Ahmed M. Rehab on Our Terrorist Sympathizer, Rachael Ray

This more or less treads the same ground as my post yesterday, but I was pleased to see it in the Chicago Tribune, where I first learned of Rachael Ray and "Keffiyehgate." Thank you, Ahmed, for pointing out what is painfully obvious: apparently, demonizing whole peoples (Palestinians, Arabs, in particular) is still being done, and without much controversy.

chicagotribune.com
RECIPE FOR A CONTROVERSY
The blogger, the chef and the terrorist
By Ahmed M. Rehab

3:27 PM CDT, May 30, 2008

How could a chirpy TV host with such edible title credits as "30 Minute Meals" and "Tasty Travels" one day awaken to find herself in the middle of a terrorism-related media blitz -- all because of a Dunkin' Donuts ad, no less?

It's a tough recipe to cook up, but here are the ingredients:

One paisley scarf that somewhat resembles the checkered pattern of a Palestinian national garment called the "keffiyeh," --a scarf that could be bought at Macy's
One right-wing blogger who lacks any sense of cultural nuance
A public opinion climate ripe with paranoia
A slow news day for the media
Directions: Briefly expose the scarf to the blogger, scatter over the climate, let simmer on a slow news day, and voila!

Can you hear the world's laughter?

The blogger is Michelle Malkin, author of the universally ridiculed book, "In Defense of Internment."

One of many to find fame and fortune in the post 9/11 hullabaloo, Malkin has a strange but simple job: to whip up controversy. If she succeeds, she gets attention. If she gets attention, she gets paid. She is her own brand, and like any brand, hers must deliver on expectations to remain competitive in an increasingly saturated market.

Malkin continuously scours the world's hot button issues hoping to raise the heat. On Thursday, she hit the jackpot with the most unlikely of subjects.

Enter Rachael Ray, who also has a straightforward job: to whip up meals. She shows TV audiences how to find bliss through the art of food. Sound controversial yet? Patience.

Ray happens to do an iced coffee ad for Dunkin' Donuts. She dons a paisley scarf selected by the stylist for the spot.

OK, that's the end of the buildup.

No, really, that's it.

Presented with that ad, most people may wonder if the iced coffee is any good. None is likely to wonder whether Dunkin' Donuts and Rachael Ray were promoting terrorism.

Malkin is a notable exception. She has a hungry career to feed.

And so, Malkin's pattern-recognition sensors kick in: Palestinians!

According to her, if Ray's scarf looks like a keffiyeh, the traditional scarf worn by Palestinians, then it must be a keffiyeh.

So what if it were?

Well, she further argues that, unbeknownst to the world, keffiyehs are actually a symbol of terrorism, hence her insinuation that the ad promotes terrorism.

Malkin then proceeds to educate the world about Palestinian keffiyehs, when they are worn, by whom, and why.

Not surprisingly, she gets it all wrong: In reality, the average Palestinian is much more likely to wear a keffiyeh than a terrorist.

Think about it: would the keffiyeh really be your preferred disguise if you were a terrorist and wished to walk incognito into a Tel Aviv bus or pizza parlor?

Probably not.

It is, however, your likely choice if you are an average Palestinian going to the mall, farming your land, walking to school, or -- yes -- hurling stones at an Israeli tank in the streets of your occupied hometown: hardly acts of terrorism.

So how does Malkin manage to discombobulate the facts? How does she find no shame in writing off a people's national dress as "a symbol of terrorism"?

There can only be one explanation: For Malkin, every Palestinian is a terrorist. To sell that point, she resorts to sensationalism, minimalism and obscene sweeping statements.

Sadly, this reductive approach is an old and tired trick when it comes to public discourse on the Middle-East, or Muslims.

But let's not kid ourselves. Malkin's anti-Palestinian message, by itself, is not newsworthy. It is only effective when coupled with a climate that is highly receptive to fear-mongering. Only then can it wreak havoc. After all, it is only because of the perception of a public backlash that Dunkin' Donuts, with curiously weak knees, felt pressure to yank the ad off the Internet.

Luckily most Americans know better than to drink Malkin's Kool-Aid. They will likely remember this tale only as one of 2008's silliest. Nonetheless, I am certain Malkin is gloating over the few prized conformists her antics were able to mobilize.

Come to think of it, I think I will wear a keffiyeh on my way to work tomorrow -- as I sip my iced Caribou coffee.

arehab@cair.com

Ahmed M. Rehab is the executive director of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

Jon Stewart on Bush Administration Hypocrisy Regarding Its "Support" for the Troops

Rachael Ray headscarf and Dunkin' Donuts/The Case of the Keffiyeh

This whole "controversy" is a stunning reminder that the simplest cultural artifacts--the "ready to wear" (not ready to war) keffiyeh--is suddenly politicized as a symbol of "murderous jihadis." This sort of thing would be funny if it weren't so incredibly illuminating. For those not in the know, a keffiyeh is a (head)scarf. They're good for shielding one from the weather--whether hot or cold, dusty or rainy. They are not necessarily symbols of anything, any more than a cap is a symbol of something for the head.

It is true, however, that the keffiyeh has played an iconic role in Palestinian nationalism, most likely in solidarity with its peasant roots. Arafat was known to wear his in the shape of historic Palestine. Yes, activists like to wear them. And? In all likelihood, the "symbol"--if it ever were a symbol--has been commodified, set free of its particular political meanings. Hell, if Ms. Ray is donning it, chances are it is set free of its political meanings.

It pains me to no end that anything--ANYTHING--that has anything to do with Arab culture (minus the hookah, celebrated by college boys everywhere) becomes political, becomes pro-terrorist, because it is "alien" to us Americans. Bullshit.

CANTON, Mass., May 28 (UPI) -- Dunkin' Donuts, based in Canton, Mass., has pulled an advertisement after a scarf worn by pitch woman Rachael Ray was compared to a Muslim headscarf.

Michelle Malkin, a conservative commentator for Fox News, said in her syndicated column that the paisley scarf worn by Ray in the ad resembles a traditional keffiyeh headscarf worn by Muslim men, WCVB-TV, Boston, reported Wednesday.

"The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad," Malkin wrote. "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."

Dunkin' Donuts said the resemblance between Ray's scarf and a keffiyeh was unintentional.

"Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial," the company said in a statement.


© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

Don Quixote!

Moe Green Poetry Hour to Feature Poetry from Inclined to Speak

The World Wide Word Radio Network
Is proud to present the following show

This Wednsday
May 28 on
THE MOE GREEN POETRY HOUR
9:30 am Pacific time, 12:30 pm Eastern
Join Rafael F. J. Alvarado
as he listens to the poetry from

Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry
Hayan Charara
Mohja Kahf

To listen to any of our shows click below
Listen live or later
Feel free to download any of our archived shows
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/
Call in number (718) 508-9717

Obituary for Utah Phillips: Folksinger, IWW Radical, Friend of Ammon Hennacy

The intertwining of art and politics finds another embodiment in Utah Phillips, a folksinger who was mentored by Ammon Hennacy, a pacifist and the only American to have refused to serve in World War I and World War II. It's not really my kind of music, but he does it winningly. (Thanks to the Bureau of Public Secrets for passing this along).

* * *

"Folksinger, Storyteller, Railroad Tramp Utah Phillips Dead at 73"
Nevada City, California:

Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California, a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World,popularly known as "the Wobblies," an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to
popularize it.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country.

His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his "elders" with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

"He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears," said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.

In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.

A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.

Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy's Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as "blacklisting."

Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.

"It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody," said John "Che" Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.

Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as "the Trade," developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.

"He was like an alchemist," said Sorrels, "He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn't believe in stealing culture from the people it was about."

A single from Phillips's first record, "Moose Turd Pie," a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips's songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.

Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn't want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.

Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, "Loafer's Glory," produced at KVMR-FM, and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.

Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City; son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.

The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org

Chris Hedges' :War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning"/The Addiction of War

In what must be seen as unusual act of courage, WCPN (90.3 FM in Cleveland) had a hour-long presentation this morning of Chris Hedges' lecture on the addictions of war. If only our media--whether public or private--could have been as direct and courageous as our radio station this morning, since before the beginning of this misguided adventure in Iraq. Thank you, WCPN, for showing the mettle it takes on the homefront to speak truths about war that go beyond the cliches.

Memorial Day/A Tour (Through) Behind the Lines

For today, Memorial Day, I went through the archives of previous posts on "Behind the Lines" blog that deal with veterans and the costs of war. From March 22nd's post:

My father just returned from a trip to Vietnam, some forty years after his initial service to our country, as a Naval Advisor on a South Vietnamese patrol gunboat. The day after his return, he was rushed to the hospital because of edema in his legs, which had swelled frighteningly during the trip. Unknown causes. Almost no one in contemporary Vietnam wanted to talk about the war, and he was both relieved and saddened by this. Where did it go? What wounds were--and are--just below the surface of languages, of faces, of skin?

Who knows how we will remember and memorialize this current war? It's difficult to imagine a memorial as moving and provocative as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C.--that black scar of mirroring granite half-sunk in the earth. If there's a limit to its representativity, it's that there are no Vietnamese names, names of the 2.5 million dead. Yet, despite this framing, it's still a testament to how art can act both as elegy and as outcry.

Here are a selection of the past posts:

Abu Ghraib Torture, American Veteran Suicides (April 28, 2008)

Winter Soldier 2008 post (April 8, 2008)

Poems on/about the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial (March 22, 2008)

Operation First Casualty/Iraq Veterans Against the War (November 11, 2007)

Poems of Peace and Change (including veterans Brian Turner and Yusef Komyunyakaa and survivor Dunya Mikhail) reading (July 7, 2007)

Peace,

Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan

Jeff Newberry sent along birthday greetings to the Weird Bard, Robert Zimmerman (a.k.a. Bob Dylan). And so why not? From his second album, when Bob was doing the folk protest better than anybody (before he did the transition to electric, better than anybody), he wrote as vituperative a critique of the military-industrial complex that's ever been written: "Masters of War."



"Masters of War"
Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

And, as a special treat, from D.A. Pennebaker's documentary Don't Look Back, "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

"Forty Years After Catonsville"

Published on Wednesday, May 21, 2008 by The Nation
"Daniel Berrigan: Forty Years After Catonsville"
by Chris Hedges
Forty years ago this month, Father Daniel Berrigan walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, with eight other activists, including his brother, Father Philip Berrigan, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. The group carted the files outside and burned them in two garbage cans with homemade napalm. Father Berrigan was tried, found guilty, spent four months as a fugitive from the FBI, was apprehended and sent to prison for eighteen months.

Father Berrigan, unbowed at 87, sat primly in a straight-backed wooden chair as the afternoon light slanted in from the windows, illuminating the collection of watercolors and religious icons on the walls of his small apartment in upper Manhattan. Time and age have not blunted this Jesuit priest’s fierce critique of the American empire or his radical interpretation of the Gospels. There would be many more “actions” and jail time after his release from prison, including a sentence for his illegal entry into a General Electric nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, on September 9, 1980, with seven other activists, where they poured blood and hammered on Mark 12A warheads.

“This is the worst time of my long life,” he said with a sigh. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system. I find those expectations verified in the paucity and shallowness every day I live.”

The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.

“Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians,” he says of the founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. “She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking.”

Berrigan’s relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton’s “great contribution to the religious left,” he says, “was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, ‘Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.’”

“He could be very tough,” Berrigan says of Merton. “He said you are not going to survive America unless you are faithful to your discipline and tradition.”

Merton’s death at 53 a few weeks after the trial left Berrigan “deaf and dumb.” “I could not talk or write about him for ten years,” he says. “He was with me when I was shipped out of the country, and he was with me in jail. He was with his friend.”

The distractions of the world are for him just that — distractions. The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that “if voting made any difference it would be illegal.” He is critical off the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, “introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church,” including “anonymous delations, removals, scrutiny and secrecy and the placing of company men into positions of great power.” He estimates that “it is going to take at least a generation to undo appointments of John Paul II.” He despairs of universities, especially Boston College’s decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. “It is a portrayal of shabby lives as exemplary and to be honored,” he says. And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty years ago but who have now “disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline.”

“The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life,” he says. “It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base.”

All empires, Berrigan cautions, rise and fall. It is the religious and moral values of compassion, simplicity and justice that endure and alone demand fealty. The current decline of American power is part of the cycle of human existence, although he says ruefully, “the tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others. We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”

“The fall of the towers [on 9/11] was symbolic as well as actual,” he adds. “We are bringing ourselves down by a willful blindness that is astonishing.”

Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

“The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere,” he says. “I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.”

“We have not lost everything because we lost today,” he adds.

A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.

“The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living — the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet — was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place,” he says. “We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation.”

Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times and a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author, most recently, of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (Free Press).