Dunkin' Donuts attacked for featuring Rachael Ray wearing a scarf that looked like the keffiya, the Arab head dress.

The controversy and subsequent pulling of the advertisements for DnD with Rachael Ray have angered me. People are ignorant and flouting it by making demands around something they don't understand.

The keffiya is not a symbol of either Islam or terrorism. The head dress (which comes in white, checkered black or checkered red) came into importance in the
early 20th century as part of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans who ruled the Middle East for over four hundred years left a two class system of landlords and peasants. The landlords generally wore a red high hat regularly referred to as a tarbouch or fez.

Peasants wore the keffiya as a practical head cover to protect from
the hot sun in the daytime and the cold winds at nights.

Once the Ottomans began to loose power sympathy with peasants and the
average people took the symbolism of the keffiya.

Visit any rural Arab areas or the traditional Bedouins and you will see them dressed in one color or another of the keffiya. In 70s Europe, the keffiya became a fashion symbol as part of a general sympathy with university students around the world taking on power structures. It is true that Palestinian guerillas and Yasser Arafat
took on the keffiya (the latter more to cover his bald head) making it a symbol of people's liberation in the same way as the Che Guevara t-shirts came to reflect a particular left wing political leaning but certainly not symbolic of terrorism or Islam. Turning a centuries old symbol of a proud people into a claim of terrorism is unacceptable to the millions of people around the world who proudly wear the keffiya.