Rachel Ray: Terrorist Sympathizer?

A few days ago I heard some rumblings about Food Network star Rachel Ray causing some controversy for sporting a black and white Palestinian head-dress--called a kaffiyeh--in an online advertisement for Dunkin' Donuts that began running at the beginning of May. So, as I do, I went online and looked it up.

I discovered that several weeks after the ad first ran, she and Dunkin' Donuts were heavily criticized in a conservative blog called Little Green Footballs for using the kaffiyeh, saying the ad was "casually promot[ing] the symbol of Palestinian terrorism." Also, conservative blogger and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin condemned Ray in her blog for donning "a jihadi chic kaffiyeh." According to this article from The New York Times, a firestorm then erupted online--I saw hundreds of references to the ad in just a few minutes of searching--and finally Dunkin Donuts pulled the ad on May 7. Another article on the controversy can be found here on the website of MSNBC.

I spent some time on the Little Green Footballs blog and sifted through a couple hundred of the mostly very angry 493 comments that people left in response to the kaffiyeh controversy. I was surprised by the sheer passion that the respondents had for the issue. They were were quite serious in their disgust, many taking the opportunity to blame the nebulous "left-wing" for the appearance of the kaffiyeh and calling for boycotts of Dunkin' Donuts and discussing writing letters to the company too. Some even sincerely debated whether Ray knew about the symbology of the kaffiyeh or if she was just "clueless" or ignorant" and wore it because it looked nice. Someone even casually wondered if perhaps Ray was "of Muslim heritage." I did not share their passion, though, and to me, it seemed that such anger over a wardrobe accessory meant that these people were just waiting to get mad about something. So they did.

One of many reasons I don't share their passion is that I have a much different view about the meaning of kaffiyehs. Here, I see them almost every day, and mostly on the heads of old men who used to live in Jerusalem or Jaffa or some other city or village in what is now Israel. The kaffiyeh is just their traditional head-dress, and nothing more. It doesn't mean terrorism just because some people or groups who commit acts of terror also happen to wear it too. That's like calling, for instance, the cowboy hat the "symbol of bank robbery" just because Jesse James used to wear a cowboy hat when robbing banks.

Of course, the simplest reason I don't share their passion on this issue is this: what Rachel Ray is wearing in that ad is NOT a kaffiyeh. This was clearly evident to me not after careful scrutiny or meticulous examination of the above picture, but literally after looking at it for a half second. Yes, what she is wearing around her neck is indeed black and white--the traditional colors of the Palestinian kaffiyeh--and there are tassels on the edges. However, the design of what she is wearing--the arrangement of the black and white colors--is not the same as the design of a traditional kaffiyeh. No kaffiyeh looks like this, or would ever look like this. Instead, a traditional kaffiyeh--as worn here by the deceased Yasser Arafat--looks like this.


Yes, there is a certain similarity between what Ray is wearing around her neck and what Arafat is wearing on his head. Both items are scarf-like, and as mentioned above both are black and white. However, all black and white scarves are not kaffiyehs, and what Ray is wearing is not a kaffiyeh. It's unfortunate that so many people got so bothered and that so much angst was spent and wasted over Rachel Ray's scarf. Just a little research and open mindedness would have shown that there was no reason to be so irate, but unfortunately--and ironically--so many people chose to remain "clueless" and "ignorant", and thus they became upset.