Here's my thing by postaldog

. . . or just me?

Perhaps by now you've heard the hubbub about the kaffiyeh scarf worn by Rachel Ray in the Duncan Donuts ad. Conservative bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, raised a stink about a US celeb and company putting out an ad with a symbol of Palestinian terrorism in it.

I happen to agree with Michelle on this one -- this ranks up there with idiot celebs wearing Che fashion shirts.

But here's my thing -- check out this opposing view from an anthropology prof:

"Amahl Bishara, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Chicago who specializes in media matters relating to the Middle East, said complaints about the scarf's use in the ad demonstrate misunderstandings of Arab culture and the multiple meanings that symbols can take on depending on someone's perspective.

'I think that a right-wing blogger making an association between a kaffiyeh and terrorism is just an example of how so much of the complexity of Arab culture has been reduced to a very narrow vision of the Arab world on the part of some people in the U.S.,' Bishara said in a phone interview. 'Kaffiyehs are worn every day on the street by Palestinians and other people in the Middle East — by people going to work, going to school, taking care of their families, and just trying to keep warm.'"

As a man from the South, not freakishly devoted but aware of the history down here, I'm always disturbed by the hatred spewed on anyone who dares display a Confederate battle flag. According to the PC police, it offends black Americans because they associate it with slavery and all the bad things that went on during that period in this country.

Others down here say it represents Americans who stood against what they felt was an over-reaching government, over-taxing and over-regulating them without fair representation in the Capital. Bullying the less populated southern states with legislative manuevering designed to allow the government to get what it wanted despite the state's wishes. Remember: the 2/3 rule was created by the northern states to prevent the southern states from increasing their representatives in the House by counting all the slaves as citizens of the states.

So dhimmi's say the kaffiyeh's are misrepresented as terrorist garb by knee-jerk conservatives who attach an innocuous bit of daily wear to a handful of evil-doers.

Southerners say the Confederate flag is wrongly associated with racism and slavery by the displaying of the flag by a handful of criminal miscreants.

Why is one right and the other wrong?

Follow up:
On the front page of the St. Pete Times, Saturday is a story about a group called Sons of Confederate Veterans who are in the process of erecting a 30x50 foot Confederate Flag atop a 139 foot flag pole at the intersections of I75 and I4 west of Tampa.

Naturally the local chapter of the NAACP is apoplectic and the organization's president has suggested that county commissioners should find a way to stop the flag from going up, even though it's on private property and all permits are in hand.

The flag is a backlash from events of the last few years where the Confederate flag has been removed from state buildings and historical figures such as Gen. Robert E. Lee have been systematically erased or ignored from any gov't forum.

Though this was not my purpose in the original post, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.