Disney to Muslim Worker: Either Cover Hijab With Micky Mouse Ears, Or Work Out Of Sight
Los Angeles
What makes a safe Muslim? |
Imane Boudlal, 28, has filed a lawsuit against Walt Disney Corp because the company behind the happiest place on earth has allegedly harassed and ignored her right to freely practice her religion. Here are the facts, as they’ve been written:
The lawsuit claims Boudlal, who is a Moroccan native but a naturalized U.S. citizen, contacted her supervisors at the Grand Californian Hotel & Spa’s Storyteller’s Café in 2010 after she decided to wear her hijab full time. She says she was told wearing her hijab to work violated the company’s “look” policy — general appearance guidelines — and that after weeks of back-and-forth, she was told she could wear a Disney-designed scarf, but only after it received corporate approval.
The hijab basically, as claimed by Disney, violates the company’s “look” policy, which, when we boil it down to only the tea leaves and spread them over the table, we read that the real offense is looking like a Muslim.
Disney knows lawsuits better than most people and corporations, and they’re well aware of the First Amendment. The freedom of speech. No impeding of free exercise of religion. The old freedom jingle. They know about it. The best they can do with that troublesome, hardened hijab look is to force their Muslim workers to wear a Disney-designed scarf.
The bottom line is that “the happiest place on earth” is only joyous if the Muslim look, somewhat protected by the United States Constitution, is softened by a giant pair of Mickey Mouse ears placed on top of the offending hijab. That seems to be the solution here.
Just imagine a family of four staying at the Grand Californian Hotel & Spa and happening to spend time at the Storyteller’s Cafe, where they see a girl in a hijab. What kinds of stories will they tell when they leave? Perhaps they’ll recount, in online reviews of Disney’s magical hotel, about how they feared for their lives while being so close to a serious, practicing Muslim.
“Just think,” Dad writes online, “how close my family came to a fiery end when that Islamic girl kept shifting around the cafe in a very suspicious manner. Don’t the violent ones wear head scarves? That’s the impression I’ve been given. How could Disney hire someone like that?” He would then give the hotel a one out of five stars. An ominous review.
Most Americans can probably side with Disney on this one. Stuff that hijab up her ass. After all, Muslims carried out 9/11. The last thing Disney needs is to have a worker wearing an authentic scarf that causes Americans and good Christians to hyperventilate in fear for their lives while they eat their overpriced, extra-long Disney cafe hot dogs and stuff their mouths with greasy french fries. Eating shit is this country’s preferred method of meditation. Pleasure followed by abdominal agony. A ritual. A God-given right. Nobody wants to think about Muslims while they get deep into that sacred trance.
Some Americans believe the First Amendment doesn’t cover Islam, or those in submission to God (Muslims). They might be right. As far as I can tell, these days it only truly covers the varied branches of Christianity, Israel, and Chick-fil-A. And yet, another argument is that the founding fathers, when they wrote the First Amendment, could have never predicted or imagined such a globally-powerful, all-seeing corporation like Disney. If they had foreseen it, they might have told us to trust our corporate lords and masters as we drift into a global economy and get in line to experience the Great Monoculture.
The other bottom line is that Disney is your god. When people speak of the American empire, they are just forgetting to throw in Disney’s name behind it. No other corporation has been so able to widely and efficiently brainwash the mightiest people in the mightiest nation on earth with its content. Movies. Books. Television. Sports. News. Music. If anybody ever held a monopoly over the tools for blasting propaganda, it is Disney.
We live in a Disney world. Disney’s ideas of reality are ours, whether we know it or not. Normal life, every day life, what is acceptable, what is not. Whatever portion of the audience Disney doesn’t affect, Time Warner snatches it up.
This country’s ideas about love and war, Christians and Muslims, American exceptionalism, Washington politics, God, and whatever ‘reality’ happens to be, has largely been sculpted by Disney. The kinds of clothes we wear. How our homes should look. How trendy one car is compared to another. The system of material hierarchies, created out of thin air, but a reality in our society as if God himself had dictated it.
Disney’s legion of enlightened workers also knows that a Muslim threatens their peace and happiness. She might blow up the California Screamin’ roller coaster with a hidden vest bomb. Or light napalm in the Tower of Terror. They have good reason to be afraid, because that’s what Muslims wearing hijabs do. We’ve been told and shown for over a decade now. And it explains this behavior:
The lawsuit also says Boudlal was repeatedly harassed by her co-workers from the beginning of her employment, being called “terrorist,” “camel” and “Kunta Kinte,” the name of a slave in Alex Haley’s novel “Roots.” Boudlal reported the incidents to her managers both verbally and in writing, Rosenbaum said, with no results.
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You seem to have presented no room for American Muslims to exist, having painted America itself, with all of its inhabitants, as anti-Islamic. While Disney was clearly in the wrong here, we should not stoop to being offensive as we try to correct these issues and open doors toward Muslim acceptance. We will not win by empowering the resistance that stands against us.
Melanie, thank you for this comment. There is plenty of room for Muslims to exist, and each year it seems there is more tolerance and acceptance, however, the prevailing mindset of the American culture, as I see it, still views Islam as a fundamentalist, extreme religion for those who are standing in the way of material and technological processes that are being advanced by the ‘world of man’ rather than the ‘world of God’. There will be no reconciliation for that, I don’t think. Islam and the modern material structure of the world will not merge, but remain in conflict as the former believes the world and all systems of it should adhere to God’s law, and the latter do not believe in God’s law, but follow various components of man-made ideologies, like capitalism, socialism, neoliberalism, and so on.