Despot, oil sheikh, terrorist

by SAMER ELATRASH

In a scene from the 1994 blockbuster True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger executes a squawking Palestinian terrorist by tying him to a missile and firing it at a helicopter crammed with more Palestinians. In The Delta Force, Chuck Norris wallops Palestinian terrorists aboard an airliner. In the 2000 movie Rules of Engagement, a colonel played by Samuel Jackson orders his troops to fire on Yemeni demonstrators. Dozens are killed. A young girl loses her leg. It’s a day that will live in… But no! At the end of the movie, it emerges that all the demonstrators, even the young girl, had fired at the Americans! In a scene from the 1966 film Cast a Giant Shadow, about the Israeli-Arab war in 1948, an Israeli is pierced by a Palestinian bullet, and falls to the ground clutching a white dove.

The clips, gathered in Jack Shaheen’s documentary Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, provide a glimpse of what he calls “a pattern of stereotypes that robs a people of their humanity.” The documentary starts with the earliest Hollywood depictions of Arabs, often prurient despots who wanted to bed demurring American blondes. Over the decades, they morph into fat, seedy oil sheikhs and finally into gibbering terrorists who were cheerily dispatched to hoots from the audience.

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS ARE OBVIOUS: Shaheen

Politics and propaganda

“It’s part of our tragic cinematic history,” says Shaheen, over the phone from his South Carolina home. “Unlike some other stereotypes, there are political implications involved in Arab stereotypes. There is the Arab-Israeli conflict and the demonization of religion. The closest parallel is the vilification of Jews.” The implications, says Shaheen, were evident in the public backing for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. “All the pre-9/11 images, all those films showing us blowing Arabs to smithereens, made it easier for us to go into Iraq,” he says. “We were already hating things Arab and Muslim.”

Born to Christian Lebanese immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Shaheen, an avuncular 71-year-old who teaches communications at the University of Southern Illinois, grew up watching unflattering depictions of Arabs and Muslims on the screen.

“I was aware of the images,” he says, but he never felt that he stood out. His family moved to the nearby steel mining town of Clairton, where his grandfather worked in the mills and went door to door selling linen. “I followed him everywhere,” he says. “Many of the families he did business with were black, and I learned early on not to judge people by their colour. It was a terrific ethnic mix. I don’t like to call it a melting pot. It was a tabouleh. It’s healthy—everything in tabouleh is good for you.”

His first job in dispelling stereotypes came with the U.S. government. In the 1960’s, Shaheen joined the U.S. government’s Special Services Division to organize a theatre group in West Berlin. “We wanted to shatter myths about G.I.s among Germans and to encourage Americans to interact with German civilians,” he says. The theatre group was “comprised of Berliners, Americans, the French and the British. The Berliners, especially, loved our plays.”

Back in the U.S., Shaheen earned a graduate degree and began teaching. His first books were on public broadcasting and the depiction of nuclear warfare in feature films. “Then something unexpected happened,” he says. “I received a Fulbright scholarship to go to the American University of Beirut. I accepted it and off I went. I visited my family there, and I decided then and there that I was going to write an essay on how Arabs were portrayed in Hollywood.”

Cartoonish depictions

Shaheen began following shows and movies that had Arab characters. It was his children, however, who alerted him to the portrayal of Arabs in Disney cartoons. “My children would call me from the living room, saying, ‘Daddy, bad Arabs on TV!’”

His research took him to L.A., where he interviewed several directors and screenwriters who worked on movies with Arab characters. “One third said they hated all things Arab,” he recalls. “One third were apathetic and one third showed some concern. One writer invited his friends to dinner, and had me speak to them. I explained the importance of debunking these negative stereotypes, but most people there had bought into the stereotypes. They really felt that Arabs were like images they were projecting, and who was I to tell them they were wrong.”

His book, The TV Arab, was published in 1984, and Shaheen began serving as a commentator for U.S. television stations and a consultant for Hollywood productions. “At times, I felt like a black guy talking to the KKK,” he says of Hollywood.

Shaheen says the derogatory portrayals of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood were entrenched, and fighting the stereotypes was difficult. It still is, he says. Although some filmmakers have gone beyond the traditional stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims—Shaheen mentions the movies Babel, Syriana, Kingdom of Heaven and Three Kings, on which he worked as consultant—movies and TV shows continue depicting Arabs and Muslims, including American ones, as “clones of Bin Laden and Saddam.”

He says he is now writing a book on the depiction of Arabs and Muslims after the September 11, 2001 attacks. He is fiercely critical of TV shows like 24, where most Arabs and Muslim characters, many of them Americans, are portrayed as terrorists. Asked whether the attacks somewhat justified the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists, he says, “So 19 Arab terrorists attacked the U.S., and none of them were Americans. There are 1.2 billion Muslims. There were a thousand Catholic priests involved in sexual abuse. How many movies should we make about that? Should this be the only image of Catholic priests that we see?”

Asked how he would like to see Arabs and Muslims portrayed, he says, “No better and no worse than anybody else.”

Palestine in particular

In Reel Bad Arabs, the images of the Muslim terrorists and subservient Muslim women are contrasted with footage of Arabs and Muslims playing soccer or sitting about the living room, and young couples walking hand in hand in Arab cities. All snapshots of daily life are ignored by Hollywood, he says. Especially galling for Shaheen, who compares the depictions of Arabs in Hollywood to anti-Semitic propaganda, is the treatment of Palestinians by Hollywood. In one scene in the documentary, Shaheen adopts a plaintive tone, to the background of scenes showing Israeli soldiers abusing Palestinians. “Is the life of a Palestinian child not equal to the life of an Israeli?” he asks

Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People premieres in Canada on Monday, March 26 at Concordia (1455 de Maisonneuve, room H-110, 7:30 pm). The screening will be followed by a discussion with Jack Shaheen. The event is presented by Cinema Politica, an international network of free political film screenings organized by Montreal-based non-profit überculture. See www.cinemapolitica.org for info and preview

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