Saturday, May 17, 2014

weird vet kufiya

My friend John grabbed this off of some vet FB page and sent it to me. We don't know who took the photo or what the story is behind it but it's one of those images that is floating around. I have no idea what to make of it. I'm befuddled.



The baseball cap says 'kafir' in Arabic, which is correctly translated as infidel. A synonym is unbeliever. I believe that Islamist insurgents in Iraq fighting against the US occupation would have used this term fairly routinely to describe the US military forces. I did not know that (some) US troops had embraced the term.

Just plain weird, to rest your sleeping baby in a red kufiya with gun shells and some sort of weapon behind him/her....

1 comment:

Don said...

Hi Ted - the whole "infidel" thing with the US military is strange, and to me, very unsettling. It's been written about and is a "hot topic" in circles where the US military and Middle East studies intersect. I've written about it here:

http://carryingthegun.com/2012/03/26/enough-with-the-infidel-stuff-seriously-stop/

And it was written about more recently here:

http://www.thestate.ae/americas-new-kaffirs-insecure-white-folks/