This isn't your momma's Sears. This week, tank tops, t-shirts, and hoodies featuring the words “Free Palestine End Israeli Occupation” were for sale on the company's Sears Marketplace website. This allows customers to purchase items from third party vendors. Forward has more about the vendor hawking these shirts:

In a statement on its website, the Germany-based Spreadshirt Collection calls itself a “global platform for personalized clothing and accessories, we are the go-to-place for anyone looking to realize their creative ideas on quality fabrics. We value freedom of expression, whether it’s with your own designs or those made available by our community.”

The company’s code of responsibility says that it does not print things that are “bound to offend people.”

Elsewhere on its site, the company says that it values free expression. “Therefore, we print almost all designs sent to us whether we, as a company or personally, like them or not.”

Well, they may sell whatever they like, but apparently Sears no longer has the appetite to fight this cultural battle after a social media onslaught:

If you click on this link, you can see the shirts they had been selling:

However, clicking on the items yields this result:

The store lists three reasons why the items might not be available: the page may no longer exist, the customer's session may have timed out, or the product is no longer available. Here are two other reasons they should've added to the list:

"We made a grave mistake by offering a shirt that would really offend our customers. Oops!"

or, as a Twitter user pointed out,

"You can't free or restore a state that never existed."