Justin Page
“This land shall be blessed with fruits and nuts, unto fifty
genderations.”

Try the low-fat intifada latte: Coming soon to a Starbucks near you: a
complex blend of homegrown gay-rights rhetoric and pro-Palestinian
activism, infused with a shot of anticorporate flavor and topped off
with a frothy acronym.

Sure to get some agitated and others steamed, Queers Undermining
Israeli Tyranny, aka QUIT, is a group of local rabble-rousers whose exploits at
a Berkeley Starbucks have been percolating around the Internet for the
past few weeks. On August 17, around twenty QUIT activists occupied one
of the caffeine peddler's Shattuck Avenue outposts, claiming it as part
of "Queerkeley," a gay homeland revealed in holy writ. The holy writ in
question was "QueerNation Berkeley -- God's Prophecy Fulfilled," a
tongue-in-cheek manifesto in which God declares to the prophet Harvey
Milk: "Lo, I have promised the land of Berkeley to the lesbians and to
the gays, and to the bisexuals, and to the transgenders and to the
intersexed, and to all of the gender variant peoples. And this land
shall be blessed with fruits and nuts, unto fifty genderations." Thus
emboldened, SuperSoaker-toting Quitters erected cardboard "settlements"
outside the store and announced a curfew for straight customers.

The episode, recounted in a press release on the group's Web site
(http://www.quitpalestine.org/), was meant as political satire, says
oneof its founding members, Tinku Ali. Just in case you missed the
intended metaphor, the silliness of gays claiming a Berkeley coffee store as the
Promised Land was intended to expose what Ali calls the "absurdity" of
Zionism and Israeli settlements in Palestine. The group targeted
Starbucks because it claims the chain's founder and CEO Howard Shultz
is a vocal supporter of Israel. Speaking from Starbucks' headquarters,
spokeswoman Audrey Lincoff says Shultz is "pro-peace" and that his
comments about the Middle East have been misinterpreted. As for the
Berkeley takeover, she says it was just a few unruly students who ran
inside the store, made a ruckus, and dispersed when the cops showed up.
That, at least, was the version of events that filtered up to Seattle.
The Berkeley police have no record of responding that day, and Ali says
the cops never came. A manager at the now-liberated -- or would that be
"reoccupied?" -- Starbucks said company policy prevented him from
dishing about the incident. "I'd get my butt kicked," he explained.

And how did unsuspecting java-sippers react to being cast as surrogate
Palestinians in a bit of street theater with enough mixed metaphors and
competing agendas to confuse even the most practiced observer of
Berkeley politics? Pretty gamely, it seems. Ali says the strongest
reactions he saw during the hour-and-a-half takeover were "quizzical
looks." If anything, he says, the incident raised QUIT's profile and
brought in hundreds of positive responses from folks who welcomed a
touch of levity in an otherwise deadly serious conflict. And QUIT's
prankish prophecies may be winning over new believers. "People have
asked us how they can do something like this," says Ali. With five
thousand Starbucks stores worldwide, plans for implementing the next
stage of God's plan for these particular chosen people are undoubtedly
brewing somewhere. -- Dave Gilson