Michelle Malkin supports terrorism

Let us quote:

The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.

Let us analyze the hypocrisy that is Michelle Maglalang (what an odd and terrorist sounding name she had). Maglalang was born in the United States to immigrants who were not citizens of the country. They did not become citizens until she turned 18. She was “an anchor baby” if I may quote her:

“Citizenship is too precious to squander on accidental Americans in Name Only.”

She graduated from Oberlin College, which she describes as a “radically left-wing, liberal arts college. In fact she regards all Universities as “radically left-wing, liberal arts” colleges. Does this give us a direct cause and effect scenario? Are colleges liberal because the people are educated or are the people educated because they are liberal. Im sure atleast three conservative have had heart attacks to the large words in my blog today so I will dumb it down for our non college educated conservative readers.

Maglalang thinks the internment of Japanese (and anyone who looked Asian) during WW2 was warrented and “the right thing to do.” When it was pointed out to her by rights groups that she was Asian her response was “I am not Asian, I am American”, lets be honest- she was/is an Anchor Baby.

So back to the issue at hand. By Malkin’s own account she is a terrorist. She supports terror and is an anti-semite. She believes that people, like herself, should be jailed and then deported. She should have never been an American citizen and her parents should have been deported the minute they smuggled themselves into America. She must be a crazy liberal “moon bat” because she went to college and thusly should not be spoken to.  She married a college educated man who graduated with the likes of Rachel Maddow and George Stephanopoulos (The liberal enemy). Her husband is unemployed and stays home to raise the children (A women working? Damn those suffragists! Damn those liberal hippies!)

Ladies and Gentlemen I give you Michelle Malkin : Hypocrite, Uncle Tom(Thomisina), Terrorist

How not to interpret symbolism

The following article was written by LilithHope. I know that the Rachel Ray topic has been spoken about by countless individuals but thise piece explains how fringe groups cannot claim a monopoly on symbols that predate themselves or anyone else they know.

The US chain Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an advert following complaints that the scarf worn by a celebrity chef offered symbolic support for Islamic extremism.

Dunkin’ Donuts said there was a “possibility of misperception“

“This fashion choice incensed at least one prominent conservative blogger, who said it evoked extremist videos.

The blogger, Michelle Malkin, called the garment “a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos“.”

This is a fine example about the collapsing of everything Arab into the category “terrorist”. As anyone with the slightest idea about Arab history and culture would know, the kuffiyeh was initially worn in the Middle East in order to protect the head from the harsh sun of the desert, and then became a symbol of Palestinian nationalism in the 1960’s; it was, quite literally, Yasser Arafat’s piece de resistance. 

The up-in-arms reaction of the blogger mentioned above indicates that she has no real grasp of an important factor in interpretating ’symbols’, which is that they have no fixed meaning, and that across ages and within different contexts the meaning of an inanimate object will change.

The fact that the kuffiyeh has been used in the past 7 or 8 years in the videos by terrorists is more a reflection of the widening perception in the Arab popular consciousness that American policies are aimed against them as a group, an ethnicity, a religion. That Arabs rally behind the Palestinian cause as the epitomization of oppression stems from their realization that the destruction of their own homes, nations, livelihoods, be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon, is perpetrated by the same entity that sanctioned the creation of the state of Israel, whose initial displacement of hundred of thousands of people from ther homes continues to this day, in terms of ever-increasing settlements and the land grabs acheived by the mostrosity that is the separation wall. The sustained violence, dispossession and destruction that are the manifestation of American foreign policy in the region are considered to be based on a lumping togehter of Arabs in the mind of the American political elite. It is therefore to be expected that individuals or groups who seek to counter such aggression appropriate symbols from a past struggle or traditional identity (ie: the kuffiyeh as something quintessentially Arab).

However, that does not mean that the new appropriation, that of ‘radical Islamism, should have a monopoly on the meaning of the symbol; rather, it is one of a plurality of meanings, and it is the responsability of the spectator to show awareness of that fact in their analysis of the symbol. Consequently, the drive to immediately associate the kuffiyeh with terrorism betrays the deep-set bigotry that both inspires and perpetuates the aggressive policies that designate certain lives as more valuable than others.

Furthermore, in keeping with the view of the shifting quality of symbols, one must also acknowledge that the kuffiyeh has become a very popular fashion accessory in the West over the past couple of years. Indeed, just as the face of Che Guevara has been massively commodified and abused by the very exploitative system that he sacrificed his life fighting against, so the popularization of multi-coloured kuffiyehs as sold in Top Shop or Urban Outfitters serves to mainstream, and hence dilute, the message of resistance.

I was in Camden market about a year ago and saw 2 teenage boys looking through a rack of coloured kuffiyehs and walked over to ask them,pointing to the scarf , ’do you know what that means?’. They just looked at me emptily, completely oblivious to what I referring. I cotinued, asking if they knew the origins or historical and political meaning of the kuffiyeh. They shrugged and shook their heads, and without displaying any interest in the topic at all, they continued to discuss which colour would suit them best.

Popularization yields banality. Something that was once revolutionary becomes just another frivolous morsel for our relentless appetite of consumption.

But that does not mean that the kuffiyeh is devoid of any political significance. It depends where it is being worn, and why. To say that the popularization of the scarf in the high streets of London and New York renders the Palestinian who bears in in Gaza, the 3rd generation refugee who dons it in Jordan, or the many people around the world who wear it in solidarity with the Palestinian cause insignificant or futile is to prioritize one contextually contingent meaning of the kufiyyeh over all others.

The above furore over the use of the kuffiyeh in a Duncan Donut’s commercial can be viewed as revealing more about the eye of the beholder than the actual object of consternation. What is most worrying is that by heeding to the complaints of the conservative blogger and others, the company is allowing one selective, biased and prejudiced interpretation to dominate over the others, thereby invalidating both its meanings of resistance and fashion trend. Moreover, as a result of this case, that interpretation will no doubt become more predominant in the popular Western imagination of what the kuffiyeh means, and exacerbate the stigma that has come to surround anything Arab. 

Michelle Malkin and race hatred

I like democracy, I like my freedoms but sometimes I hunger for a society where people can’t vote and those in power make decisions for us. Crazy right?

These moments of craving repression are caused by people like Michelle Malkin (and other wastes of matter). If people like her are allowed to vote in our society it is no wonder why things have been horrible for the past eight years. Their lunacy goes to new heights on a daily basis and serves as an insult to people who can formulate coherent thoughts. This week Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Littegreenfootballs and other “conservative” bloggers really jumped off the deep end. (Someone should really tell Michelle that she isn’t white and hating on immigrants is a little hypocritical).

Feministe summed it up wonderfully:

Thanks to Wonkette I found out about the most asinine snippet of fabricated outrage since Falwell warned us all about that sinister homosexual Teletubby. This time, right-wing cheer squad Michelle Malkin and Charles Johnson have frothed up at the mouth over the fact that Dunkin Donuts and Rachael Ray are colluding to support anti-Semitic terrorism.

Wait, what?

Look, right there! In the middle of the picture. No, above the “artificial sweeteners and skim milk are better for you” latte she’s hawking… she’s wearing a black and white scarf! Or more precisely, what the froth squad are calling a keffiyah — the traditional Arab headscarf that, in a particular black-and-white pattern, became a symbol of the Palestinian people and their struggles for sovereignty. Sadly, they’re not joking. Although I have to say I laughed out loud at the phrase “hate couture.” The thing is, if you look at the scarf Rachael Ray is wearing in that picture, it doesn’t even remotely resemble the pattern traditionally associated with the keffiyeh, which resembles an interlocking net or a chain-link fence. Look, here’s Yasser Arafat wearing one… a fairly iconic and well-known image. But Ray’s scarf doesn’t even have a regular geometric pattern on it.

It’s easy to joke about the obvious problems here. Dunkin Donuts has already responded to the controversy by saying:

Thank you for taking the time voice your concerns about the Dunkin’ Donuts Rachael Ray advertisement. In the ad that you reference, Rachael is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design purchased at a U.S. retail store and selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. This is not a ‘kaffiyeh’, which is typically a checkered and cotton/wool fabric.

It has paisleys on it. You can see one if you look closely enough. At this point, we’re in the territory where any black and white scarf becomes suspect, whether worn around your head like Arafat or draped loosely around your neck. Extra Axis-of-Evil points if it has knotted tassels! And yes, Jon from Exurban League seems to feel perfectly fine jumping into that territory and saying that no, you shouldn’t wear a black and white scarf unless you want to send an anti-Semitic message of hate and support for terrorism. What’s next… is Santa Claus a Communist again because of the red suit? You know, we really shouldn’t stop at black and white scarves; even more radical Palestinian groups than Arafat’s (such as Hamas) have been known to adopt checkered scarves in red or other colors. We better check the whole Urban Outfitters catalog and boycott suspect neckwear — especially that one called “Desert Scarf,” that’s very suspicious.

However, there are bigger fish to fry here than the extensio ad absurdum of black and white scarves. The keffiyeh, the actual keffiyeh and not just any patterned monochrome scarf in existence, really is a symbol of Palestinian liberation. And this issue has come up before, when outrage from the blogosphere convinced Urban Outfitters to pull their strikingly familiar “anti-war” scarves off the shelves. Oh wait, except they didn’t really pull them off the shelves at all. They just renamed the products, calling the scarves shemaghs, a name also adopted by US and UK troops when wearing this kind of scarf as a face covering for harsh desert weather, or even just “desert scarves” as mentioned above. Fashion and marketing mutate the name, the pattern, even the material (silk’s not quite as good in a sandstorm, Rachael) until the symbol starts slipping out of your hands, and you start looking like a raving lunatic if you try to fix it onto a political opinion.

I actually think a lot of the criticism leveled at retailers like Urban Outfitters was valid. As Sieradski pointed out on Jewschool, the merchandising of the keffiyah dilutes and trivializes any connection the piece of clothing has to actual political conflicst. Posts from the Arab-American forum Kabobfest were quoted saying much the same thing:

With a great deal of discomfort and a tad bit of pissed-off-ness, I regret to (re)inform the KABOB-o-sphere that Palestine has officially become a trend…That’s right folks, for a mere $20.00 (or 75.0127 Saudi Riyal) you too can jump on the socially stupid hipster-doofus bandwagon by rocking your very own “Anti-War Woven Scarf!” (available only at Urban Outfitters… or..err..uh… the Middle East).

It’s another example of the fashion industry thriving on scavenging and appropriating whatever cultural traditions they can find to profit off of, but perhaps more saliently, it’s a fusion of military and political chic — much like Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara. A visual motif becomes popular because it originally meant something; 20-somethings in more affluent metropolises of the world adopt it to look countercultural, to express their political solidarty; finally, Urban Outfitters wants to make some quick cash.

I really do believe that some symbols mean something real. I disagree strenuously with anyone who claims that you can appropriate a meaning-laden symbol and turn it into a simple fashion statement; there are reasons global culture won’t let anyone get away with doing that to an angled swastika motif in black, white and red. (At the same time, I do wish more people knew the much longer history of the symbol and how it’s used in Asian cultures.) But there are two problems in this case. One is that the right-wing zealots are trying to foist their own blanket meaning on a piece of clothing that has a long history as a national symbol. I’ll come back to that later. The other problem is that Malkin and Johnson are complaining about a symbol that has basically escaped and vanished, lost its meaning in the Land of Miscellaneous Consumer Scarves.

The more popular the symbol becomes, not to mention the more permutations it gets put through, the less likely anyone is to make any kind of political connection. Regardless of how you feel about Israel and Palestine, isn’t that what we should be mourning here: the complete dissolution of an important issue that’s killed countless people, destroyed families, and ripped a region apart, into a meaningless fashion statement? The hilarious thing is that the right-wing froth squad have everything exactly backwards; it’s not like they can really stop anyone from wearing any generic black and white scarf, but they can yell about it as if the trivialization and dilution of real life-and-death geopolitical events isn’t happening. As if people’s fashion choices really did mean something, but the whole point of consumerism is that these kinds of meanings get sucked out and replaced with price tags.

Finally, here is the real question we should really ask ourselves: what about celebrities and political figures and everday folks who really do wear keffiyahs, unlike Rachael Ray, and wear them to express support for the Palestinian people? Malkin and Johnson would have you believe that this is a clear statement of support for terrorism and hatred for Jews. There’s something very, very rotten in that assumption — do I really need to explain it? Equating Israel with all Jews is suspect enough; just for starters, it’s an equation that a whole lot of Jews object to strenuously. Even in the United States, pro-Israel political leadership is having an increasingly hard time mobilizing support for Israel’s policies from American Jews, especially all the urban, liberal Jews in this country.

On top of that, the “keffiyehs support terror” mindset makes Palestine and any support for the Palestinian people equivalent to terrorism. You can’t really make that kind of claim with a straight face and also say you hope for peace in the Middle East.

yeah… they are worn all over the middle east, different colors and everything. Republicans and more over people who label themselves “conservatives” are really quite the uneducated bunch.

Kabobfest had this to say:

America Does Away With Algebra and the Numeral System

Because, just like the “scarf,” it is “too Arab” .

Although Will already posted on this, I think it is worth re-opening an already active discussion by shedding some light on the cyber responses to the pulling of Dunkin Donut’s online AD featuring Rachel Ray.

In a post about the DD commercial, The Huffington Post explains that townhall.com columnist, “Michelle Malkin and other conservative observers thought the scarf looked too much like a keffiyeh, what Malkin describes as “the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.” (Her actual full quote is too priceless to not include in its entirety: “The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.”)

How is a scarf worn and used by pre-Islamic Arabs (which probably includes Jews and Christians in the area) automatically read by Malkin as a “symbol of the Islamic Jihad”? One used to keep the sun and sand out of the eyes and mouths of bedouins and South Arabian desert dwellers?

Malkin also claims that accepting this commercial is a mainstreaming of violence. As much as this might shock readers, I would have to agree. Smalltown USA Ray wearing traditional bedouin garb is a violent assault on my culture.

Not allowing the ridiculousness of such a claim go unnoticed, one commentator, maggienow, on the Huffington Post sardonically observes: “I know for a fact Ray is a Palestinian terrorist ” I once watch her make a falafel on her show. Coincidence? I think not!”

Pacific231 follows suit:
“Malkin’s next targets:

The Pillsbury Doughboy. How DARE he sell CRESCENT rolls!!

Little kids who play leapfrog. MY GOD IT LOOKS LIKE THEY’RE PRAYING TO ALLAH !!”

As a result of DD’s cowardly bowing down to pressure from conservative insanity, many of the commentators have suggested boycotting the company’s products and writing the corporate offices.

Oh and Malkin’s real name is Née Maglalang. (sounds like a terrorist to me)

Kanye West rockin the keffiyeh

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=-hotjeKvovg

I know, he is probably just being a fashion whore BUT I can hope. I mean he is vocal with causes and he is friends with our boy Lupe Fiasco who regularly wears a keffiyeh. I can hope, we can hope.

For more information on the Keffiyeh craze running through out western civilization check this out.

Kabobfest at their best

This is possibly the best video I have seen on youtube. Kabobfest has pulled through yet again!!