The youth sitting next to us in the restaurant rushed toward my friend and asked him to stop sipping the soft drink he was holding because an American company made it. The young man wanted people to boycott everything American and foreign.

The objective behind that demand could be a noble one but the logic is definitely not sound. I wondered how on earth he was going to boycott everything American and foreign and how he was going to spend his day doing this. I watched as he returned to his table and started eating his meal. To my surprise, it was made up of American rice and Brazilian chicken.

This issue of boycott is not an easy thing and thus should not be handled lightly. It is a complicated matter that reveals our weakness and vulnerability. Trying to enforce the complete boycott that youth was demanding would send us back into the Stone Age and I don’t think any wise person wants that.

You can’t ask others to boycott a soft drink while eating a dish of rice produced in the same country from which the soft drink has come. In simple words, you can’t be against America when it comes to having a soft drink and with America when it comes to eating a meal.

Even the desalinated water we drink is produced by American technology.

Trying to boycott everything American is like trying to escape the clutches of an octopus. In the age of multinational and transnational business giant firms are no longer owned by people from the same country or nationality. American shareholders own one fourth of the capital of 50 major companies from the Asian tiger group. British firms have been reduced to branch companies in their own country working to meet local demand while the bulk of their capital moved abroad in search of cheap labor. The American car, preferred by many, is manufactured in Mexico or Canada because the parent companies moved outside the US to escape financial or legal complications or to look for cheap labor and low production costs. Two of the largest three pharmaceutical companies in the world are American and not a single painkiller tablet produced by Saudi companies in Qasim or Tabuk could reach the market unless approved by the parent company.

Saudis demanding boycott seem to forget that the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the food they eat, the coffee they sip and everything around them is foreign. First produce your own clothes and then call for boycott.