A few weeks ago I told you that Apple employees in several Californian stores refused to sell the company's products to Iranian citizens or citizens who spoke Farsi, saying that the US import ban on Iran prevented them from doing so. Although nothing has been heard about the issue since then, Jamal Abdi, president of the Iranian American National Council, he managed to explain them journalists from the New York Times that Apple is a racist company that refuses to sell products to the citizens of Iran and of course accused it of discrimination.
An isolated episode could be dismissed as the work of one bigoted, or misguided, employee. But there have been other recent reports of Apple employees refusing to sell to customers of Iranian descent. In Santa Monica, Calif., two friends looking to buy an iPhone were asked whether they were speaking Persian and promptly informed, "I am sorry, we don't sell to Persians." In Sacramento, an Iranian-American man looking to buy Apple products for personal use mentioned that he was also thinking about buying an iPod for his nephew in Iran and was told he could not buy anything, even for himself. An Iranian student in Atlanta, and his Iranian-American friend, were not allowed to buy an iPhone after the friend, under questioning, mentioned that the student planned to return to Iran for the summer.
In addition to the examples given by me in the previous article, the man claims that other people from different American cities could not purchase Apple products because they spoke Farsi or intended to go to Iran. On its website, Apple says that the US prohibits the import of electronic products to Iran, and the Iranian state prohibits the import of electronic products from anywhere, and Apple applies the American federal law and refuses to sell the products. Sales bans were applied when employees overheard customers saying they intended to send Apple products to Iran or when they heard Farsi spoken in stores, but the same was applied to those who spoke Persian.
Now Jamal Abdi is asking the American government to intervene and force Apple to stop applying such rules in its own stores, but it is hard to believe that any person in the government will force an American company to sell its own products to Iranian citizens.
