USA: The Disgusting Breitbart Smear Campaign Against the Immigrant Owner of Chobani

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Chobani yogurt head Hamdi Ulukaya is a wildly successful capitalist. So what did he do wrong, by alt-right standards? He hires Muslim refugees.

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | UK Desk
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast
By James Kirchick | September 1, 2016

[Excerpts]

Hamdi Ulukaya is the model American immigrant success story.

In 2005, the Turkish-born Kurdish entrepreneur purchased a defunct Kraft foods plant in upstate New York with an $800,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. In just a few years, his Chobani yogurt went from selling a few containers at a Long Island kosher grocery to being the No. 1 selling yogurt brand in the country with annual revenue topping $1.5 billion. In addition to employing more than 2,000 people directly—all of whom earn above minimum wage and enjoy generous benefits—the company purchases 4 million pounds of milk from American farmers every day.
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For his humanitarianism and thinking outside the traditional corporate box, Ulukaya now stands at the center of a vicious smear campaign. Earlier this year, in a piece originally headlined “American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims,” a writer for the far-right conspiracy-mongering website World Net Daily falsely claimed that refugees were being sent to Twin Falls specifically for the purpose of working at the Chobani plant and that Ulukaya was “call[ing] on [the] biggest American companies to join [an] Islamic surge.” (That line was later removed from the piece, as was the headline, since changed to the slightly less inflammatory “U.S. Yogurt Billionaire Asks Businesses to Hire More Foreign Refugees.”) The allegations have since migrated to the similarly paranoid precincts of Breitbart.com, the “alt-right” repository of white nationalism and xenophobia whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, recently merged seamlessly into the Trump campaign as its CEO. At Breitbart, the story of Chobani’s refugee employees has taken on new life as the centerpiece of a broader intrigue. For the past month, Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan has been filing dispatch after dispatch from the Idaho town alleging a nexus of disease, rape, and jihad—all with Chobani and Ulukaya at its center.

In breathless tones, Stranahan, who according to his Twitter bio recently relocated to Twin Falls, attacks Ulukaya as a “globalist corporatist,” two epithets that, in the newfangled dialect of Breitbartian-Trumpian nationalism, signify one’s dubious, non-American loyalties. According to Stranahan, refugee resettlement in Twin Falls is “a situation connected to the drive for cheap labor by the local food processing industry that Chobani is a major part of.”

Another author writing at Breitbart claims that Idaho has “been a popular destination for refugees in recent years… in large part due to Ulukaya’s efforts to import refugees to work in his yogurt factory” and that Ulukaya is “a figure of controversy for his decision to fill his yogurt plants with foreign refugees rather than unemployed Americans. (Eds: An earlier version of this article incorrectly credited those quotes to Stranahan.)
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The most sensational component of Breitbart’s “special report” concerns an inappropriate sexual encounter, misleadingly labeled a “gang rape,” involving three refugee minors and a 5-year-old Twin Falls girl in June. Local anti-Muslim activists seized upon the incident, which is under investigation by authorities, and launched a campaign to discredit the entire refugee resettlement program, which Stranahan ominously labels “Idaho’s Globalist Devil’s Bargain.” Last month, a white nationalist organization called the American Freedom Party issued robocalls across Idaho informing listeners that the “nonwhite invasion of their state and all white areas constitutes white genocide.” (This is the same racist outfit that endorsed Trump, calling him the “Great White Hope,” and paid for robocalls on his behalf in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.)

In a piece headlined “Twin Falls Refugee Rape Special Report: Why are the Refugees Moving In?” Stranahan writes that the use of refugee labor by Chobani and other food companies in southern Idaho has led to unspecified “civic consequences,” the insinuation being that these businesses are somehow responsible for the June incident and that the entire refugee resettlement program should be scrapped on account of the behavior of three refugee children.
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Hamdi Ulukaya’s business ethics—fair, compassionate, cosmopolitan—are a direct repudiation of Donald Trump’s cutthroat, selfish, racist greed. And perhaps that’s what grates Breitbart most about this green card-holding, tax-paying Turkish immigrant and the business he built from scratch. For at its heart, the Trump phenomenon is a revolt of the thuggishly second-rate, a collection of mediocrities and opportunists for whom dragging down their betters provides a fillip to wallowing alone in self-pity.

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