Grace Tame’s partnership with Nike appears to be in jeopardy after the sportswear brand confirmed it had started a probe into her hatred of Israel and amplification of anti-Semitic claptrap to her 250,000 followers on Instagram.
Nike spent the weekend assiduously ducking questions over Tame’s remarks, but by Monday its officials emerged with a statement outlining their heightened concerns with the rhetoric.
“Nike does not stand for any form of discrimination, including anti-Semitism,” a spokeswoman said. “We take this matter very seriously and are in touch with Grace’s team to understand the matter further.” Translation: short of an apology, she’s toast.
Tame has spent weeks expressing her contempt for Israel with impunity, posting claims of “ethnic cleansing”, “genocide” and signal-boosting the view that anyone who supports the country is – word salad warning – participating in a “legitimisation of Jewish supremacist ethnonationalism”.
The worst of it came last week, however, when Tame reposted a statement from Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd, in which he appeared to condone the murder of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington and angrily attacked journalists who reported that the slayings were an act of “anti-Semitism”.
In amplifying the most extreme voices of pro-Palestinian activism, Tame has created an untenable liability for Nike and its global brand. She has also found herself in an alignment with people who openly celebrate the October 7 attacks, justify the capture of toddlers as hostages and, most perversely, with those who have nothing to say – and peddle denials about – the rapes of many women at the Nova music festival site.
Last month she shared a stage with the loathsome Randa Abdel-Fattah, whose assertion that Zionists have “no claim or right to cultural safety” is playing out with a deadly, real-world effect: a week ago in Washington, on Monday in Colorado.
Tame is no longer just an affiliate of these people. She has positioned herself as a participant in the spread of lies about Israel and its supporters, to the point where she’s urging her followers to regard the deaths of two Jews in Washington not as a result of any libel, or anti-Semitism, but as the inevitable, justifiable consequence of a war being waged on another continent. It is completely bonkers for Nike to abide this sentiment.
The irony is, Tame may not even know that Nike stores in Australia are wholly owned by Harel Wiesel’s Fox Group, a retail chain headquartered in Israel and listed on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. Its subsidiary, Retailors Ltd, purchased the master franchise licence from Retail Prodigy Group last year.
You have to wonder why Tame even bothers to keep up this partnership with Nike, and through it with Fox Group, when she harbours such a contempt for Israel, and while urging her followers to quite literally boycott and divest from the country.
Then again, there’s a delicious irony in knowing that even with all that hate and activism against the Israelis … she’s sort of been helping them the whole time.
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