...And the keffiyeh makes headlines once again. After last summer, when conservative freakshow Michelle Malkin threw a hissy fit over a Dunkin' Donuts commercial featuring Rachael Ray in a keffiyeh-ish scarf and Dunkin' Donuts pulled the commercial, I thought it was over. As the winds of autumn began, I noticed more keffiyehs wrapped around the necks of American fashionistas and thought "well, at least mainstream means I won't get dirty looks." But now, it seems that the ignorant bigots of America are at it again.
Earlier this week, two Pittsburgh high school students were forced to meet with administrators after it was determined that the red and white keffiyehs they were wearing around their necks were "disruptive to class."
Ah yes, the disruptive keffiyeh. I know mine's always talking and passing notes...I can hardly get any work done!
The students, both Arab-American, say they've worn the keffiyeh for years as a sign of their heritage, rather than of politics. And although one of the students was sent home the week prior for wearing an "RIP Israel" t-shirt to school, he admits he was aware that violated school rules...but that this doesn't.
The students also defend themselves in this video by CAIR:
As Pierre Tristam explains in this piece, the keffiyeh is "as old as the sands of Sudan and Saudi Arabia." It only gained political significance in the past century. As Tristam also notes (and I agree):
“Terrorism” and Palestinian militancy are a convenient excuse for a more unseemly, unspoken objection—the much more ordinary objection to Arabs and Arab culture as acceptably desirable by American consumers. Making symbols of Arab culture desirable and acceptable to mainstream consumers makes it immediately more difficult to vilify Arabs and, by obvious extension, Palestinians, Shiites, Sunnis (or whatever fills the blanks of reigning American prejudice). And vilifying Arabs is one of the last overtly permissible prejudices in American culture these days, because it more easily justifies the country’s immense and mounting investment in blood, guts, steel and dollars at Arabs’ expense (in Iraq primarily, in the greater Arab and south Asian region where the American military is deployed generally).The way I see it, school administrators have two choices: ban scarves in school entirely, just as they did with bandannas in my youth (as they risked "gang affiliation"), or let it go. Forbidding the keffiyeh alone is discrimination.
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