Joe, here's the fashion:
The red scarf is the one we used to wear. Now that I'm seeing it again, it pretty much just looks like a bandana. No wonder we used that; in Egypt, that would have been orders of magnitude easier to obtain than an actual bandana.
In retrospect, I suppose the term "pretentious" was rather jaw dropping in that context. What I meant was, it is rather presumptuous for one guy (incidentally, you refer to him as a "designer"; who is this guy anyway? when was that statement made?) to lay claim to a common item of clothing as a symbol of his specific community when that item of clothing is already routinely worn in a staggering variety of communities in a huge geographic area, and has been common to every community in that region for hundreds if not thousands of years.
In my mind, to treat the keffiyeh as a special Palestinian thing is what shows tremendous ignorance. Yes, they are an oppressed group and thus deserve special attention, but guess what? So are a lot of the other people who wear keffiyehs! Conversely, a lot of people who wear keffiyehs are not oppressed in the slightest, and are themselves oppressors. When an item of clothing is common in many diverse groups, from the downtrodden Kurds to the exalted Saudis, thinking it is only a Palestinian thing suggests to me someone who knows little about the Middle East. Moreover, this is the subtlest form of ignorance, as it is ignorance manifesting in people who really do care and are earnestly trying to do the right thing.
Incidentally, for what it's worth now that I know about this fashion I find it pretty silly. Sort of like when there was a fashion for wearing camouflage; I'll mock the trendoids dressing that way for looking stupid, but directing moral outrage at them is pretty silly too.
ADDITION: Y'know, now that I'm googling up some articles to learn about this fashion, I'm seeing that the whole issue seems to be one that conservative bloggers were the first to make noise about, only in the sense of Palestinians as terrorists:
http://www.mideastyouth.com/2008/05/31/the-rachel-ray-keffiyeh-fiasco/So at the risk of being patronising, I'm guessing there's a growing liberal backlash in the opposite direction?
Maybe this discussion should move to DISCUSS. Man, who knew that discussions of fashion would turn into an argument about politics?