Out of Business: ISM shop shuttered on Etsy

Ah, the exceptionalism of the Palestinians and their advocates.

Paul Larudee of the International Solidarity movement (ISM) is upset. After several years of selling Palestinian olive oil, soaps and Keffiyehs on the Etsy  website, their shop was closed.  Paul howled "discrimination". but it wasn't.  

Rules don’t apply to anti-Israel activists after all. Never mind that the Etsy marketplace deals exclusively with handmade goods, vintage goods and craft supplies, and the commercial, mass produced products marketed by the ISM were outside the scope of Etsy. Never mind that the ISM violated the very principles and mission of the Etsy, and damaged the integrity of the site by arrogantly shirking the guidelines

They are the victims. They are always the victims.

From Etsy:

Handmade will always be the heart of Etsy.

In our diverse marketplace, handmade can't mean a single method or process. Instead, it's about these three principles.

Authorship

A handmade item begins with you. Etsy's not the place to sell new items you had no role in creating.

Responsibility

Shop owners on Etsy are invested and knowledgeable about how their handmade items are made.

Transparency

By being open and honest about how items are made, we create a marketplace built on trust.

Nonetheless, the ISM whines:

Etsy's complaint against us was that our items are not hand made by us. That is of course only partly true, because nearly everything that we sell requires the time and effort of our group volunteers to finish the product and make it ready for shipping.

A more telling point, however, is that there are nine other Etsy sellers offering keffiyehs for sale, and theirs are not any more handmade than ours. In fact, four of them offer the exact same product as us, from the exact same supplier in Palestine (Hirbawi factory). Why are we being singled out? We think it is precisely because we are a nonprofit supporting Palestinians and Palestinian human rights. That is the main difference between us and the other Etsy stores.

 No, packaging a product doesn't make it handmade.  And its just a matter before those other shops are closed too, for violating the ETSY principles.