I was browsing through the popular Amazon.com toys and games section and looking at all the beautiful and interesting toys there. While I was doing so I came across a very interesting and detailed replica scale model toy bulldozer called the Bruder CATERPILLAR Track-Type tractor. It seems to be a popular toy and there were more reviews than normal for this toy on Amazon.com than other toy trucks and almost all of them were praising how good, detailed and how much they like this toy tractor. There was only a single negative comment about this toy and it made me reflect and made me ashamed as a Muslim.
I’m a Muslim. All Muslims are supposed to be brothers and sisters to me. But will I consider like this American Grandmother about the consequence and tacit support I give to destroying my brothers and sisters in Palestine by buying a toy like this?
Also most Muslims think Americans are brainwashed by Pro-Israel media and see the Palestine-Israel problem only from Jewish Israel Point of View (PoV). That assumption is for the most part true. However this grandmothers comment alone proves we should not heap all Americans in one category. There are good kind hearted American Christian people their who understand the situation in Palestine even though there is so much Israel bias news and propaganda in the United States.
I’m reproducing here the comment from that Catepillar Toys page on Amazon.
My 3-year-old grandson received this [Catepillar track type tractor, price: US $26 made by Bruder toys in Germany.] as a present from another relative and he liked it a lot. But we were unhappy to have the toy around when we realized that some portion of the price of the toy went to the Caterpillar Corporation. They make the real bulldozers used by Israel to knock down homes and school in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s called collective punishment and it breaks international law. I also guess it was a CAT that murdered a sweet young American girl named Rachel Corry when she got in its way. So if we buy this machine-loving kid anymore construction toys we’ll make sure there is no connection to Caterpillar! We want him to learn about building, not destroying.
1 MUSLIM NATION 
I had never heard that before about Caterpillar; so you inspired me to do some checking, and I see that there has been some effort applied via boycott against Caterpillar for a few years now.
One of the sites I found talking about the issue was actually on Facebook (I hope I understood the HTML to make the link work): <a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204666440".
Caterpillar is #18 in the list of eighteen.
But take a look at some of the others — like #15, which is Nokia. How many Nokia users are there in the Muslim World, I wonder?
If each consumer tried to have nothing whatsoever to do with a product manufactured or produced by a corporation that had any affiliation with oppression or war, sweatshops or slavery or child labour, exploitation or endangerment of at-risk species…and even things like Big Pharma, Corporate Farming (as in Monsanto), and the like…it would become almost impossible to buy anything with a fully clear conscience, because some ingredient or component of the product being looked at would have a relationship of some sort with the worst of the foregoing.
Everything has become too interconnected and interwoven.
Turning this around just a little, I recently watched a video on TED.com by a Dutch woman (Christien Meindertsma) called How pig parts make the world turn. I would have tried to put in the link, but I wasn’t sure if I did the first one correctly and was able to make it ‘live.’
Anyway, according to her, parts of the ordinary pig “make their way into at least 185 non-pork products, from bullets to artificial hearts.”
It was a little bit uncomfortable to watch the video, but she identified quite a number of things I would not have thought contained any “pig:” shampoo, conditioner, anti-wrinkle cream, body lotion, tooth paste — it was even used as an “improver of [bread] dough,” gelatin for low-fat dairy products (to improve taste and texture that apparently suffers due to removal of the natural fat), and on and on.
The chances of finding “pig by-product” listed on an ingredient label of anything we might be buying and using here in the West is darned remote, though.
It’s daunting.
Each of us can only try to boycott or avoid that which we may believe to be injurious. If you do not approve of a company and what it promotes or supports, then make a choice as to the company’s product: buy it, or do not buy it.
Just stay as balanced as you can — don’t let yourself be driven mad because of the impossible scope of the challenge before you.
I think in general, a generation has witnessed destruction of Palestine into a Israeli-Palestinian issue – another generation are going to take their feelings to another level. This is one example ‘Boycott’ of products which support Israeli oppression in Middle East and largely on Palestinians.
Boycott is important, but what’s more important is to make others aware.