Kaffiyeh-gate

Rachel Ray is a television celebrity chef with an irritatingly spunky manner and an annoying voice. Today though, I just feel sorry for her. After she appeared in this Dunkin Donuts commercial wearing what seems to be -Gasp!!!- a kaffiyeh, all hell broke loose and Dunkin Donuts was forced to hastily retract the advertisement.

Why? Because various right-wing commentators accused the hapless Rachel of: wearing Jihadi chic, of promoting hate, of promoting Muslim extremism and terrorism of being insensitive to Israelis...Intifada...Palestinian terrorism... and on and on and on... All because of a scarf? and if you look closely, it is not even a Kaffiyeh.

Arabs and Muslims living in the United States for the past seven years have had to develop a thick skin. We are constantly bombarded with this type of ignorant garbage and it seems to be unrelenting as the years go by. Xenophobic hysteria was to be expected in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 but not a single American has been killed on American soil since then because of Al Qaeda-linked terrorists. In contrast, tens if not hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have died since in retribution in ill-conceived and unnecessary wars. And yet, seven years on, the constant barrage of fear-mongering drivel continues.

As an Arab and a Muslim it hits you in the face everywhere you turn from newspapers, to the web, the radio and TV. Bookstore tables seem to always feature one or two new alarmist books about terrorism or Islamic extremism by self-proclaimed experts. Authors who cannot read a word of Arabic will expound confidently about fatwas, hadiths or the meaning of Koranic verses. And at a time when the reverend Wright is excoriated about his politically incorrect speech about white people and the reverend Hagee is criticised about his anti-Jewish speech, no one blinks at the overtly xenophobic anti-Arab and anti-Muslim opinions that permeate all forms of media.

Sometimes I feel like I need to create a MEMRI in reverse. Let's call it AMRI (American Media Research Institute). MEMRI's purpose is to translate selections from the Arabic media to "expose" to the West its intolerant, hate-filled and anti-Western content. I propose doing the same by translating into Arabic the hate-filled, ignorant and Islamophobic content of American media. The difference is, whereas MEMRI has to dig deep into more obscure sources to get their juicy content, all AMRI has to do is turn on the TV, grab the closest newspaper or walk into a bookstore to find the incendiary material that it needs.