Last month, three college students in Burlington, Vermont, were walking home after Thanksgiving – their second in the US, after applying to study abroad from their homes in the West Bank in 2021. According to police, the trio – Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ahmed – were allegedly approached by Jason J Eaton, who, without saying a word, began firing rounds from a pistol at them. Eaton did not know the students; all he could see was that two of them were wearing the keffiyeh, the black and white scarf that has been indelibly linked with Palestinian struggle for over half a century.
A climate of rising Islamophobia in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war has led to a number of hate crimes against Muslims in recent weeks, often against people wearing the keffiyeh. A woman in Brooklyn was arrested following an incident in which she threw coffee at a man wearing the traditional black and white scarf, and a security guard pulled the scarf from the neck of an attendee at New York City’s Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting.
