I don’t normally wander off into cultural controversy, but this one has a couple of political angles to it, especially as May 20 has been dubbed “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”

Tunku Varadarajan at The Daily Beast:

“While on the theme of degeneracy: It must be irksome for the mullahs and their adherents to have it publicly shown that a Shiite beauty in a bikini leads not instantly to damnation and wrathful interventions by the gods.

Ms. Fakih posed, strutted, and primped—all without vast, irrevocable social consequences that needed controlling by firm and pious hands. There was no pandemic of rampant immodesty, no outbreak of irrepressible male lust. )

So for Ms. Fakih, her bikini is, arguably, more an instrument of liberation than of exploitation. Indeed, the assumption we make in America is that her entry into a beauty contest, with all its concomitant baring of body and limb, was her own autonomous choice. She carved her own path. And let us remember that in many cases, Muslim women living among us have to gain equality with their own menfolk before they can be integrated in America. So their assimilation, when it happens, is an impressive personal feat.

Since 9/11, Muslim spokesmen have been trying to say, with varying degrees of success, that “not all Muslims are alike”—the point being that Americans should not draw generalized conclusions about all Muslims based on a handful of terrorists in our midst. The spokesmen are correct in seeing this as the key to anti-Muslim feeling—a disconcerted people (here, the American public) will always think that the group it fears is “all the same.” Until now, many Americans have resisted this message. But Miss USA can be an effective way to show that, indeed, not all Muslims are alike. Some, in fact, wear bikinis in cheesy beauty contests. This example, this integration by bikini, could go a long way toward demonstrating to Americans that Muslims are not a weirdly, frighteningly monolithic group, and thus begin to break down prejudice.

The Miss USA judges may have done more to further American cultural diplomacy than all of the efforts of USAID, the State Department, and Karen Hughes combined—this, after all, is the highest honor American popular culture can bestow. As if on cue, an aunt of the beauty queen, interviewed by AFP in her village in Lebanon, said: “She is an honor to us, an honor to all of southern Lebanon.” Why would anyone wish to argue with that? Why would anyone, in fact, not wish to rejoice in this most American Miss?”

My Comment:

Although I don’t care for the way Varadarajan resuscitates that old neocon meme (“they hate us for our freedoms”), I’m glad someone applauded an occasion that can only improve the image of Americans, even (or maybe, especially) in Muslim countries.

Instead, some people fixated on the winner’s alleged family connections to Hezbollah and latent jihadi proclivities (Debbie Schlussel).

[Lila: I haven’t researched this angle thoroughly, and there may actually be something to it, since one of the pageant’s sponsors is apparently “linked” to Hamas and Hezbollah – how is the question].

Other critics goggled over some old pictures of Ms. Fakih doing a pole-dance.  The people shouting ‘slut ‘didn’t notice that during the pole dance the young lady was wearing what many people wear on a board-walk (shorts and a tank top – far more than she wore during the pageant); that her audience was all-female; and that it was a one-time radio contest, not her profession,  for heaven’s sake. it was a promotional event by a friend who was a DJ at a radio-station and was intended “to teach women how to dance and be sexy,” according to Ms. Fakih herself.

She was obviously just hamming it up for the girls.

But you couldn’t have got a starchier reaction for some people if they’d been burqa-loving mullahs…..

And, I noticed a headline emphasis on Arab-American…. I’d have no problem with it, except aren’t we always being told to drop those ethnic prefixes, because they’re so un-American and smack of identity politics?

As usual, the media doesn’t listen to its own lectures…

The question I have, though, isn’t about poles.

It’s about privacy. Who put those pictures on the net and did they get permission to do it?