Eye on Hollywood 

Reel Bad Arabs 

Edmund Connelly

June 7, 2008 

In the 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles, the “unapologetically Jewish writer and director” Mel Brooks provided an insight into how American Jews viewed themselves and the groups they viewed as threats. Brooks took the stock formula of "decent, stout-hearted white folks settling the lawless West" and turned it on its head to create a "deliriously multicultural movie." Despite the pronounced success of Jews in America by 1974, Brooks still cast Jews alongside other multicultural victims of white mischief. When, for instance, the Indian chief (played by Mel Brooks) met the black sheriff, the encounter (in Yiddish) was at least partially "an expression of solidarity between two oppressed, marginalized minorities." 

As for the groups Jews felt threatened by, Brooks represented them in the posse hired by the bad guy: Arabs, Nazis, Hell's Angels, and Klansmen. Though this enemies list could conceivably be one for American liberals in general or for African Americans, the presence of Arabs makes it an unmistakably Jewish statement, for in American history up to 1974, neither liberals, blacks, nor Native Americans had any enduring quarrel with Arabs. 

American Jews, on the other hand, have been heavily disposed against Arabs since the creation of modern Israel in 1948. Carved out of a long established Arab region, Israel existed uneasily for some two decades. The Six-Day War of 1967 gave Israel breathing room, but the Jewish state certainly got its hair mussed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. By the time of Brooks’s 1974 film, many American Jews were obsessively preoccupied with the survival of the Jewish state. Thus, it is no surprise that heavily Jewish Hollywood—an “empire of their own” as Neal Gabler has called it—has consistently created a negative image of Arabs.  

Readers are likely familiar with scenes of murderous Arabs from highly acclaimed movies such as Exodus, starring Paul Newman (1960), Flight of the Phoenix, with James Stewart (1966), The Black Stallion, (1979), Back to the Future, (1985), True Lies, featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis (1994), Father of the Bride Part II, with Steve Martin (1995), and Denzel Washington’s action-packed The Siege, (1998). All of these films with highly negative images of Arabs appeared well before 9/11. 

Arab American professor Jack Shaheen was naturally sensitive to the images his fellow Americans saw, and in 1984 published a thin little book called The TV Arab, which chastised television for creating and perpetuating a noxious image of Muslim Arabs. The mid-eighties, after all, were a time when a wide range of American minorities were critically studying and contesting the images majority society created of them. In academic shorthand, this became known through Edward Said’s explication of the construction of “The Other” in his influential Orientalism — admittedly the foundation of what has become an entrenched bastion of anti-white "postcolonial studies" in vast areas of the humanities and social sciences. 

Shaheen then spent nearly two more decades viewing and compiling images of Arabs in Hollywood films, resulting in a tome that was as thick as his TV Arab book was thin. The new book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, canvassed 900 films, “the vast majority of which portray Arabs by distorting at every turn what most Arab men, women, and children are really like.” 

In Reel Bad Arabs, Shaheen convincingly makes the point that Hollywood for one hundred years has regularly—and often deliberately—created a dehumanized image of Arabs. Unfortunately, fate intervened to make this book one of the more ill-timed studies of our age: It was released in early 2001, just prior to the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. This Al Qaeda-led attack made the image of the Arab as blood-thirsty terrorist even more indelibly imprinted on the brains of not only American viewers but of people throughout the world. Subsequent attacks such as those in Madrid and London only reinforced this. 

If Shaheen was troubled by the strength and persistence of negative portrayals of Muslims and Arabs prior to the 9/11 attacks, his discomfort likely grew exponentially when the new hit TV series 24 starring Keifer Sutherland as Counter Terrorism Unit agent Jack Bauer began to run on Fox TV immediately after the Twin Towers collapse of September 11th.  

Co-created by Jewish American Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, the show presented a never-ending series of terrorist attacks on the U.S., including nuclear attacks. Because many of these episodes featured Muslim bad guys, Shaheen criticized the show for creating "a new Arab-American bogeyman.” Indeed, for one season a terrorist named Habib Marwan controlled a series of Middle Eastern terrorist cells that gravely threatened the American people. 

The most egregious image of Muslims, however, probably came with the introduction in season four of the immigrant Araz family, composed of father Navi, mother Dina, and 17-year-old son Behrooz. Though Behrooz dates an American girl, the family is vile and corrupt in almost every other way. The entire family is on a knowing mission to destroy large parts of the United States with nuclear weapons. Father Navi exhibits his vileness by telling his son things such as "I listen to your phone calls, I read your e-mail" and striking him on the face. This is nothing, however, compared to the father’s decision to murder his own son. 

Fearing the America girlfriend will expose the terrorist plot, Navi orders Behrooz to cold-bloodedly murder her. Suspecting Behrooz does not have the inner strength to do so, mother Dina poisons the girlfriend by spiking her tea. Dina is at least considerate enough to then shoot the girl’s body in an attempt to persuade her husband that Behrooz had carried out orders. 

Next, as Behrooz and one of his father’s henchmen are digging the girlfriend’s grave, the henchman tries to kill Behrooz. Incapacitating the attacker, Behrooz demands to know who ordered his death: It is his own father Navi. 

One might think that such malevolent portrayals of Middle Eastern terrorists would excite universal scorn, but some Jewish groups and lobbyists hailed 24 as a bid to reveal Muslims' "true nature." Jewish neocon writer and activist Daniel Pipes, for instance, wrote to the Jerusalem Post and the New York Post encouraging Fox not to bend to Muslim objections on the series.

Friends tell me that Shaheen has a new book about Hollywood’s vilification of Arabs, Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs After 9/11. In an interview about the book, Shaheen says that since 9/11 a few films such as Babel (2006) and Rendition (2007) had more even-handed images of Arabs, yet steadily worsening images were the rule. For instance, Shaheen cited last year’s The Kingdom, an action movie with FBI agents hunting terrorists in Saudi Arabia, as “one of the most damaging depictions of Arabs of recent times.” It is a film in which "even Arab children cannot be trusted." Shades of young Behrooz in 24. 

Shaheen is wise to point to the selective framing of Arabs and the repetition of that framing. “You cannot deny the reality—there are people who really want to kill Americans. But those are basically the only images we see." Naturally, such repetition has a goal, one captured in an old Arabic saying: “Al tikrar biallem il hmar. By repetition even the donkey learns.”  

The donkey in this case is presumably the American people, who, as we all know, are pliable to sustained manipulation.  

As Shaheen points out, this constant repetition of negative images of Arabs has real-world  consequences: “Hollywood’s depiction of Arabs has eased the path for U.S. administration policy.” Negative images of Arabs and Muslims as the enemy "made it that much easier for us to go into Iraq. There were very few people protesting.”  

Another example of real world consequences of Hollywood imagery that comes to mind right now is the long history of depicting black presidents as “calm, earnest, utterly decent and way, way cooler than white presidents”—an imagery that is quite possibly fueling some of the extraordinary appeal of Barack Obama to so many white voters. As in Blazing Saddles, blacks are still the good guys and the Arabs are still the bad guys.

As a white person concerned about the inroads of Islam in Europe and into other Western societies, one may applaud these negative images of Arabs as possibly influencing attitudes toward immigration into Western societies. But the sad reality is that the only common thread here is that Jewish sensibilities are shaping our media images. 

Ever the wise observer, Shaheen closes his interview with a reference to a Western philosopher. "Plato said: 'Those who tell the stories rule society'. Nothing has changed, and the story tellers of today have a tremendous impact on the world as we perceive it." 

I think I’ll go ahead and order Shaheen’s new book.

Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.