Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People - from Democracy Now

[Douglas Carpenter]

This is an absolutely excellent and crucially important Democracy Now segment -- I hope everyone takes time to either read the transcript, listen or watch by online streaming or download ---

link to listen on line/read transcript or download:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/144225

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SNIP:"Where are the human images of Arabs and Arab Americans? That’s the topic of a new film called "Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People." It’s based on a book by the same name by acclaimed media critic Jack Shaheen. Both the book and the film explore the American cinematic landscape to reveal a stark pattern of Arab stereotyping and its disturbing similarity to anti-Semitic and other racist caricatures through history. "

SNIP: JACK SHAHEEN: For years, I have looked at how we -- particularly, when I say “we,” image makers -- have projected Arabs on silver screens. In my latest book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, I looked at more than 1,000 films, films ranging from the earliest, most obscure days of Hollywood to today's biggest blockbusters. And what I tried to do is to make visible what too many of us seem not to see: a dangerously consistent pattern of hateful Arab stereotypes, stereotypes that rob an entire people of their humanity.

All aspects of our culture project the Arab as villain. That is a given. There is no deviation. We have taken a few structured images and repeated them over and over again. Whether one lives in Paduka, Kentucky or Wood River, Illinois, we know basically the same thing. We know the mythology -- the mythology, namely Hollywood's images of Arabs.

We inherited the Arab image primarily from Europeans. In the early days, you know, maybe 150 years, 200 years ago, the British and the French who traveled to the Middle East, and those who didn’t travel to the Middle East, conjured up these images of the Arab as the Oriental other. The travel writers, the artists, who fabricated these images and who were very successful, as a matter of fact -- and these images were transmitted and inherited by us. We took them, we embellished them, and here they are. "

SNIP:"JACK SHAHEEN: The humanity is not there. And if we cannot see the Arab humanity, what’s left? If we feel nothing, if we feel that Arabs are not like us or not like anyone else, then let's kill them all. Then they deserve to die, right? Islamophobia now is a part of our psyche. Words such as “Arab” and “Muslim” are perceived as threatening words. And if the words are threatening, what about the images that we see in the cinema and on our television screens?"

JACK SHAHEEN: Well, as Gerbil said, if you take the same images and you repeat them over and over again, and the images teach us to hate a people and to hate their religion, what happens is that we, in spite of our intelligence, our innate goodness, actually turn around and let these images despise and vilify an entire people.

You just had a guest, a young Iraqi girl that lost both her legs as a result of a bombing in Iraq. If you look at Rules of Engagement, one of the films that I talk about in the book and in the movie, you see a Yemeni girl with one leg on a crutch, who lost her leg when the Marines shot her. But in the end, this little Yemeni girl is not a victim, but a terrorist. So we cannot empathize with this girl who walks around with a crutch. "


link to listen on line/read transcript or download:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/144225




.

[Tom Joad]

1. thanks for posting this Doug. SF bay area people, -- Arab Film Festival is happenin' now!

See this film and many more.
http://www.aff.org/

See reel good Arabs.

[Tom Joad]

2. also recoomended, take action against neo-con "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week"

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?list=type&type=199

Right-wing and neo-conservative political forces are calling for campus mobilizations 22 – 26 October 2007 for “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” events. They deliberately use the provocative term "Islamo-Fascism," linking Islam (and blurring the religion, the countries where it is a majority, and its adherents) with the most despised political movement in history -- fascism. They do so despite the disdain with which the most violent and extremist versions of political Islamism holds both the nation-state and corporations, both of which fascism holds sacred. Their call predicts “the biggest conservative campus protest ever” and identifies their goal as “to confront the two Big Lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat.”

The very language of their goals makes clear that this is not solely a racist assault on Muslims, Arabs, Arab-Americans, South Asians and anyone viewed as sympathetic towards those communities. Certainly this Islamophobic crusade, led by the neo-conservative David Horowitz FreedomCenter, does reflect a deeply rooted racist demonization of those targeted communities.But it reflects dangers even beyond the threat it poses to those communities and to the social fabric of this country from the consolidation of racist demagoguery as a “legitimate” part of public discourse.

_____________________________________________

take action against this spreading of militaristic hate.
don't let the warlords like Horowitz/aipac/Dan Pipes get away with this shit.

[Scurrilous]

3. K & R

:kick:

[ProgressiveMuslim]

4. Anyone intersted in working against this type of prejudice

should check out the Arab-American Anti-discrimination Committee at www.adc.org.

I'm hard-pressed to come up with a single positive image!

[Douglas Carpenter]

13. thanks for mentioning the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

http://www.adc.org/

[breakaleg]

5. Thanks for posting. nt

[Douglas Carpenter]

6. kik

[Karenina]

7. Anyone remember Popeye?

Anyone remember how often Bluto/Brutus was the evil Sheik of Arabyyyy...??? Eat your spinach. Ay-rabs are the bad guys.

[Douglas Carpenter]

8. exactly....its been going on for a lonnnnnnnnng, lonnnnnnnnnnnng time

and the images are frighteningly similar to the anti-Semitic propaganda of earlier years

[SoCalDem]

9. Stereotyping & movie-making go hand in hand

Westerns usually portrayed "Indians" as bloodthirsty/ignorant/untrustworthy

Asians are usually portrayed as smart/agile/sneaky

Hispanics are usually portrayed as gangsters/many-childrened women/field workers

Blacks are usually portrayed as service workers/drug dealers-users/welfare recipients

people who are overweight are almost always "the goofy friend" or are lazy/gluttons..

movies play up stereotypes.. it's their "shorthand" to avoid having to write good material.. they do half the work for them

[riderinthestorm]

10. I have to admit I haven't seen a lot of films

but the ones that come to mind are very respectful of Arabs, even if the characterizations are stereotypical (like stereotyping cats or dogs is a cliche - not something to get worked up about as a nefarious plot to undermine a particular group).

Lawrence of Arabia
Indiana Jones
The Black Stallion
Casablanca

:shrug: Yes, this is a very limited range and I am not a big film or teevee buff and I have had a couple of drinks on a Saturday night but my recollection of these films isn't any kind of negative image of Arabs. Quite the contrary as they are portrayed as humane, human and just like the rest of us - honorable, corrupt, interesting and guilty in equal measure.

I guess I never paid enough attention to single out cartoon characters as a "good" or "bad" Arab (or whether they were even Arab! LOL) or not - bad me (like Popeye).

Sigh.

[Douglas Carpenter]

11. yes that is an extremely limited view of films

And I am not even sure those examples are good ones. The vast majority of Hollywood films stereotype Arabs in overtly racist ways. From Aladin to any number of countless action films - they are certainly just as overtly racist as anti-Semitic films of an earlier era.

If you check the article in the post...it presents many, many examples of the very typical racist stereotyping of Arabs which are pandemic in our society

[Aristus]

15. "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" portrayed Sallah in a positive light.

"I.J.& The Last Crusade" did not.

In ROTLA, Sallah was portrayed as a respected digger, a loving husband, a devoted father and a loyal and resourceful friend.

In IJATLC, Sallah had been reduced to a cap-tipping servile cliche. I don't have to be Arabic to hate the transformation of a great character.

[Douglas Carpenter]

12. just a few examples:

link: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/144225

snip;"ACK SHAHEEN: Disney's Aladdin was seen by millions of children worldwide. It was hailed as one of Disney's finest accomplishments, but the film recycled every old degrading stereotype from Hollywood’s silent black-and-white past.

ALADDIN OPENING MUSIC: Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels grow, where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but, hey, it’s home.

JACK SHAHEEN: “Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but, hey, it’s home.” Now, how could a producer with a modicum of intelligence, just a modicum of sensitivity, let a song such as that open the film? 300 movies, nearly 25% of all Hollywood movies that, in one way or another, demean Arabs, contain gratuitous slurs, or they portray Arabs as being the butt of a cheap joke.

UNIDENTIFIED: We were going into Mecca, see? And the plane is full of Arabs with these animals -- goats, sheep, chickens. I mean, they don’t go anywhere without their goddamn animals. We had to put plastic in the cabins. You know, they urinate, they defecate.

JACK SHAHEEN: You have films by Neil Simon like Chapter Two." The beginning of the film, the protagonist arrives back from London, and his brother says, “How was London?” And he says, “Full of Arabs.”

LEO SCHNEIDER: How was London?

GEORGE SCHNEIDER: Full of Arabs.

JACK SHAHEEN: Wow! Imagine if he had said, “Full of blacks,” “Full of Jews,” “Full of Hispanics.” I mean, that’s ridiculous. Why do we do these things?

One of the most offensive films, with the gratuitous images, Father of the Bride 2. It features Steve Martin selling his house to a Mr. Habib.

MR. HABIB: We like house very much. When you can move out?

GEORGE BANKS: Excuse me?

REALTOR: The Habibs would like to buy the house, George. It’s exactly what they’ve been looking for.

MR. HABIB: Yes. When you can move? We need house a week from Wednesday. And my wife wants flower dishes in kitchen. You sell? We pay top dollar.

JACK SHAHEEN: When Habib’s submissive wife tries to speak, he shouts gibberish at her. And then he offers Martin a $15,000 cash bonus to move out in ten days. When Martin tells Mr. Habib that he doesn’t want to sell the house after all, he finds Habib's wrecking crew there, ready to demolish his beautiful home. And in a scene that calls to mind one of the most degrading stereotypes of the Jewish people, Mr. Habib demands an extra $100,000 to sell the house that he has owned for just a day back to Martin.

GEORGE BANKS: You want me to take out a loan on something I owned free and clear just twenty-four hours ago?

MR. HABIB: Well, that is up to you, George. Your park, your fence, your memories.

JACK SHAHEEN: Now, if you looked at the other Father of the Bride films -- Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy -- there were no Arabs or Arab Americans. So why does Disney inject these horrific sort of offensive characters in Father of the Bride, Part 2? It’s the same reason that in Gladiator the slave traders who kidnap Russell Crowe and bring him back to Rome are Arabs. I mean, this is ridiculous. I mean, why does Hollywood inject Arabs, scenes of Arabs and/or slurs demeaning Arabs in movies having nothing to do with the Middle East?

So, you're sitting like I am, for example, watching Back to the Future, about a mad scientist. And yet, early on in the film, we see these ugly inept Libyans with machine guns in a parking lot trying to gun down the protagonist. I mean, why? This movie wasn’t about the future. It was the same old stereotyping from the past. "

snip:"JACK SHAHEEN: You see the oily sheikh in Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You see the money-grubbing sheikh who’s out to commit all kinds of terrorism and launch a missile in Ernest in the Army.

SHEIKH: Gentlemen, behold my special club, the pluton missile. With it, I will bring the infidels to their knees and be leader in the Arab world.

JACK SHAHEEN: One of the myths in the ’70s was that the Arabs are coming over, buying up chunks of America. And, of course, this was reflected in the cinema

HOWARD BEALE: That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back!

JACK SHAHEEN: One of my favorite movies of all time, racist though it may be, is Network, about commercial television.

TV ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it! How do you feel?

AUDIENCE: We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!

JACK SHAHEEN: Network features a TV anchor rising to super stardom. How? He unleashes wild rants against the system on the air. But he directs at Arabs who he says are buying up America.

HOWARD BEALE: They’re buying it for the Saudi Arabian investment corporation! They’re buying it for the Arabs!

JACK SHAHEEN: The anchor, Howard Beale, calls on the American people to rise up and stop the Arab buyout of his TV network.

HOWARD BEALE: Listen to me, God damn it! The Arabs are simply buying us! There’s

snip:"JACK SHAHEEN: This kind of anger, the anger born of fear, all of it in response to a perceived conspiracy and threat by a specific group of people, well, we’ve seen and heard this before. If we look at the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis, at its core is an identical type of economic threat. This economic myth even made its way into children's books. Sadly, the popular image of Jews in Nazi propaganda resembles the popular image of Arabs in some of our most beloved Hollywood movies, the only difference being that the Arab usually wears a robe and headdress.

To solidify Washington's connection with Hollywood, simply look at the films produced in cooperation with the Department of Defense, showing our men and women in the Armed Forces killing Arabs at random. Like Iron Eagle, where a teenager goes over and bombs up an Arab country, you know, just learns how to fly a jet overnight. And then, of course, Navy Seals, where Charlie Sheen goes over to Lebanon and obliterates scores of Arabs. "

link to full segment:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/19/144225

.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

16. Politicians likewise have no problem defaming Arabs.

I've called my own reps numerous times and said: substitute the words "Jewish American" or "African American" and see how that sentence sounds....

It's disgraceful.

[Douglas Carpenter]

17. unfortunately even among self-described "liberals" and even among some posters here on DU

[Douglas Carpenter]

14. \

[Donald Ian Rankin]

18. I haven't seen it, but "Rendition"? NT