A wave of anger and calls for a boycott of the chain of stores LC Waikiki grew in Turkey and the Arab world in the past few weeks after the brand pulled T-shirts with Arabic writings from Turkish stores.
The chain has come under double fire for selling children’s T-shirts with Arabic writings in Turkey.
“It’s time to play” the English translation of the Arabic writing “حان وقت اللعب” is The phrase written on children’s T-shirts that caused chaos on social media in Turkey, rejecting the presence of the Arabic text. The company responded to criticism by announcing that it was withdrawing Arabic-language T-shirts from its stores in Turkey.
Many Arab and Turkish people expressed their anger on social media, using solid and firm words against the chain of stores and asking people to take serious action against LC Waikiki, wondering why the stores have withdrawn these T-shirts. At the same time, its shelves are filled with clothes written on it in other international languages that have not been removed.
Baraa Nizar Rayan tweeted: “The Turkish LC Waikiki company apologizes to the racists and withdraws from the Turkish market a shirt bearing three words in Arabic (wrongly placed) in the Turkish market. Dozens of its shirts bear English phrases, which were not withdrawn and did not apologize because of them. The company has branches in 16 Arab countries; you should boycott it And not approach it if you care about your dignity!”
Samer Tarawneh wrote: “The Turkish clothing brand LC Waikiki apologizes to its customers in Turkey after racist criticism of it for selling a product that has writtings in Arabic. We Arabs will boycott LC Waikiki, and we will not buy your products in any country until you respect our Arabic language!”
Mehmet Tasoglu tweeted: “All languages of peoples around the world must be respected, and nobody should act in a racist manner towards a particular language. I will stop buying any of LC Waikiki’s Turkish products and call on everyone to boycott them because they support racist discourse in Turkey.”
Al-Habib Al-Hashemi tweeted, “I will not buy anything from LC Waikiki stores anymore, because they considered writing in Arabic on clothes a mistake that requires an apology, concerned about the racist customers’ feelings who doesn’t have morals.”
It is known that LC Waikiki stores sell clothes in addition to household supplies, and most of the goods are printed with words in several languages, including English, Chinese, and others.
