Our Mayor dons a keffiyeh

Ever since the City of Chicago dropped the charges against 26 pro-Palestinian students and two faculty arrested on our campus for trespassing, I’ve wondered whether mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023, has some sympathies for Palestine contrasted with some opprobrium for Israel.  (The city also refused to send Chicago cops to take down our encampment, so it had to be done by University police, who in the end did a great job.)

The Instagram post below was put up by CAIR Chicago (the Council for American-Islamic Relations), showing the mayor donning a keffiyeh to celebrate Arab Heritage Month (this month of April),  Now keffiyehs of various types been used by Arabs for centuries, mostly as headdresses but sometimes as shawls. However, this particular black-and-white garment is Palestinian, and, as CAIR surely knows —and Brandon Johnson should have known—is associated with Palestinian resistance, beginning with Yasser Arafat’s frequent wearing of it, including while appearing in front of the United Nations (see the history of the garment and its symbolism at this Guardian article).  As Wikipedia says:

The black and white keffiyeh’s prominence increased during the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

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A post shared by CAIR-Chicago (@cairchicago)

Johnson, who is not a popular mayor (see below) has been accused before of “disrespecting” Chicago’s Jewish community, though I didn’t know about that. But the actions of the City of Chicago with respect to illegal activities of Palestinian protestors, and the city’s refusal to act, combined with the photo above, makes me wonder about Johnson’s feelings about Israel. (One instance: when pro-Pals blocked Lake Shore Drive, our main artery along the Lake, the city did nothing.)

To be fair, I did find this picture of Johnson accepting a yarmulka from Jews before he was elected, but of course the article says that he was “courting the Jewish vote”.  I don’t think he put it on, though!

I don’t think I need worry much longer about a possible anti-Semite being mayor, though, for, as I said, Johnson is not at all well liked by Chicagoans of all stripes. As Wikipedia notes:

Johnson is considered to be a political progressive. His term as mayor has been marked with low approval ratings, with only 6.6% of Chicago voters expressing favorable views of him in a February 2025 poll.

As for CAIR, well, it’s been accused of touting antisemitism many times before; I’ll give just three links: here, here, and here (h/t Malgorzata). A few quotes, one from each source (in order):

. . . . key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its “propaganda apparatus.”

and

The White House strongly condemned recent comments from the leader of a top American-Islamic group who said he was “happy to see” Gazans invading Israel on October 7.

The comments came from Council on American-Islamic Relations Director Nihad Awad at a conference two weeks ago, when – according to a video posted on X, by DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute – he said, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

“We condemn these shocking, Antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN.

Bates echoed President Joe Biden in calling the October 7 attacks “abhorrent” and “unadulterated evil,” noting that October 7 “was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

and

Two years in the making, this new book is the product of extensive meticulous research into the most dangerous Islamist political group in the U.S. today—CAIR. It is dangerous because it was created as a front group for Hamas in 1993—in a secret meeting of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders, including CAIR’s current leader Nihad Awad, held in a downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia in 1993, a meeting the FBI wiretapped.

Since its corporate inception in 1994, CAIR has been the number one promoter of incendiary vile antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in the U.S. by any “mainstream” Islamist group. I use the word mainstream in quotations because CAIR has successfully duped virtually the entire media establishment—many of whom have willingly collaborated—into portraying this Hamas front group as a “Muslim civil rights organization.” CAIR is soaked with antisemitism, yet we hear NOT a word about this reality from the gatekeepers.