

Minnesota - North Dakota - South Dakota.


"They removed the link and are working to correct the site."īMW also issued a press release stating, "BMW Group regrets having published this map on one of its Internet sites. "The minute we got the calls, we contacted our colleagues over there," said Mitchell, referring to the company's Middle East division. Rob Mitchell, the BMW Group's North American director of corporate communications, said on Friday the company had received "quite a number" of calls from people objecting to the omission of Israel from a map on the Internet indicating the location of BMW dealers in the Middle East. In response to a flurry of protests, BMW has agreed to correct its Middle East division's Web site, which showed "Palestine" in place of Israel, a company spokesman told The Jerusalem Post. According to the Jerusalem Post, this action did indeed occur in response to a rash of complaints to BMW: Our inquiry to BMW went unanswered, and by the next day they had pulled the map in question from their web site and removed the link to it from their BMW in Your Country page. This omission made no logical sense, as BMW does business in Israel, just as it does in the other labelled countries. On 8 August 2002, a reader called our attention to the web site of BMW Middle East, whose map of BMW service locations in the Middle East included an area labelled 'Palestine' but failed to identify the country of Israel: A pair of German auto manufacturers seem to have no such excuses for maps of the Middle East which recently appeared on their web sites, however. Origins: E-mails proclaiming that a particular company has identified Israel as 'Palestine' on a map or directory listing or has omitted Israel entirely (with the purported intent of "courting Arab business") are not uncommon, although such claims generally turn out to be false, the result of inadvertent errors, or situations caused by agencies beyond the control of the blamed company (as happened with Fuji and Marriott). Claim: The web sites of German automobile manufacturers BMW and Mercedes-Benz both displayed maps of the Middle East which left Israel unidentified.
