Muslims and Islamophobia
24 May 2010, NewAgeIslam.Com
The image of Rima Fakih, the
first Muslim Miss USA, blowing kisses into the air last Sunday has knocked the
wind out of the sails of many an Islamophobe and Islamist alike. Isn’t she
supposed to be wearing a burqa? Isn’t she supposed to be blowing bombs? And most
importantly, isn’t she supposed to be aching for felafel rather than
pizza?
Fakih’s blatant betrayal of the
stereotypes, the supposed-to-be’s, has sparked bewilderment on the blogosphere.
Islamophobes view it as the clearest evidence yet of the liberal/Islamic
conspiracy to take over the US, while Islamists are dismayed by the extent to
which Satanic influences have profanated the piety of Muslims, particularly
those who have made the West their home. -- Saif Shahin
Photo: Miss USA
Rima Fakih
By
Saif
Shahin
So
how are you feeling? “Ask me after I had pizza.”
We
live in bewildering times. And we must be pardoned for being paranoid when all
kinds of bewilderments roll themselves into one pizza-hot bomb that blows right
into our face. After all, what can be more bewildering than a Muslim immigrant
pole-dancer from Hezbollah country, clad in a barely-there-bikini, winning that
crown of the white, Christian, capitalist world – the Miss USA beauty
pageant?
The
image of Rima Fakih, the first Muslim Miss USA, blowing kisses into the air last
Sunday has knocked the wind out of the sails of many an Islamophobe and Islamist
alike. Isn’t she supposed to be wearing a burqa? Isn’t she supposed to be
blowing bombs? And most importantly, isn’t she supposed to be aching for felafel
rather than pizza?
Fakih’s
blatant betrayal of the stereotypes, the supposed-to-be’s, has sparked
bewilderment on the blogosphere. Islamophobes view it as the clearest evidence
yet of the liberal/Islamic conspiracy to take over the US, while Islamists are
dismayed by the extent to which Satanic influences have profanated the piety of
Muslims, particularly those who have made the West their
home.
“Hezbollah
is laughing at us, tonight. One of its
auxiliary members won the Miss USA title without having to do a thing to
denounce them and their bloody murder of hundreds of Americans,” writes Debbie
Schlussel, for many the Islamophobe-in-chief of the blogosphere, on
www.debbieschlussel.com.
“Dhimmi
[a non-Muslim subject of an Islamic state] Donald Trump [billionaire co-owner of
the pageant] simply didn’t have the guts to demand that Fakih denounce the
Islamic group Hezbollah, whose martyrs and top terrorists are Fakih family
members. It doesn’t matter to the Donald
that this is the terrorist group that murdered more Americans than any other
after Al-Qaeda, and probably more, when you count its joint ventures with
Hezbollah,” she adds.
Of
course, no more evidence of Fakih and her family being Hezbollah members is
required than the telling fact that they belong to southern Lebanon. The other
fact – that Hezbollah, an Iran-created Shia militia, and Al-Qaeda, which
professes an extremist Sunni ideology and has its roots in Saudi Arabia, are
anathema to each other and not known to have had any joint ventures, terrorist
or otherwise – is, however, hardly relevant.
As
she proudly writes, Schlussel was “on top of this story before anyone”, warning
her readers of the mortal dangers of the 24-year-old economics and business
management graduate entering the national pageant as Miss Michigan. But she has
a particular reason to be incensed – Fakih lives in Dearborn, the Detroit suburb
whose Muslim community is the focus of much of Schlussel’s ramblings, which she
affectionately and often refers to as ‘Dearbornistan’.
Islamophobic
Arithmetic
Daniel
Pipes, whose blogsite www.danielpipes.org is another popular vent for
anti-Muslim prejudices in the US, is alarmed by the “surprising frequency of
Muslims winning beauty pageants” in the West, and suspects “an odd form of
affirmative action”.
He
enumerates a total of five Muslim winners of pageants across the US and Europe
in five years – Sarah Mendly (Miss Nottingham, 2005), Hammasa Kohistani (Miss
England, 2006), Nora Ali, (Junior Miss America, 2007), Juliette Boubaaya (Miss
Picardie, 2009), and finally Rima Fakih – which is a fairly high percentage of
wins when you consider that only a few thousand pageants must have taken place
in all these countries and across various age groups over all these
years.
One
collateral damage of the attack on Fakih is Farouk Shami, who sponsors the Miss
USA pageant as the owner of Farouk Systems. Schlussel calls him “the racist 9/11
Truther and Palestinian terrorism supporter” and claims he influenced “Trump and
the judges to make sure his fellow Muslima won”. The evidence? Fakih had
“tweeted gushingly about hanging out with him”.
Another
victim is Barack Hussein Obama, the ‘Muslim’ whose now-not-so-recent
presidential victory is also supposed to have played a part in a ‘Muslima’
usurping the tiara. And this is too obvious a link for anyone to bother about
evidence.
The
rant against Fakih betrays the racism that lies at the heart of Islamophobia.
Schlussel writes: “I had a bad feeling they’d pick her to try to pander to the
Islamic world some more because–ya know–the collective American nose isn’t yet
brown enough from ass-kissing Islamic butt all around the
world…”
And
commenting on Pipes’s suspicion of affirmative action in favour of Muslims at
Western beauty pageants, a reader says: “No surprise here. Affirmative action
was first applied in beauty contests for black women to win in the 1980s, then
it was the turn of Latin, brown skinned women, and now it’s
Muslims.”
Fakih,
as these reactions show, has hit Islamophobes at two levels. They are sickened
by what they perceive as a victory of mediaeval brown Muslims over the modern
white Christian West. It turns the West-supremacist world they are used to
upside down, and so they naturally throw up, before taking comfort in the
palliatives of ‘rigged pageants’ and
‘affirmative action’.
At
a deeper level, the Islamophobes are appalled that Fakih belies their
broadbrushing of the Muslim world as comprising solely or at least
overwhelmingly of fanatics and lunatics who want to blow the West into hell and
themselves to heaven – in other words, people with whom the West cannot coexist.
They are not ‘normal’, they are after your life and you have to wage wars
against them.
That
worldview doesn’t sustain when girls like Fakih adopt ‘the American dream’ and
live it successfully. After all, what could be more normal than a young girl
wishing to be Miss USA. Indeed, she doesn’t have to win it to be normal – for
only a few such girls actually win – and that is why Schlussel went after Fakih
as soon as she entered the contest.
Where
The Twain Shall Meet
Schlussel
and Pipes (S&P hereon) are not the only Islamophobes of the world – many
readers agree with their views and there are scores of links to their blogsites
across the World Wide Web. ‘Rima Fakih Hezbollah’ has even become a suggested
search term on Google after her victory. But nor do they make up the world –
Fakih’s victory is being vaunted as a trailblazer in Muslim world-West relations
by people from different backgrounds, both on the web and off
it.
The
only non-Islamophobes who are unhappy seem to be the Islamists. Hezbollah MP
Hassan Fadlallah, when asked about his opinion on the new Miss USA, answered
disdainfully, “The criteria through which we evaluate women are different from
those of the West.”
But
what about Fakih herself? What does she make of all the hoopla? She, too, seems
a little bewildered by the change in her profile from small-town pageantry to
global telly-talking. “I feel more Arab-American is the more correct name,” she
told CNN when asked if she felt she represents Muslim Americans.
With
no religion attached? “Religion does not identify me, I would like to say that.
My family is more of a spiritual family rather than religious. We’ve never been
religious, we’ve been never known to be religious, and on top of everything, we
celebrate Christmas, I went to a Christian high school. We are Muslim, however,
we appreciate and admire all faiths.”
The
self-defeatism of S&P’s Islamophobia was evident across the Atlantic three
days after Fakih’s win – at a chic departmental store in France, where a woman
and her daughter tried to rip the burqa off a convert to Islam, as they found it
“offensive”. France is considering a blanket ban on the
burqa.
The
victim of the ‘burqa rage’ is a girl around the same age as Fakih. What is she
to do, she might wonder, if she trespasses onto S&P’s blogsites: tear off
her burqa, as her attackers want, or put it back on, as the writers appear to
prefer?
Perhaps
she will just tell them: “Ask me after I had pizza.”
Copyright:
Saif Shahin
10:36 PM
Sultan Shahin
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