solidarity in the face of fascism

courtesy the Democratic Socialists of America. a protest sign for our times. 

(in hyper-secular France, would any left organization propose such a sign?)

Supermodel Gigi Hadid, Palestinian (and the kufiya proves it); Zayn Malik's "Pillowtalk"

Supermodel Gigi Hadid has been coming out as Palestinian (or, half-Palestinian--her mother, Yolanda Foster, is Dutch, her father is real estate developer Mohamed Hadid), ever since December 2015, and her Palestinian-ness has been getting a lot of attention in the media, as reported by Khelil Bouarrouj on the blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Gigi's instagram photo of her (and her girlfriends') henna'd hands is what prompted all the attention, but she has also posed in a Coco Chanel designed kufiya-styled top. (More on Chanel's kufiya-styled line in a future post!)

I hope Bouarrouj is correct in his optimism that it's good for Palestinians when some high-profile figures like Gigi celebrate their heritage.

Meanwhile, Gigi's boyfriend (or is he?) Zayn Malik (ex-One Direction) has a new single "Pillowtalk" that was (from January 28-29) at position #1 on the Billboard + Twitter Trending 140 chart. Zayn Malik's dad is British Pakistani. In Zayn's video he is snoggling with the half-Palestinian Gigi Hadid. Both of 'em are blonde -- is this how "Muslims" subversively penetrate mainstream Western popular culture? The vid was only released on January 28, and as of this posting on January 31, it had over 23 million views. So I guess it's rather popular. What does it say when people named Malik and Hadid sit at the commanding heights of US-Euro popular culture? What do people who click on that YouTube video think of Donald Trump's Islamophobia?

UPDATE February 1: I've been informed that the reason Gigi was wearing that kufiya-themed outfit was that she was flown in to Dubai to showcase it for the Chanel resort collection. Nothing at all to do with Palestinian pride. (Thanks, Mezna!)

turbanophobia

I've reported on occasion about the bohemian hipness of turbans in the US. Notable why? Because it seems to fly in the face of endemic Islamophobia.

So maybe we on the progressive front should be doing more to promote turban wearing, in solidarity with Sikh children, who, it turns out, are the massive target of bullying in US schools. (Wearing a turban would be much more radical than sporting a kufiya scarf, eh?)

As reported by Jezebel:

"A recent survey by the Sikh Coalition has found that half of Sikh children and two-thirds of Sikh children who wear their hair in turbans report being bullied at school" (emphasis added).

Where is the anti-bullying lobby on this issue?!

The report goes on to argue that this is a wider phenomenon, due largely to the post 9/11 terror hyper-hysteria:

"The period since 9/11 has been particularly difficult for Sikh Americans and their children. While Sikh children experience bullying in the classrooms, their Sikh American parents endure astoundingly high rates of hate crimes, employment discrimination, and scrutiny at the nation's airports. Brown skin and turbans have popularly become associated with terror. Crude popular culture stereotypes of terrorists and damaging media images outside the class room have made their way into the classroom to the detriment of young Sikhs."

And, whenever instances of mass shootings are discussed in the context of the need for control, why in the hell is Oak Creek, Wisconsin almost never mentioned? It was here, on August 5, 2012, that a white supremacist killed six Sikhs and wounded four others, at a Sikh Temple.

Oak Creek, Oak Creek, Oak Creek. We remember Columbine, Aurora, Newton...Why not Oak Creek?

Oh, I guess the Sikh Coalition report begins to suggest why. Many of us do not believe turban wearers are "innocent" or even "American."

Thanksgiving: Beware the Sharia Turkey, Says Pam Geller

Noted Islamophobe Pam Geller, who blogs at AtlasShrugs.com, recently asserted that Butterball turkeys are now certified halal, confirming the rapidly creeping Islamization of the USA.

The hysteria is Pam Geller's. The kufiya-clad turkey is courtesy TPM, which reported on this gem.

Some responses to France's 'burka ban'? Paris Fashion Week and Erykah Badu

As of April 11, it was illegal in France to appear in public with one's face covered. In anticipation of the soon-to-go-into-effect legislation, some Paris designers, including Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and Marithé François Girbaud, featured some fashion designs inspired by the burka at Paris fashion week in March. Read about it in this article from The Independent. (Elaine Sciolino notes in today's New York Times that, although there is much talk of the burka, in fact what the women in question are wearing in France is not the burka but the niqab.)

AFP PHOTO/Pierre Verdy

AFP PHOTO/Pierre Verdy

AFP PHOTO/Pierre Verdy

This is of course not the first instance of "hijab fashion" to appear on Western runways. It's not something that I've been following terribly closely (kufiyas seem to consume most of my time and energies), but I have on occasion posted on it in the past. This occasion, however, seems, possibly, to be somewhat more oppositional.

Meanwhile, is Erykah Badu's poster for her Dubai appearance on April 9 in any way related to France's new legislation?

And in a kind of footnote, in light of the above, what would you make of this?


I recently came across this via SPIN magazine. Hebrew letters (on face and on either breast), plus insignias on both shoulders which resemble the Arabic for allah. And a pyramid. The mystical symbolism is, well, beyond me. Gnostic Kabbala Afro-futurism.

(Erykah, despite requests from the BDS movement, performed in Israel in 2008. While there, she appeared in a t-shirt expressing opposition to the war in Iraq; her Israel concert poster featured a khamsa; she expressed support for Palestinian rappers; and defended Louis Farakhan.)

Erykah makes some of the best music in contemporary r&b/hip-hop/soul. I love her last two albums.

Colin Powell: "[So] what if he [Obama] is Muslim?"

Colin Powell, on Meet the Press today, has the courage to say what someone of his stature should have said ages ago. He says, of course the answer to the claim that Obama is a Muslim, that he's a Christian. But he goes on to say:

The really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being Muslim in America? The answer is no, that's not America. Is there anything wrong with some seven year old Muslim American kid thinking that he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop this suggestion, he might be a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America. (My transcription.)

Then he goes on to talk about a soldier killed in Iraq, US Muslim, buried at Arlington National Cemetery, with star and crescent on his tombstone. Watch it here.

Kufiyas are, maybe, okay, but taking off Eid al-Fitr is "un-American"

Yarmulkes are banned at the workplace, too.

From the Wall Street Journal, October 18.

"Mass firings at meatpacking plants in Colorado and Nebraska last month highlight growing conflicts over how to accommodate religion in the workplace. The plants, owned by the U.S. unit of Brazil's JBS SA, collectively fired about 200 Muslim Somali workers who walked off the job over prayer disputes. The workers had asked management to adjust their evening break times so that they could pray at sunset. Managers at both plants initially agreed but then reversed their decisions after protests by non-Muslim workers...

A Tyson Foods Inc. chicken-processing plant in Tennessee this year agreed to let its work force claim holiday pay for Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, instead of Labor Day. Non-Muslims protested that the policy was un-American. Tyson managers reinstated Labor Day and switched a paid birthday to a personal day that could be used for religious observances...

In August, a federal judge in Nevada ruled that the Las Vegas police department must allow an orthodox Jewish officer to wear a beard, but not a yarmulke. The judge noted that the city permits employees to wear beards for medical reasons, but it prohibits all officers from wearing headgear...

Muslims in Greeley, Colo., last month protested the firing of more than 100 JBS workers after a walkout over Ramadan. (Sara Loven/The Greeley Daily Tribune, via AP)

The Somali workers said that they should be allowed to pray on their breaks and would be gone for only a few minutes. Supervisors responded that the only permitted unscheduled breaks were for use of the bathroom and that the plant couldn't have hundreds of workers leaving the lines at the same time.

"It takes less than five minutes," says Graen Isse, a Somali worker who was fired following a similar dispute at a JBS plant in Greeley, Colo. He says he and other workers offered to let JBS deduct pay for time spent praying."

Read the entire article here.

Update: I've just read an article about struggles over such issues at a JBS plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, from the Oct. 15 New York Times. It's a little more nuanced than the WSJ article. Interestingly enough, the objections to the JBS decision to give Somali workers time off to pray (and to cut the workday, and pay, of all workers by 15 minutes) came from Sudanese (mostly Christian) and Latino workers!

As an aside, Greeley, Colorado is where Sayid Qutb had his revelatory experiences with American civilization and mores, in the late 1940s. Props to John Calvert of Creighton University for doing the most to dig this info out. Read about it here.

Gary Younge on anti-Arab fascism in Europe

Yep, folks, this is what I'm reading on Christmas morning...Gary Younge's very powerful column in the latest issue of The Nation. Here are a few choice excerpts, but be sure to read the entire piece. As Younge notes, it's not just the hard right in Europe that is making hay out of as well as inciting anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-"Islamofascist" sentiment, but such sentiment is increasingly mainstream, as the comments by Martin Amis (never buy another one of his books!) and Angela Merkel indicate.

But the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not "Islamofascism"--that clunking, thuggish phrase that keeps lashing out in the hope that it will one day strike a meaning--but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities in the name of racial, cultural or religious superiority.

For fascism--and the xenophobic, racist and nationalistic elements that are its most vile manifestations--has returned as a mainstream ideology in Europe. Its advocates not only run in elections but win them. They control local councils and sit in parliaments. In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France and Italy, hard-right nationalist and anti-immigrant parties regularly receive more than 10 percent of the vote. In Norway it is 22 percent; in Switzerland, 29 percent. In Italy and Austria they have been in government; in Switzerland, where the anti-immigrant Swiss People's Party is the largest party, they still are.

Recently German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a Christian Democrat party congress that "we must take care that mosque cupolas are not built demonstratively higher than church steeples."

In September 2006, British novelist Martin Amis told the Times of London: "There's a definite urge--don't you have it?--to say, 'the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation--further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan.... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children."

[Can you believe this guy??!!]

Far from being the principal purveyors of racial animus in Europe, Muslims are its principal targets. Between 2000 and 2005 officially reported racist violence rose 71 percent in Denmark, 34 percent in France and 21 percent in Ireland. With few governments collecting data on racial crime victims, it has been left to NGOs to record the sharp rise in attacks on Muslims, those believed to be Muslims and Muslim targets.

None of this means anti-Semitism and jihadism don't exist among Muslim communities in Europe. But it does provide a context for both. Muslims are a relatively tiny percentage of European citizens--there is a higher proportion of Asians in Utah than Muslims in Italy--and are overwhelmingly concentrated among the poor. More than 40 percent of Bangladeshi men in Britain under the age of 25 are unemployed. All of this excuses nothing but explains a great deal. According to a Pew Research Center survey, the principal concerns of Muslims in France, Germany and Spain are unemployment and Islamic extremism. Integrating into a society that won't employ you, educate you or house you adequately is no easy feat. Participating in a political culture that scapegoats you is also tough. Attacked as Muslims at home and abroad, they defend themselves as Muslims.

The most potent anti-Semites and bigots in Europe do not live in run-down housing projects but grace the corridors of power. They are not Muslim; they are Christian.

(The photo is from the New York Times.)

Radical Islam: Destroying Europe from Within?

Last month I started reading Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, 2006). Before I finished I learned it had been nominated in the criticism category for the National Book Critics Circle Award. On February 8, the The New York Times reported that Elliott Weinberger, previous finalist for the award, denounced Bawer, accusing him of "racism as criticism." Meanwhile, the president of the Circle's board, John Freeman, wrote on the organization's blog, "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's 'While Europe Slept'...It's [sic] hyperventilated rethoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia."

Having now finished reading it, I must agree with Freeman's sentiments about While Europe Slept. If Bawer does win in the "criticism" category when awards are announced on March 8, it will bring shame upon the Circle.

Writer and critic Bawer is gay, an avowed liberal who moved from New York to Amsterdam in 1998 because of its more tolerant atmosphere. He now lives in Oslo. While Europe Slept is a full-out critique of what Bawer considers Europe's complacency with regard to the radical Islamist threat, by comparison with the vigorous and resolute response taken by the US since 9/11. But while Bawer is critical of Europe, his views with regard to Islam are in fact symptomatic of a widespread, and growing, European tendency. Whereas hostility and racism toward Muslim immigrants were previously the property of the extreme right, such views have become increasingly mainstream. For instance, take the fulminations of Oriana Fallaci in books like The Force of Reason, or Polly Toynbee's columns in the Guardian. Whereas in the US, Islamophobic rhetoric tends to be the province of right-wing commentators and, especially, conservative evangelists, in Europe Islamophobia is more frequently articulated from within the terms of liberal discourse.

Bawer rehearses a number of the alarms about the threats posed by Muslims in Europe that are common currency on the right. First, the demographic threat, the nightmare that Muslims are about to swamp Europe. Bawer quotes British historian Niall Ferguson, who wrote in 2004, "a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize a senescent Europe to the north and west." Now, Bawer claims, nearly the whole of Europe is within their [the Islamists'] grasp" (231). Second, the failure of Muslims to integrate into European society, their insistence on separation, rejection, ghettoization and inter-marriage (20, 209). Third, the threat of violence and crime posed by young Muslims resident in Europe. Bawer cites the example of the city of Malmö in Sweden, whose population is 40 percent "non-Swedish" (meaning non-white Swedish), where the incidence of rape is five or six times that of nearby Copenhagen, child rapes have doubled in a decade, and teenagers were torching schools (205). Brawer piles on example after example, such as the June 2005 incidents, where 500 Muslim teenagers were involved in mass muggings on strand of beach near Lisbon (211). Fourth, Muslims in Europe are resistant to adopting "European values." Even those who might oppose the terroristic methods of radical Islam are "hamstrung by the belief that loyalty to the umma...overrode any civic obligations to their kaffir (infidel) neighbors," and so they are loathe to criticize extremist Islamists (3, 229). Moreover, "many" immigrant communities are "led by fundamentalist Muslims who looked forward to the establishment in Europe of a caliphate government according to sharia law (3)." Fifth, the immigrants bring their "tribal customs" with them, such as FGM (female genital mutilation), honor killings, payment of blood money and so on (18, 22, 211).

Let me address these scare-mongering arguments briefly. (1) The notion that the eleven or so million Muslims in Europe, who constitute 3 percent of the EU's population, are likely to become the majority any time soon is ludicrous. (2) Muslim failure to integrate and Muslim ghettoization are in large part the consequence of policies of the state and local governments, as well as fear of racist attacks, rather than active decisions of Muslim communities and individuals. "Ghettoization" is more imposed than freely chosen. (3) The violence and crime that are endemic in lower-class, "immigrant" ghettos, are the products of poor education and infrastructure, lack of opportunity and high unemployment. Bawer objects to such explanations, and cites as evidence Theodore Dalrymple's claim that young Muslims in the French cités are not poor but typically have cell phones and cars (Bawer adds that young Muslims all over Europe drive BMW convertibles) (110). Cell phones, yes, but it is well-known that France's banlieusard rioters of November 2005 torched some 9,000 cars -- because they can't afford them. Bawer elsewhere does acknowledge that "in Europe, generally speaking, only the most undesirable employment is available for people with foreign-sounding names of foreign-looking faces (72)." As for the mass muggings near Lisbon, I've seen no evidence that the bands of muggers were composed entirely, or even mainly, of Muslims. (4) As for refusal of "European values," Jocelyne Cesari's book When Islam and Democracy Meet (2004) argues persuasively that Muslims in Europe have, among other things, adopted the very "secular" notion of religion as individual choice. Many European Muslims have criticized Muslim extremism, such as the Islamic Commission of Spain, which issued a fatwa declaring Usama Bin Laden an apostate. No Muslim community in Europe is led by fundamentalists who want to reestablish the caliphate -- this position is held by a small minority, not by community leaders. (5) Most Muslims in Europe originate from countries where FGM ("female cutting" is a less incendiary term) is not practiced. Reports do suggest a rise in the rate of honor killings in the last few years, but this Boston Globe report sees this as an effect of Muslim Europeans' feelings of embattlement and isolation rather than as an imported "tribal custom."

Overall, Bawer's argument proceeds through distortion of fact, selective use of evidence, taking minority trends as representative of the whole community, and blaming the victim. While Europe Slept presents a picture of (white) Europeans intimidated and bloodied by violent Muslim youth, when in fact it is European Muslims who are most at risk, from racist attacks by extreme-right militants and the police, and increased racial profilings and community repression since 9/11 and the Madrid and London bombings.

Where Bawer's argument connects with "liberal" discourse is in its concern with women's and gay rights. Bawer asserts that "some estimates suggest that 90 percent of European Muslim wives are physically abused" (59), and he is concerned that non-Muslim European are threatened by Muslim violence, particularly rape (55). But it is Muslim homophobia that really exercises him, as someone who left the US because of Christian fundamentalist intolerance for gays, only to find conditions were worse in Europe. "I wasn't fond of the hypocritical conservative-Christian line about hating the sin and loving the sinner," Bawer writes, "but it was preferable to the forthright fundamentalist Muslim view that homosexuals merited death" (33). And he quotes approvingly the statements of Pim Fortuyn, Holland's charismatic anti-immigrant and populist politician, assassinated in 2002: "What...would happen to same-sex marriage when fundamentalist Muslims gained enough power to eradicate it? Islamic countries not only prohibit gay marriage: they execute people for sodomy" (164-165). Bawer concludes the book by stating that Muslim intolerance is making life more dangerous for gays in Holland, and that this is prompting a desire among many Dutch to emigrate.

Certainly, women's and gay rights must be defended. What I want to underscore here, however, is the ways in which Bawer deploys stereotypes of Muslim intolerance of women's and gay rights to argue for a crackdown on Muslim immigrants (and citizens) and immigration writ large. Western discourse about defending women from sexist Muslim men, of course, has a long history, whereas the defense of gay rights against fundamentalist Muslims represents the embrace of a relatively new Western "tolerant" value. According to a report in the New York Times last October, "So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government last winter introduced a primer on those values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: A DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing."

Increasingly, centrists and liberals across Europe are embracing the view that Muslim religious and cultural values are simply too conservative and fundamentalist, that they are incompatible with the "tolerant" European values that have taken hold since the 1960s and 1970s. Immigration, therefore, should be strictly limited or cut off altogether, and Muslims in Europe should be forced to "integrate."

Let's hope that the National Book Critics Circle has the good sense not to honor a book that propagates such arguments.