and in South Africa kufiya news...

At the World Debating Championships in Thailand in early August, the South African team put on kufiya scarves, as well as badges in the form of Palestinian flags, at the opening ceremony, in protest of Israeli human rights violations against the people of Gaza. And they took a photo, posted on Facebook on August 6. 

As a result, a petition was circulated calling for the team captain, Joshua Broomberg (on far right in the photo), who is also deputy head boy of the King David Victory Park High School, a Jewish day school, to be removed as deputy head boy. The petition picked up 2,000 signatures; a petition opposing his removal garnered 4,000, according to the Times of Israel.

Yoni Bass, writing for 972, explains that the uproar over the incident is symptomatic of a strong and perhaps growing conservative trend in South Africa's Jewish community. Read more here.

Mandela in kufiya: Algeria 1990

Nelson Mandela and his comrade Robert Resha received training from the Algerian FLN in Morocco in 1962. Shortly thereafter he returned to South Africa and was captured, tried, convicted of sabotage, and imprisoned until February 1990. In May 1990 he visited Algiers to meet his former FLN comrades. (Resha died in exile in London in 1973.)