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Brendan O’Neill is an editor of the British magazine Spiked and one of the few trustworthy commentators in the U.K. on Israel and the “Palestinians.” He takes apart what he calls the “keffiyeh classes” here: “The cult of the keffiyeh,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, December 20, 2024:
…The keffiyeh classes don’t only have a ‘startling disconnect’ from the realities of the Middle East, but also from the true global injustices of the 21st century. Consider where their keffiyehs are likely to come from – China. The great paradox of the cult of the keffiyeh is that, as Niloufar Haidari reports, ‘the more popular the keffiyeh has become in the West, the less this has translated into a boon for the Palestinian economy’. There is only one Palestinian weavery left that makes keffiyehs. The keffiyehs we see in the coffee shops, campuses and art galleries of the West are ‘mass-produced’ items ‘from China’. The last remaining keffiyeh-maker in the Palestinian territories says it has become ‘increasingly difficult to compete with the low prices of the imported counterfeits’. That the keffiyeh craze of the Western bourgeoisie has hurt keffiyeh-makers in Palestine is a dark irony that will not be lost on those of us who know that the virtue-signalling of the powerful often has unintended consequences….
Hamas clearly recognises that when the cultural establishments of global capitalism treat every image of Palestinian death as an indictment of Israeli evil, when the West’s activist class, media elites and online influencers hold up every picture of a broken Palestinian as proof of the Jewish State’s ‘uniquely murderous nature’, then it is in Hamas’s interests to prolong the war and allow more such suffering to occur. Having made Palestinian agony the currency of their activism, the activist class cannot now feign surprise at Hamas’s willingness to let this disastrous war continue. Hamas’s intransigence in the face of its far more powerful foe is a direct consequence of the keffiyeh classes’ commodification of Palestinian pain as a testament to both Israeli malfeasance and Western indifference.
The cult of victimhood’s greatest offence is to reduce everything to a simplistic clash between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil, light and dark. This movement requires not only victims it might ostentatiously empathise with, but also the opposite: victimisers, the monsters of persecution, who must be noisily raged at. As Professor Joshua Berman writes, the ‘Palestinian ideology of victimhood… constructs a struggle between a victim-hero in opposition to a scapegoat’. And this can lead to a ‘revelling in caricatured depictions of the oppressor’, he says. So where Palestinian radicals ‘traffic in classic hook-nose anti-Semitic tropes’, their Western supporters traffic in the insistence that the Jewish State is uniquely murderous, given to bloodletting, obsessed with murdering children, and so on. This is the thin line between pity and hate. Pity for Palestinians morphs with frightening ease into hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, courtesy of the morally infantile narrative the cultural establishment has weaved around this most fraught of conflicts.
The end result? Protesters in keffiyehs telling Jews in New York City to ‘go back to Poland’. Activists in keffiyehs shouting on the New York subway: ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.’ Britons in keffiyehs marching alongside radical Islamists who long for further pogroms against the Jewish State. The aftermath of 7 October is a painful reminder that the facile moral binaries of identity politics are far more likely to resuscitate racism than tackle it.
The keffiyeh entitles its wearer to “share the pain” of the “Palestinians,” without admitting that any pain those “Palestinians” now feel is the direct result of 6,000 members of Hamas smashing into Israel on October 7, 2023, and proceeding to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap another 251, who were taken back to Gaza. The Israelis only want to be free of Hamas rockets, Hamas drones, Hamas murderers, Hamas kidnappers. But the keffiyeh wearers in the West have no interest in what the Israelis have suffered. They despise Israel. The keffiyeh is the fashion statement that proclaims its wearer to be on the side of the angels; that is, the wearer wants Israel to disappear entirely, to be replaced by a 23rd Arab state. The keffiyeh proclaims the wearer’s solidarity with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It’s akin to the Chinese waving Mao Tse-tong’s Little Red Book during the Cultural Revolution, or the Nazis with their sinister Hakenkreuz armbands.
Many of the people wearing those keffiyehs in the West will soon be having plenty of Muslims in their own countries, and then — too late — they will discover what Islam teaches, and that they too, just like the Israelis whom they now despise, will become the objects of Islamic hatred, aggression, and triumphalism.
Anti-Semites feel justified in their hatred of Jews. Yes! And what else is new! Well, Jew hatred is no different than any other failure to distinguish between individuals. Rational people know that there is always more variance between individuals in a group than between the groups. So, anti-Semitism reflects brain failure of a particular sort. This brain failure consists of a warping of the self-protection mechanism that tells us that we are in danger. Thus, by way of example, the existence of the 1.5 billion Muslim Ummah (nation) is threatened by the existence of the 15 million Jews. If people are told this untruth often enough, our brains fail us and we adapt to a world where we may never have met a Jew, but are nonetheless sure that any and every Jew wants to destroy us. From this observation, we learn that lying to ourselves and others is a great source of evil.
Yes there’s Useful Idiots Everywhere s especially in certain groups like Climate Change Animal Rights Gun Control and Globalists
As the Jewish people, we have generational experience being deliberately configured into THE scapegoat for the ills experienced by people and for the glaring difficulties within societies that form the basis of both their usage of extreme fear induction to marginalize us as the source of the problem and then requiring what is sanctioned as our “justifiable” annihilation. The strategic use of fear coupled with generating false history and baseless hatred becomes a reusable cauldron of misanthropic lies that over time have been inculcated as truth.
Unfortunately for the West, critical study of the Middle East, its many tribal affiliations, its ready submission to the dictates of Islamic Jihad and its historical colonization of vast lands put under Islamic submission, fails the litmus test for knowledge-based Middle Eastern studies in our colleges. The flawed premises for a non-existent people claimed by Egyptian, Yasser Arafat as Palestinians do not exist!! They are not a separate people with a unique history, Kings or any artifacts legitimizing their historical presence in land where Jews have lived for over 3500 years, albeit times with very few present, essentially rendering it desolate. That said, evidence for our Jewish presence is shown in a surfeit of archeological finds validating our historical presence, our King David, remains of our last Temple, parts of our ancient Torah scrolls and on and on. And, through all of these meticulous excavations, there has not ever been an artifact, of any kind, verifying a people called Palestinians.
The Jewish land of ancient Judaea, when conquered by Rome, which included the Philistines, whose origins are from Crete, was renamed Syria-Palaestina. There is NO correlation between this renaming of ancient Judaea as a territory by the Romans and a much-later fictional, people solely created for political purposes to justify the violent destruction of the Semitic Jewish people from their ancient homeland and since May 14, 1948, our legally established Jewish Nation of Israel. Willful ignorance is a great facilitator of psychological projection.yet we know that even if our people were completely destroyed, the world would choose another group to blame and destroy…isn’t that what genocide is really all about anyway???
I noticed that in season 1 of the popular tv streaming series “The Chosen” there is at least one scene, that I noticed, where one of Jesus’ apostles appears to be wearing a keffiyeh wrapped around his head. The character was Lesser or Little James. I’m not sure if it appears in other scenes.
It’s hard not to wonder if the series’ producers were mindful of not allowing the actors to wear it, should any of them have still wanted to, during filming of episodes after Oct 7.