Early on Tuesday, the candy company offered up a classy response to Donald Trump Jr.’s insulting photo that compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of poisoned Skittles. Like vehicle death, for example. Approval can take up to 24 months, as NPR reported a year ago.
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His analogy was quickly criticized, but one unwitting participant in this whole thing was Skittles.
Thousands of people tweeted their thoughts on the analogy, making Skittles a trending topic on the social media site yesterday.
The company that owns Skittles said it “wasn’t an appropriate analogy” to compare people to candy. “We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing”.
The brand, like the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Adele and other artists, didn’t appreciate its product being associated with the Republican nominee.
Many responded to Trump Jr.’s tweet with images of refugees, primarily children. “The answer is no”.
Trump Jr. has been generating some controversy lately.
Last year, a picture of a deceased Syrian child being carried out of the Mediterranean Sea became a distressing face of the refugee crisis.
Trump has called for the immediate halt to USA immigration from Syria and other Muslim countries where terrorists are known to operate.
Clinton has said she would expand President Barack Obama’s refugee program to accept about 65,000 Syrian refugees. Clinton said she would continue with the vetting now in place, an effort that can take multiple years to complete.
The core issue, of course, is that whether one should eat from a bowl of Skittles, in which three have been poisoned, is radically different from whether the United States should offer refuge to those displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Obama pledged the USA would accept 10,000 Syrians this budget year, which ends September 30, and achieved that number a month early.
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These mental images – refugees as poisonous candy, venomous snakes or terrorist cells-in-waiting – come at a time when the Obama administration is working to humanize the world’s refugee problem.
