Video: UMich student confronts Champion’s owner in anti-Israel rant
‘I don’t want to shop at a place where I’m offended’
A video has surfaced on Facebook which appears to show Champion’s Liquor store owner Robert Kesto being berated for his decision to hang a sign reading “I stand with Israel.” The video, which is undated, was published on Sunday by a YouTube user called Rekt SJW (Social Justice Warrior) Videos.
In the video, the unidentified woman behind the camera, whose face is not shown, enters the store and begins by asking Kesto, “How much do you value your customers?”
Kesto responds “good enough” and the woman elaborates saying, “You have a sign that says ‘I stand with Israel’ and to me what that’s saying is that you stand with genocide, with mass killings of children of women, of war crimes, and at the University of Michigan, it’s kind of not accepted.”
The woman explains that she finds the sign “really inappropriate” as Kesto is a business man on a diverse campus.
“I don’t want to shop at a place where I feel that I’m offended,” she says.
Kesto responds that he is Jewish, and he is upholding his freedom of speech by posting the sign, prompting a back-and-forth between the two about Israeli-Palenstinian conflicts that ends in the woman informing Kesto she will no longer shop in the store.
“I’ll make sure that everybody I know doesn’t shop here anymore,” the woman says before she leaves. “I won’t shop here anymore.”
“I’ve been here since 1986… I could care less,” Kesto replies, to which the woman responds, “You really are Israeli if that’s your mentality.”
We spoke to Kesto, who confirmed that it is him and his store featured in the video.
“Everyone has an opinion,” Kesto told us. “I have an opinion, and I stand strong and I keep Israel in my heart. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and you should keep it to yourself if you disagree.”
Relations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students at the University of Michigan have been notoriously tense since the failed Divest movement in 2014, when students called for the university to withdraw its investments in companies that allegedly held contracts with the Israeli military. More recently, an “apartheid wall,” which mimicked a version of the security fence at the border between Israel and the West Bank, was constructed on the Diag on Rosh Hashanah.