But, Sean Davenport has called on council leader Martin Rooney to apologise after branding protest an “overtly racist act”.

Activist Sean said the Labour man’s comment were ill-informed and down to a “lack of education and understanding”.

But the admin worker refused to focus on the negative aspects of the protest, believing Mr Rooney to have made the comments “before thinking”.

Sean said: “I don’t know what to make of his comments to be honest.

“I think it’s a lack of understanding about what we’re doing – I think he’s spoke before thinking about what he’s saying.

“The protests are going quite well. I thought the first one would have been a one-off about the humanitarian efforts, but it’s been well received and we now have a nucleus of about 30-40 protestors.” Since the first demonstration outside Marks and Spencer at Dumbarton’s St James’ Retail Park – which coincided with WDC’s raising of the Palestinian flag above Dumbarton’s Municipal Buildings – Sean and his brother, Kieran have successfully organised three more acts of solidarity.

That saw a second protest outside Marks and Spencer, a third outside Morrisons and a fourth to be held outside Asda in Dumbarton tomorrow (Wednesday). And Sean says the message is being heard loud and clear.

He added: “One of the store managers from Morrisons came and gave us 10 minutes of his time to see what we were protesting at, which was great.

“He said he’s going to have a meeting with his bosses further up the chain about the boycotts.” Sean and fellow activists are protesting against supermarkets supplying Israeli produced goods, asking for those who support the people of Palestine to boycott such goods.

The first protest outside of Marks and Spencer was also to highlight their “historic links with Israel” and the alleged provision of funding to Israeli governments.

But Sean says his efforts are not politically minded, merely to highlight the suffering of war.

He added: “It wasn’t our intention to target just one shop, there’s no agenda. We have tried to hand out leaflets about the boycott and how people can get involved.

“There’s no specific reason I’m doing this, but the war there is headline news it catches the eye and it’s really hard to watch. I know people locally that travel to take part in bigger demonstrations.

“But me and my brother didn’t think a lot of locals would or could travel to the bigger national ones. So we thought we should hold one locally and see what kind of reaction we got.

“The more and more I spoke to people and saw there was nothing, I thought we should do something here in Dumbarton.” As a result of the success of the demonstrations, Sean and his brother are now spearheading a meeting to discuss what else people from the area can do to show their support for those affected by the war. And of Councillor Rooney’s comments, Sean would like to see a retraction of his comments and said he was “angered” by the comment.

He added: “It’s really angered us. He might as well come out and call us racist. We are going to keep asking for a retraction – it’s disappointing he said it.” Councillor Rooney did not respond to our request for comment.