CHERRY POINT, N.C., 30 May 2008 — If you need a reminder as to how out of touch some Arab hating Americans are with reality — sit yourself down and read on.
The fast food giant, Dunkin’ Donuts, pulled an online advertisement featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after critics argued that that a keffiyeh-like scarf she wore in the ad offers symbolic support for terrorism.
The coffee and baked goods chain said the ad that began appearing online May 7 was pulled over the past weekend because “the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee.”
In the spot, Ray wears the scarf around her neck and holds an iced coffee while standing in front of trees with pink blossoms.
The seemingly innocuous Dunkin’ Donuts commercial starring Rachael Ray sent the conservative blogosphere into a frenzy with some saying that wearing the scarf amounts to calling for jihad.
Does Dunkin’ Donuts really think its customers could mistake Rachael Ray for a terrorist sympathizer? Guess so, as the company abruptly canceled the ad in which the domestic diva wears a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, a traditional headdress worn in many Arab countries.
Critics, including conservative Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin, complained that the scarf looked similar to the black-and-white checkered keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf. She referred to Ray’s scarf as an example of “jihadi chic.” Critics who fueled online complaints about the ad say such scarves have come to symbolize Muslim extremism and terrorism.
The keffiyeh, Malkin wrote in a column posted online last Friday, “has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.”
She then writes, “I’m hoping her hate couture choice was spurred more by ignorance than ideology.”
Clearly, Malkin doesn’t know anything about the Middle East and its people.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann called her “paranoid.”
“Everyone — from the keffiyeh-wearing Bedouin herders to most Iraqi and Gulf Arab men — would be really pissed to hear that they’re now terrorists,” a Marine, who knows the Middle East, told Arab News.
But Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t seem to know that not everyone who wears a keffiyeh is a terrorist.
Malkin’s online fuss and the reaction it caused, infuriated journalist Linda Lowen, who wrote: “This profoundly bothers me, especially coming from a woman of color (Malkin is Filipino-American). I’d expect a bit more understanding and insight from her than this knee-jerk response. When we demonize people, their apparel and the culture they come from, and practice guilt by association to the extent that we feel threatened by a scarf in a Dunkin Donut commercial, it’s a sad, sad moment.”
“Just a few decades ago Malkin herself would have been a suspect — racially profiled as a person of Asian descent during World War II — after the bombing of Pearl Harbor,” wrote Lowen.
She accused Malkin’s attack as a cheap way of “cementing her reputation as ‘the Asian Ann Coulter’ by creating controversy just to get headlines and attention.”
