading and debating for decades now and the results show.
Muhammed Shafiq pretends that he’s proud of what he’s done to get Tommy Robinson banned from Facebook. That’s a lie. He’s worried, very worried. Maajid Nawaz is unravelling before our eyes. Mehdi Hasan still cannot see that his interviewees are laughing at him (take a look at his interview with Naftali Bennett).
Muslims are on the run, either from us, or from Islam. We’d prefer the latter, but we’ll settle for the former if that’s all we can get for now. This does not mean that we’re unaware of the infiltration into our societies of trained militias and of the violence they will unleash if we let the situation degenerate that far. We are not ready for dhimmitude; not by a long way.
Emilie Green says
“I’ll have a laugh, please”
Classic Pepsi vs Coke. Funny TV Commercial: Italian Mafia Girl,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjHYcd8B-50
jay says
I knew it! The Mossad is using child mafiosi to intimidate believers in the True Cola, Coca, into paying tribute to the Zent [my new term for the Zionist Entity, spread the word!] It should be the other way, of course; spread the Da’wa of Co’ca, brethren and sistren!
Mirren10 says
🙂 🙂 Nice one.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
Cumpà. tu si pazzu.
gravenimage says
Eiu! Cumpete cumu!
gravenimage says
It’s not everyone who posts here in Corsican…
CRUSADER says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw1KjQ5wzpA
You two are like the “Corsican Brothers” !!
FYI says
Yes,It is easy to make up acronyms.
I.R.A.N islam Ransacks All Nations
I.S.L.A.M islamic Supremacists Lie and Murder
I.S.R.A.EL Iran Shall Reap All Elohenu’s wrath{if they pick a fight with Israel..}
Watto35 says
How about: Not Every Silly Turk Loves Erdogan. ( A certain chocolate)
Westman says
Could hardly stop laughing.
Imagine a Christian leader telling his congregation such ridiculous things. How long would he last? And if he could find enough brainwashed members it would just be another cult like the Davidians.
Why Muslims have such morons for religious leaders is a mystery until we realize someone who is a memorization savant is likely short on logic. “He memorized the Quran” and can regurgitate dogma is not a recipe for wise leadership, yet, seems to be enough for Islam.
somehistory says
Probably the only “myth” about Pepsi that is true is that if a driver of a Pepsi truck is caught drinking Coke, he is fired.
(From a driver’s own lips.)
If for every Pepsi sold, Israel received money, they would never have any economic problems and fewer Israelis would need to work. The old math problem of getting a penny the first day, and doubling the amount each day for a month, proves how fast pennies can add up.
But, there is no logic in islam and moslims are incredibly stupid when it comes to real world facts.
elee says
Turks be proud, once again your conspiracy theories have exceeded the west’s wildest dreams!
Dov Berrol says
Those of us with a deep knowledge of Middle Eastern history know very well that Pepsico was one of the many companies that participated in the Arab League boycott of Israel in the 1970’s. Israelis did not have access to Pepsi until after the signing of the Madrid Agreement in 1991. It is quite ironic that poor Pepsi can never win the affection and approval of the Muslim world – even by participating in the Muslim boycott of Israel. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. More evidence that Islam is a dangerous and destructive psychiatric disorder.
gravenimage says
All true, Dov.
gravenimage says
Hugh Fitzgerald: Pepsi, Or “Pay Every Pence To Save Israel”
……………….
Is *this* old canard still around? Even odder that it is given a British twist here, since Americans say “pennies” and not “pence”.
CRUSADER says
Conservative Americans often have Pence on their minds!
CRUSADER says
Pepsi, and Coke, all in the same week!
What a bonanza for colored sugar drinks!
When I was in Israel, which I am often, I was ordering up drinks in Jaffa/Joppa.
I was told however that my friend who wanted a Pepsi couldn’t get one served
unless he when to Jordan: only Coca-Cola served at the restaurant….
I just drink the native brew…
Forget buying the world a “coke”, here’s to beer ! (“I like beer!”)
Cheers!