Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Duplicity Through Design

A very Arab looking crowd holding Keith Ellison signs

Blogger Creeping Sharia  comments that Congressman Keith Ellison's website has the "Hamas green and yellow colors" rather than the customary red, white and blue.

I started Our Changing Landscape because of visual influences. "Landscape" is after all a visual term. As I was looking around me, both in the real and virtual landscape, I started to notice that what was around us was slowly changing from the familiar to the unfamiliar. There are many contributors to this change (which I think stems from the cultural mix that has become our cities and towns), but the biggest culprits are Muslims.

What Creeping Sharia was referring to was Ellison’s campaign website, not his official congressional one. It does indeed have green as the predominant color, with pale yellow as a secondary color. The main photo is of a group of people holding green signs with Ellison’s name. Most of these people look non-white, some look Arab, and one man is wearing a small white Islamic cap (taqiyah) while a woman is wearing a hijab. This could be a scene somewhere in the Middle East.

There is no American flag, no seal of the House of Representatives, no map of America, on Ellison’s campaign website. There is nothing to indicate that this is an American website other than the script under his name (written in smaller yellow script and therefore less noticeable) which says, "for U.S. Congress." There are two yellow stars framing this yellow script. The yellow stars don’t necessarily indicate that they are symbols from the American flag. The star (with the crescent) is featured regularly in Islam. Over ten Islamic countries use the star, with the crescent, on their flags.

Green is the color most associated with Islam. Here is a wikipedia reference for the significance of green in Islam:
Green is considered the traditional color of Islam, likewise because of its association with nature. This is for several reasons. First, Muhammad is reliably quoted in a hadith as saying that “water, greenery, and a beautiful face” were three universally good things. In the Quran, sura Al-Insan, believers in God in Paradise wear fine green silk. Also, Al-Khidr ("The Green One"), is a Qur’anic figure who met and traveled with Moses. The flag of Hamas, as well as the flag of Iran, is green, symbolizing their Islamist ideology.
Just to give Congressman Ellison the benefit of the doubt, I went to his official congressional website listed under "United States House of Representatives" to see how he represents himself officially.

Once again, there is nothing to indicate that this is the website of a U.S. congressman. It does indeed have the requisite red, white and blue, but dark green conspicuously fills the background.

Here is the image that appears on top of his official website:

Left: High rises and bridge from Ellison's official website
Right: High rises in Dubai


These high rises could be from any country.  

To compare how his fellow-congressmen represented themselves, I clicked randomly on names from the list of representatives (three or four names from each alphabetical category). The majority of these websites had red or blue as the predominant color. They had an American flag, the seal of the House of Representatives, or a distinct American architectural structure, usually a state capitol cupola, visible at the top.

Jim Jordan, congressman from Ohio, had none of those images, but his large red barn is of a distinctly American rural scene. Carolyn Maloney from New York had typical, recognizable New York photos of the Statue of Liberty and the Chrysler building amongst others. Many others who didn’t put clearly identifiable American governmental icons on their websites nonetheless showed American sceneries such as light houses, snow-covered mountains and desert rock formations (which we all know from beloved Westerns).

This very subtle, and certainly quite legal, representation (or misrepresentation) of Ellison's office is how Muslims in the West slowly and determinedly enter and overwhelm our societies. Without realizing it, we become subjected to unaccustomed colors, undecipherable script and foreign faces.

As Creeping Sharia's blog post shows, even the substance of Ellison's official congressional website is suspect. He has posted a map of Iraq with possible information about troop deployment from Iraq for all to see.