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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
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Right-wing hypocrites blame Left for "Terror" fashion trend initiated by GOP donor
Cruller hu akbar!
The rightwingosphere piled on Rachel Ray this week for sporting a keffiyeh (well, actually a paisley scarf that only kinda looks like a keffiyeh) in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, accusing the homemaking TV star and her glazed with sprinkles benefactors of shilling for terrorists.
Little Green Football’s Charles Johnson, who led the charge, complained today that he was still receiving angry responses to his post from “progressives,” he wrote in scare quotes, whom “refuse to see anything wrong with the mainstreaming of the kaffiyeh.” Johnson went on to cite a New York Times article in which a “progressive” — me! — sets the oppositional zeitgeist.
“A blogger named Mobius, posting Jan. 16 on Jewschool, a Jewish blog that targets a young audience, blasted Urban Outfitters for selling kaffiyehs,” the Times article from last February read.
Indeed, I took the retail chain to task for its multiple affronts to decency.
First and foremost, I slammed them for characterizing the adopted symbol of the Palestinian national movement as “anti-war.” Such a definition is simply at odds with reality. Which is not to say that the keffiyeh is a symbol of “terror,” as Johnson would, but rather that it is the symbol of a people at war with my people. (Sadly, this matter of nuance has been consistently lost amidst the excited tone of my post, which has caused everyone from the Times last winter to Feministe earlier this week, to portray my remarks as those of an outraged pro-Israel activist.)
I furthermore assailed URBN for coopting, commodifying, and diluting Arab culture, a subject I explored in greater depth in subsequent interviews and writings (such as this one).
I also made note of that fact that Urban Outfitters’ President Richard Hayne is a contributor to both the GOP and Rick Santorum’s corruption-rife PAC. The Republican party is therefore directly profiting from the marketing and sale of keffiyehs, a fact which critics of the fashion trend, such as Johnson, routinely fail to acknowledge.
Finally, I mocked the ignorant consumer public racing out to buy keffiyehs (later I would found the Hipster Intifada Flickr group) as well as the pro-Israel crowd, which was certain to go overboard in its opposition to the trend and ultimately did not disappoint.
Ironically, over the next several months, I became a preeminent opponent of the trend, but from a place quite different than that of the hawkish pro-Israel crowd. My commentary on the subject here and in various print publications has resulted in there being more inbound links to my coverage of keffiyehs than any other subject addressed on this blog. Indeed, the number one search term on this site has, for the past year, been “keffiyeh.” What I find most telling is that this traffic is not coming from a right-wing clusterfuck/echo-chamber of websites, but rather from the blogs of young progressives whom it seems I have helped influence against the trend.
Nonetheless, Johnson describes those who do not share his revulsion to Arab culture — those who would chastise him for framing the keffiyeh as a “terror symbol” — as “see-no-evil monkeys.” This despite my being considered so left-wing by Johnson that he programmed his site to redirect incoming traffic from the blog I founded, Jewschool, to the website of the Israeli Defense Forces. (Try clicking “Little Green Footballs” in this post.)
And yet he has the gall to whine about being “deliberately misconstrue[d].” What a joker.
Michelle Malkin got in on the action today, as well, actually linking to a Jewschool post on the subject in her nationally syndicated column. She too, in framing it as a Left vs. Right issue, failed to mention the keffiyeh trend’s GOP connection, holding the Left accountable for a practice from which the Right is profiting.
At least she had the decency to note that even “100 years” McCain’s daughter has recently been seen rocking what Gawker cheekily refers to as “an Islamic terror scarf.” No word from Johnson yet as to whether the presumptive GOP nominee’s daughter is a “see-no-evil monkey” too.
Tags: fashion trend, kaffiyeh, keffiyeh, lgf, rachel wray, republican, richard hayne, urban outfitters
Michelle Malkin is generally execrable in everything she says. Sorry she linked to you.
I have to say I am on the anti-keffiyeh train, too. I have two authentic keffiyehs that I bought in the Palestinian section of Hebron in a small effort to help out the economy of honest merchants in a rather depressing and mostly-shuttered market.
Little did I expect that when I got back to the U.S., I couldn’t wear them at all, because rather than being seen as a controversial and bold statement of Palestinian solidarity, it was a totally meaningless hipster chic trend. Now we’ve reached the point of RACHAEL EFFING RAY wearing a keffiyeh in a DUNKIN DONUTS COMMERCIAL of all things. and i can’t even be appropriately outraged about the commodification, because then i’ll just sound like Michelle Malkin.
Anyway, I think the generally nuanced approach you try to take is a good one. I myself wouldn’t just wear a keffiyeh all the time, like some lefty activists, but only on a special occasion, and even then I’d try to combine it with some symbol of Jewish solidarity as well…
Didn’t Urban Outfitters immediately agree to stop producing/selling the scarf after the “Peace Scarf” issue was brought to the attention of Richard Hayne?
Obviously, Johnson and Malkin are all about hate. There’s nothing deeper to their reaction. So, it’s pretty much a dead end dealing with them, as rationality and nuance are not of interest.
I’ve noted this before: the keffiyeh as fashion “statement” or just as a nice looking and functional scarf, is not new. What is new is it’s being applied as “hipster” wear. (I’m not a fan of that either. To me, most hipster wear looks like the same stuff I was wearing in Nebraska when I was 12. Down to the trucker hat. Go watch the movie Convoy and see what I mean. Or an old episode of BJ and the Bear.)
It’s just fashion. We get into trouble when the stereotypes we administer to certain types of fashion become all encompassing definitions of the person wearing them. Johnson and Mallin do so because they are all about categorizing persons as either patriots or traitors. It serves their fascist agenda to define others as inferior for everything from how they dress to how they think.
There was a time when wearing “tennis shoes” or “sneakers” was considered a show of support for less than American beliefs, being a thug, or worse.
I know people who won’t wear sneakers or jeans because of that still. (People over the age of 60.)
Now, think about that for a moment. We’ve attached a heightened meaning to a scarf, a style of scarf that is worn my people all around the world, in various forms and colors.
But, if it’s a black and white one… oooo boy, look out.
As I said, it’s all about hate. It really is…
Actually, HalfSours, here it is back in stock 4 months after they initially yanked it from the shelves.
Bad photo and scarf aside, I kinda dig Rachel Ray, a lot. It might have something to do with staring at her wholesome smile every fucking days for months on end, as it was on our cracker line for quite some time, but I find her sexy as hell. I wonder if she has a sister that is single.
I appreciate Malkin’s heightened post 9/11 patriotism, but I was sickened to find incriminating photos of Malkin in a leather jacket. The same woman who vilifies and conflates Ray with all Arab men, is actually promoting gay leather subculture. The explanation: http://www.236.com/blog/w/kati.....s_6809.php
Oh my lord, Ray, I could not disagree more with you re: Rachael Ray. My thing is, there are so many truly worthwhile reasons to hate on Rachael Ray, and this is just not one of them.
I had a totally different read on Feministe’s encapsulation of your earlier comments, Mobius. It seems to me that Holly is saying she agrees with you that keffiyeh-as-fashion-trend dilutes the meaning of keffiyeh-as-symbol-of-resistance-or-what-have-you. Either way, though, I saw more keffiyot in London and Oxford a few weeks ago than I’d ever seen, and most of them were on little bitty thirteen-year-olds. Very bizarre.
http://naomileibowitz.com/projects/rray/index.html
mmmmbop.
Ray, maybe you just need a proper meal.
Rachel’s right, Europe’s been flooded by scarves (not only keffiyeh-type ones) that were popular over the past decades (e.g. dip-dye or Indian style ones that were sold at fair-trade fairs and stores in the 1980), and most teens don’t associate anything at all with those except for them being cheap accessory items.
All I said was that she’s an attractive woman.
Why do i need a proper meal?
So the view of a chewing woman won’t thrill you, mayhaps?
However, since there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I suppose Rachel Ray as well as Dunkin Donuts have benefited from the uproar. Whether it was intended, we supposedly will never know, but optically that scarf doesn’t go well with the detailled background, so I guess it was kept in place during the production of the clip for some reason. Maybe a love bite?
Not at all. I’m more interested in the words that come out of a woman’s mouth, not the food that goes into it.
Strange, most men I know are as much or even more concerned with what a woman will take into her mouth…
Come to think of it, I’m not very big on being involved with smokers, but perhaps they are more health conscious in Germany?
In a way, they are; the major concern is that more and more minors take up smoking, so now you get carded when buying tobacco goods and need a debit or credit card for cigarette vending machines to verify your age. Which doesn’t help if their parents will let the kids have their cards to get the cigarettes. It reflects the same kind of overall indifference that also shows in ignorantly wrapping themselves in scarfs or adorning themelves with all kinds of symbols. And indeed, I should prefer that everybody that celebrates St Patrick’s knew at least a few basics of what that day means to Irish people; that till 1891, no Irishman could become a member of parliament in Britain, that wearing green and growing clover – even if only accidentally – were subject to death penalty in Ireland, that Celtic languages were banned in Britain well into the 1980s (with the threat of death penalty still officially being in effect till then), that the Sovereign still may not marry a Catholic and no Catholic may become Prime Minister of the UK. To Irish people, St Patrick’s is more than a day of binge drinking.
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t kiss smokers, and I don’t lick ashtrays.
1. Ironic. If Rachel Ray tried to survive on $40 in the occupied territories/forcibly leased spaces, she’d be lucky to make one end of a market to the other dressing the provocative way she does.
2. The Thugees never lived to see a time when people would so carelessly bring the instrument of their own strangulation around as a fashion statement.
3. I own a yashmagh and agal myself, but they look silly in the US where we actually have trees and shade so I keep them the way I keep other things that would look silly, on my shelf as a memento of nothing in particular.
Simple ignorance fuels most of this back-and-forth about the keffiyeh. Most progressives/hipsters who wear the keffiyeh, including Jewish ones, are at least partly ignorant (sometimes willfully) that it IS a symbol of Palestinian resistance, not just solidarity. And of course the far-left has a long history of blindness to the darker realities of ‘resistance’.
Likewise much knee-jerk reactions against the keffiyeh come from straw-man posturing and ignorant right-wing railing.
Dan, you’ve (famously) worn a keffiyeh for various provocative purposes (i recall a Neturei Karta Purim costume). You’ve actually done it both from principle and from awareness of historical realities, and not as ongoing fashion.
But well I hate to say it, your communication style (as with your stunts with keffiyehs) is not designed for nuance, more for inflammation. I do respect your stand and your use of the symbol, as well as your accurate accusations of hypocrisy by others on this issue. But people are not so likely to hear nuance from someone who davens with tefillin at the other Wall (the security fence or ‘apartheid wall)
do you actually think any of these bloggers or journalists are familiar w/ my keffiyeh talit kattan? or that they’d ever even heard of me or my blog before this issue took off?
and no — my art is not intended to inflame. it’s intended to provoke. and there is a massive difference between those two intentions.
Did anybody notice that she’s in Salem, Oregon, for that shot? It’s the only state capital building with a flat dome. My heart beats for my home of the Northwest.
[...] Mobius is giving the blogosphere a reaming in the motherboard over the rightwingosphere’s dive tackling keffiyah-sporting Rachel Ray in the knees. Far be it from me to comment too much further than the grand-daddy of the topic has already done. [...]
[...] A few days ago I spotted a young German man on the Berlin subway wearing a Kaffiyeh Yisraelit. I mentioned this to a German friend. My friend did a quick google search and turned up this gem: The Kaffiyeh Feygele. It seems a gay or two on the “anti-German” left has now appropriated Rachel Ray’s favorite scarf. [...]
I think we may wish to remember whom is one of this women’s main supporter. Oprah who when Mr. Gibson was on her show. mentioned how she supported him for backing his father. We all remember his father’s support fro the Jews?
What i find amusing is that most of these so-called fashion keffiyehs look more like rustic picnic tablecloths trying to be keffiyehs. actually, a few days ago, i saw a woman wearing one that actually looked just like a rustic picnic tablecloth and not really like a keffiyeh at all!