SUNDAY HERALD: The Miss USA media panic is an annual event, most often comprising tales of drunken behaviour, indiscreet teenage photographs or a particularly stupid answer to a leading question.
This year, however, the beauty pageant finally has a controversy worthy of the name: the winner has been denounced as a terrorist sympathiser because she is an Arab-American.
Rima Fakih, 24, is the first Muslim to win the title. Her family emigrated from Lebanon to the US when she was seven. In the round of daytime television interviews that followed her victory, she took care to portray herself as “an American girl” from Dearborn, Michigan, who went to Catholic school.
“My family comes from a Muslim background, and we’re not defined by religion,” she said. “We’re a spiritual, liberal family.”
But this did not wash with the right-wing commentator Debbie Schlussel, who has found a niche audience by writing with a mixture of scorn and outrage about the predominantly Muslim population of the Detroit suburb she calls “Dearbornistan”.
“Don’t let her lack of a headscarf and her donning a bikini in public fool you,” she wrote. “Rimah Fakih is a Muslim activist and propagandist extraordinaire.”
Without producing any evidence, Schlussel accused Fakih’s family of being card-carrying members of the Lebanese extremist group Hezbollah, citing unnamed intelligence sources. “Mark my word. Hezbollah is laughing at us,” she wrote.
“One of its auxiliary members won the Miss USA title without having to do a thing to denounce them and their bloody murder of hundreds of Americans.” >>> Andrew Purcell in New York | Sunday, May 23, 2010
DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL: While some of Miss USA Rima Fakih’s family is lying and trying to do damage control on her Hezbollah ties, she’s yet to say three words: “I condemn Hezbollah.” And she’ll never say them because she supports the terrorist group. Sadly, not a single member of the mainstream media (including the gushing morons at FOX News) has the cojones to ask. Meanwhile, some of Fakih’s family is now claiming she is not from Srifa, the South Lebanese Hezbollah stronghold where she was born, but from the mountains near Beirut. Don’t believe it. In fact, those mountains are dominated by Lebanese Christians and Druze Arabs (not Muslims). And whether or not she lived briefly in those mountains, it doesn’t change two facts: Her family is in two terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Hezbo-allied Amal. And she won’t denounce Hezbollah, the group that murdered hundreds of Americans. >>> Debbie Schlussel | Monday, May 24, 2010
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