Yesterday, Al Jazeera English aired an extended version of the Made in Palestine documentary, including expanded segments about the effects of Chinese manufacturers and an added segment about Israeli kufiyehs.


Part 1



Part 2

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صنع في فلسطين

Last week I was able to buy an authentic Palestinian kufiyeh made in the Hirbawi factory, the last remaining mill of its kind in the West Bank. The Jerusalem Fund / Palestine Center has them for sale for those in the DC area.


Made in Palestine, Hebron


Original Hirbawi Shamagh (kufiyeh)

In January, French journalist Benoit Faiveley visited Hebron (al-Khalil, الخليل) and interviewed Mr. Hirbawi, subsequently made into a short documentary about the factory, Keffiyeh - Made in Palestine. Also featured in the film is Mohammed As-Saafin, a student from Ramallah who is interning at the Palestine Center this summer and, ironically enough, sold me my kufiyeh.

If you can't get your hands on one directly, Hirbawi kufiyehs are available to order from The Kufiyeh Project. Organized in April by a group of activists concerned with the decline of the Palestinian kufiyeh industry, the Project imports and distributes the kufiyehs in order "to proactively promote the kufiyeh as a symbol of Palestinian identity, resistance, struggle for justice, and solidarity... [and to] support Palestinian industry and make sure that kufiyehs continue to be produced in Palestine." As the documentary and Kufiyeh Project website explains,

Even while the kufiyeh enjoys a surge of popularity around the globe, the family-run company that produces this symbol of the Palestinian national struggle has been slowly grinding to a halt. "It's the Chinese imports," explains Yasser Hirbawi, the 76 year-old factory owner. "In the 70’s we could barely keep up with demand, but by the mid-90’s cheap Chinese scarves started coming in, because of globalisation and Gatt. We were forced to lower our prices and today we are working to a fraction of our capacity because we cannot compete." The factory used to produce more than 1,000 scarves a day, but now makes less than 100 - and struggles to sell those.

Al Jazeera English and the AFP file similar stories from Hebron.

I was first alerted to the kufiyeh kraze by Dr. Ted Swedenburg, whose blog is the authoritative one-stop shop for all things jihad-chic. I bought my first kufiyeh in the spring of 2007, around the time of the media and consumer craze for the thing, from a second-hand shop in San Francisco. As it turned out, that make was of the Urban Outfitters' "Anti-War Scarf" controversy. Urban was pressured into dropping the product from its spring line, which had caused a ruckus amongst fundies and their ilk who still can't seem to get over it (and continue to prove their intellectual vapidity.) But UO only did so with the black and red varieties (a little too jihad-chic?), which were then passed on to the vintage and thrift stores around town.

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The phenomenon lives! Noor coming to a box office near you!

MBC, the Arab world's leading free-to-air TV net, is preparing to make a film out of Turkish sudser "Nour," which became a pop-culture phenomenon when it aired across the Arab world last year.

Project will reunite Turkish thesps Kivanc Tatlitug and Songul Oden, who captured the hearts of Arab auds in their husband-and-wife roles of Muhannad and Nour, respectively.

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Check that: the PA is backtracking on its decision to ban Al Jazeera in the West Bank.

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More on the PA's closing of the West Bank Al Jazeera office. From Marc Lynch:

The PA decision is more troubling than the run of the mill story of Arab regimes hating free media, though, because it comes at a time when the contours of an emerging Palestinian state are being shaped. Salam al-Fayyad's role in the crackdown is particularly disturbing, given the great hopes which the U.S. has placed on him personally. The reflexive hostility to a free media shows yet again why the Palestinian Authority in its current configuration is a poor foundation for building a viable Palestinian state and the need for major political and institutional reforms. What does it say for the hope of building a political system on the basis of the rule of law and political freedoms when its U.S.-backed leadership cavalierly closes down media outlets it doesn't like?

And from Brian Whitaker writing in the Guardian:

The Palestinian information ministry adopted the usual line yesterday when it said the ban on al-Jazeera was intended to protect "Palestinian interests", ie those of the Fatah establishment.

In the days when there was only print and terrestrial TV, this idea that the media should be harnessed in the service of "the nation" (as defined by those in power) was fairly easy to maintain. "Licensing" of non-government newspapers and the general culture of deference kept a lid on things within the country, while "undesirable" material from outside could be stopped at the borders.

That began to break down with the arrival of new media that recognised no national boundaries: first satellite television – al-Jazeera, the most popular Arabic channel, started up in 1996 – and then the internet. Old attitudes persist, though. In Jordan, for instance, the main front-page "news" every single day is what the king did yesterday.

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Uyghurs address the Arab World

Last week Al Jazeera hosted several Uyghur-American activists to discuss the recent ethnic violence in Eastern Turkestan / the Xinjiang province. Both Alim Seytoff and Nury Turkel of the Uyghur American Association and the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) stopped by the studio to counter the official Chinese line (swallowed by certain American politicians in a War on Terror-fervor) that all Uyghurs are essentially violent, separatist terrorists aimed at establishing an Islamic state in Eastern Turkestan.

Mr. Turkel told me off-camera that there are three main reasons behind Beijing's repression: an international geopolitical border with eight countries; natural gas reserves in the province that rival those in Kuwait (not to mention strategic pipelines and access to the Caspian: "Xinjiang unrest: The oil and gas connection," Financial Times); and the Uyghur's assertion of their identity seen as interference in state-directed national assimilation, economic growth, and social cohesion ("The Uighurs’ revolt undermines China’s idea that its people will always happily trade freedom for prosperity," The Economist). As he says elsewhere, "Uyghurs are the Tibetans you haven't heard about" (why not?). A Muslim Turkic minority, Uyghurs have found almost no support from Muslim-majority countries other than Turkey. Mr. Turkel believes that one phone call from Riyadh would end the whole thing. Instead, Uyghur mosques, religious leaders, and even Qur'ans are controlled by the Chinese government in efforts to manipulate and undermine this symbol of ethno-religious other-ness (see this page at the Uyghur Human Rights Project). Women, anyone under the age of 18, state employees, workers and retirees, and communist party members are barred from entering the mosques, as this picture (provided by Mr. Turkel) of a sign outside a Xinjiang province mosque reads.

On Thursday, Rebiya Kadeer, president of the WUC and essentially the Dalai Lama of the Uyghurs, was interviewed via live shot from Washington during the main newshour on Al Jazeera. The complicated translation process of Arabic-English-Uyghur and back posed a technical nightmare. We almost missed the shot -- if you watched it, Doha wasn't able to take her in Washington until the end of the program rather than at the top, as was scheduled -- and simultaneous translation (ducking out the source audio, in this case, Uyghur, and hearing Arabic instead) was just impossible. What this did mean was that she spoke uninterrupted, in her own tounge, allowing the forcefulness of her delivery to speak louder than the actual content. Mr. Seytoff interpretted, and thanked us kindly for allowing Ms. Kadeer the platform of addressing an audience largely unaware of the Uyghur cause.

And, of course, the intern got a photo out of the deal.

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The PA does not heart Al J

And in perfect poetic timing as a counterbalance to the last post, this story from the BBC: "Al-Jazeera closed in West Bank" (see reports also from the Guardian, AFP, and AP).

The self-rule body said al-Jazeera promoted a negative view of its work and that the coverage is biased.

It comes a day after a guest on the station accused Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas of collaborating with Israel to have Yasser Arafat killed.

The channel - based in Doha - said it was "stunned" by the Palestinian Authority's decision. But the BBC's Arab Affairs Analyst, Magdi Abdlehadi, says the controversy surrounding al-Jazeera's broadcast reveals more about the crisis within Mr Abbas's group than about the satellite channel's often rocky relationship with Arab states.

And from Bloomberg:

The action was taken today because of a story the Qatar- based broadcaster aired that the authority considered false, it said in an e-mailed statement.

“Al-Jazeera is suspended since it dedicates a wide portion of its coverage to incitement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization,” the Palestinian administration said, calling the action temporary.

The shutdown followed an interview Al-Jazeera conducted with Farouk al-Qaddumi, in which the longtime PLO official accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas [and, I should note, Mahmoud Dahlan] of collaborating with Israel to kill Yasser Arafat, who died in a French hospital in 2004.

And lastly, commentary from AbuKhalil:

Will the Committee to Protect Some Journalists issue a condemnation of the Abu Mazen-Dahlan gang for closing down AlJazeera offices in the West Bank? I very much doubt that and doubt that this important development will get any Western coverage. If the offices in Gaza were closed down by Hamas, the American TV networks would have interrupted their regular programming to broadcast the news. And the AlJazeera bureau chief in the West Bank is somebody with very moderate political views who is often criticized for being chatty with Israeli officials. But no one can deny his abilities and knowledge.

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Israel does not heart Al J

"Tensions soar between Israeli UN delegation, Al-Jazeera," Haaretz.

The Arab network's chief UN correspondent, Khaled Dawoud, has accused the Israeli delegation of discriminatory policies and harassment. The Israeli diplomats, for their part, have accused Dawoud of disruptive behavior and of exploiting press conferences and events with Israeli officials as a podium to bash Israel.

As'ad AbuKhalil finds Khaled a "fine journalist." While I haven't personally talked to the guy, I hear he presses pretty hard with his questions (that's the diplomatic version, right?), so much so that the French Foreign Minister once replied by insulting Dawoud's eyebrows.

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