Free speech means free scarf
The reasoning behind the urge to censure accessories — hats, scarves, eyewear — has always eluded me. Sure, baseball caps should only be worn by small children and not adults indoors. Cowboy hats are a red flag, as are bow ties, cat’s-eye glasses and ass less chaps.
But beyond that, isn’t it courteous to simply ignore people’s accoutrements rather than openly deplore them or read motives into them in a manner that smacks of the paranoia that infects this benighted 2024?
I only ask because Ontario MPP Sarah Jama was told to remove her kaffiyeh while in the legislative chamber. She won’t of course. Why should she?
It’s a can of worms that Conservatives should never have opened but the NDP was first to stir the pot if we can mix metaphors about a conflict based on nothing more than a cloud of feelings and a puffery of paranoia.
Jama, one brave politician, was a member of the NDP caucus until its perennially foolish leader, Marit Stiles, forced her out for being disobedient in refusing to be silent about the genocide in Gaza. It was a very right-wing male thing for a left-wing woman to do to another left-wing woman, given that a smart political leader lets mouthier colleagues say all the things she herself tries not to.
I say this as an occasionally stroppy person myself, who habitually disagrees with general assertions. We serve a purpose. Shy people find us handy.
Jama is Black, a Muslim in a head scarf. Severely disabled, she uses a wheelchair and is a much-loved Hamilton Centre voice for Ontarians who don’t have much power. By that I mean money, pull, social capital, the gift of physical spontaneity and the luck of being easily assessed and welcomed into many circles.
Now an independent, she wore a kaffiyeh to work. It’s an objectively attractive fringed white cotton scarf with a chequered, almost houndstooth, pattern often taken to symbolize solidarity with Palestinians.
I have a scarf very much like it but it’s a statement of support for nothing more than fun sportswear designer Marc Jacobs.
The Israeli army’s efforts to exterminate and raze Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack have made kaffiyehs a statement item among the urban young, the way headbands perhaps were in the Vietnam years.
Considered cool, kaffiyehs make no single statement. You may view them as evidence of racism but that is an inference, not a fact. People in kaffiyehs may be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, humanist, anti-Zionist, anti-Netanyahu or simply opposed to American-funded war crimes planetwide. They may be angered by the starvation of Gazan children and Israeli hostages. Or they may have felt a chill that day.
House Speaker Ted Arnott banned Jama’s scarf, saying it was a political statement. Premier Doug Ford opposed the ban, saying it created pointless division. But Arnott, backed by a bunch of bossy paranoiac Tory MPPs, told Jama to remove the scarf or leave.
She refused.
Arnott has painted himself into a perfidious corner. He can have big booted armed guards rip the scarf off Jama, who has cerebral palsy, or carry her out in her wheelchair, or drag her from her wheelchair and through the chamber, you know, the way Air Canada might.
Jama’s kaffiyeh may be a political statement but so is a bland suit and tie. I once wrote in the Star about an anti-abortion Tory MP, Stephen Woodworth, whose apparel and mien were so dull he looked “like a passport photo with an iron deficiency, a man so indistinct I could not pick him out of a police lineup.”
Woodworth exploded, formally complaining to the media council that I shouldn’t make fun of a man’s suit. He lost.
Clearly his accessories made a statement, I was unable to discover of what.
Same with Jama’s kaffiyeh. Best not read into it elements that are not there.