JEDDAH, 30 August 2006 — It’s trendy to wear something that is written in a foreign script, whether it’s New York hipsters with Chinese character tattoos, or Japanese youths wearing some inadvertently humorous mistranslation of some English phrase.
This tendency to wearing something in a foreign language has a certain hip aesthetic, and in Saudi Arabia it’s no different.
But a young hipster wearing a shirt that declared in bold script “Long Live Sharon!” (Referring to the comatose former Israeli prime minister who, among other things, presided over the massacres at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 war with Lebanon) was assaulted by his uncle because the man was offended by the phrase, the Al-Madinah newspaper reported yesterday.
The father of the youth went to the store, which was in a local mall and demanded an apology and the destruction of the remaining shirts.
The mall manager obliged and launched an inquiry into how these shirts got into the store in the first place.
More likely than not, the young Saudi was probably wearing the shirt as a manifestation of an ironic fashion statement, which is a popular style among US and European hipsters.
It is not unusual to see hip youths in the West donning shirts with corporate logos or other designs that reflect the opposite of their own personal political or ethical views.
Apparently, the uncle didn’t get it.
