Movies have never been just about entertainment, and real life has never been more like the movies. Tarek Atia explores the dangers of believing in images It occurs to me, as I attempt to lead a more moral, spiritual life, how tough this will be. For not only will I be fighting the demons both within me and all around me, but, here and now, in late 1998, I will also always be involved in a sort of defensive struggle not to be labeled fundamentalist, terrorist, etc, just because I am trying to become a better Muslim, and a better person. Perhaps I should begin by explaining the title above, for within those five words is encapsulated the entire struggle I am referring to. Suffice it to say that we live in a media-soaked world. By this I mean all forms of media, including magazines, newspapers, television, the movies, the music industry, the Internet, and who knows what else will come along. Regardless of whoever may or may not be behind the characterisation, Bruce Willis and Bin Laden have come, more than any other two people alive, to represent the extremes of human existence, pitted against each other. They are, in many ways, the most accessible archetypes of religious and secular extremism around. Many writers, such as Benjamin Barber, have argued that the next century will be a struggle between extreme capitalism and extreme fundamentalism, or as Barber puts it, McWorld versus Jihad, with the overall loser in the struggle, in Barber's view, being democracy. Yet the real struggle of the future seems set to be the struggle of the past, of all time for that matter, and the one every single individual faces within him or herself, between secularism and religious faith. When we pit the most extreme figures of each trend against one another, the real loser is not democracy, as Barber argues, but morality and moderation itself, which is the cornerstone of religion. In a world where image means everything, and can be transmitted instantly to any part of the globe, the idea of religion as moderation has been lost in the smoke and the lights of both Hollywood glamour and the seedy training camps of Afghanistan. They are one and the same, since both depend on the idea that you as an individual need not think too much, that it's easier and better just to become a receptacle for someone else's propaganda. In other words, the goal is to let someone else think for you. This is the exact opposite of what religion preaches, for it is only man's free will which can save him from drowning in the muck of everything else. "The world", starring... Bruce Willis: He is the consummate action hero. In film after film now, he has come to represent the United States, the policeman of the world. In Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 he saved the world from terrorists and bank robbers, but -- make no mistake about it -- these were never your average crooks. These were always internationally recognised masterminds of evil, who, had Willis not been around, might eventually have taken over the world. It's no coincidence that the films were set in a skyscraper in Los Angeles, an international airport in Washington DC, and on Wall Street in New York City. These are places where, even when the toughest bad guys around try to strike, a daring American will always be there to save the day. In a more recent film, Armageddon, Willis is once more called upon to save the world, but this time from asteroids, which, when he is not busy promoting the aptly-titled international chain of theme restaurants Planet Hollywood in which he is an anchor investor, he nonchalantly does. Ducktators Turning villains into cartoons makes it easier for the US to reach a mass audience brought up to believe in whatever they see on screen. During World War II, Warner Bros. made a series of cartoons under the rubrics Ducktators and Toons at War, with titles like Tokio Jokio, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, and You're a Sap Mr. Jap. These animated shorts helped build a huge popular support base for the idea of America joining the war. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in 1942, Americans were more than gung ho to go out and fight the enemy with all they had. What many people are not aware of, however, is that America also decided to fight the enemy within, namely the over 100,000 Japanese Americans who had immigrated to the United States and were living peaceful, prosperous lives on the West Coast. These people, along with, to a lesser extent, Italian and German Americans, feared for their safety as politicians and ordinary citizens alike began frothing at the mouth. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defence Command, entrusted by Roosevelt with the defence of the Pacific Coast, wrote on 14 February 1942, "In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become `Americanised,' the racial strains are undiluted.... It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction are at large today." "A Jap's a Jap," he later proclaimed, "and that's all there is to it." By mid-summer 1942, property belonging to Japanese-Americans had been confiscated and 120,000 people had been rounded up and imprisoned in military camps, where they remained for over two years. The siege Let's switch back to 1998. The ads are out for a soon-to-be-released feature film called The Siege. They ask a frightening, but penetrating, question: "Will the people of this country be forced to become monsters in order to fight monsters?" The monsters referred to are so-called Muslim fundamentalists. In the film, which bills itself as being "chillingly close to leading news stories of the day," a "thoughtful, cautious general", played by Bruce Willis, is asked by the President of the United States to bring law-and-order to the terrorism-riddled streets of New York City. Mass arrests of Arab and Muslim Americans ensue, and again, as in World War II, thousands of innocent people have their rights trampled on, as they are forcibly sequestered in military camps, just because they are of the same religion or race as the supposed enemy. It's just a movie, right? Maybe not. The rise of Osama Bin Laden in popular lore signals, above all, that the United States really has decided to pursue a strategy political analysts have been predicting for years. As early as 1992, Leon T Hadar, former bureau chief with the Jerusalem Post and researcher at a Washington thinktank, wrote in The Green Peril: Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat, that "like the Red Menace of the Cold War era, the Green Peril is perceived as a cancer spreading around the globe, undermining the legitimacy of Western values and political systems. The cosmic importance of the confrontation would make it necessary for Washington to adopt a long-term diplomatic and military strategy; to forge new and solid alliances; to prepare the American people for a never-ending struggle that will test their resolve..." After predicting a series of events which are "chillingly close" to what has been going on for the past few years, Hadar goes on to say, "The new villain is now ready to be integrated into popular culture to help to mobilise public support for a new crusade." I haven't seen the movie, but it is clear from the long preview what the basic mood and feel of the film will be. As opposed to the age-old adage, "you can't judge a book by its cover," everyone knows that with films, the preview basically tells you all you need to know, picking all the best parts of the film, in order, a kind of abbreviated summary, complete with beginning, middle and end, jam-packed into just a minute or two. And what's clear here is that Muslims are no longer cartoon villains. This is a gritty, serious movie, starring Denzel Washington, who is generally considered to be a very serious actor, as the head of a Terrorism Task force. The bombings are realistically filmed and based on actual events, and the movie is meant to reflect a reality on the ground -- Muslims who really exist on the streets of New York. That's where the real danger is, in Hollywood's shift into Islamophobia overdrive: a brand new level of hatred and stereotyping. Representing Muslims as cartoon characters who can just be laughed off is one thing (though a bad thing, all the same, which has beyond a doubt adversely affected relations between Muslims and others in America and around the world). Presenting them as credible characters who could be your neighbours, or co-workers, or the person sitting next to you on the bus, and at the same time as highly dangerous to society, is a whole different ball game altogether, and a far more risky one for all concerned. For one thing, it raises the stakes, and as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) warns in the bulletin it has issued about the film, the only possible result is that the "trustworthiness and peaceful intentions of the American Muslim and Arab-American communities are made suspect. The overall impression, despite some positive content, is that many who see it will view the next Muslim or Arab they meet with increased suspicion and hostility." Reverse psychology, or foreign policy projectionism It was very interesting to listen to William Cohen, the US Secretary of Defence, as he described the recent US air strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan as hitting hard at Sudan's "military-industrial complex" -- as if the US did not function along precisely those same lines itself. In fact, might there not be an even more all-encompassing military-industrial-cultural complex in the US, dedicated to the continuous mass production of weapons so as to keep the US economy strong? If one uses what I like to call the reverse psychology method of interpreting the news, all you have to do is take everything the US says, and invert it back onto them. In other words, when President Clinton accuses someone of terrorism and a blatant disregard for national sovereignty and international law and a lot of other unpleasant things, he is really just projecting what the US itself is doing. Or, to be more precise, when Clinton declared that by striking at this network of international terror controlled by Osama Bin Laden, the US was not engaging in a war against Islam, he meant the exact opposite -- though he leaves it to the Hollywood spin doctors and the media to flesh out all the details. The whole thing is summed up in the line from The Siege, "They're out to destroy our way of life," which is said by a Presidential aide. This is propaganda at its ultimate, Nazi best, the same type that was used by Hitler's master-propagandist Leni Riefenstahl under the Third Reich, which made it seem like the Jews were the enemy of Western civilisation, and on the point of infiltrating its very core. Today the tables have been turned. It's the Jews who invented and remain in charge of Hollywood. They are also a force to be reckoned with in US policy-making. And they are using exactly the same techniques that were used against them in Europe to attack Muslims. Hollywood, in this respect, is an essential arm of US foreign policy. It always has been, actually, as can be shown by the huge number of propaganda films put out during and ever since World War II. Mohamed Hassanein Heikal has argued that the US propagated the myth that it was the true saviour of that war, and that since then, it has begun to believe its own myth by becoming the policeman of the world, with disastrous results. Now, the process seems to be intensifying, not abating. Thus the strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan can be described as the implementation of a policy recommendation submitted in 1995 as part of the US Defence Department's Strategic Command Report on "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence". I quote: "Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the United States may do to an adversary who carries out acts that we seek to deter, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that we may appear to be potentially "out of control" can help create and reinforce fears and doubts in the mind of the adversary. That the United States may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona that we project to all adversaries." Setting the scene for actual events Just as we might look to the preview of The Siege to give us an insight into what the film will be about, so the film itself may help provide us with a preview of forthcoming attractions in the so-called "real world". In fact, as the recent film Wag the Dog has shown, Hollywood increasingly acts as a curtain-raiser, using the supposed make-believe of the screen to prepare people for unpalatable realities, so that people will not be too shocked when the same thing suddenly begins to happen for real. The film The Siege should thus be discussed in its proper context -- as propaganda for an actual forthcoming "siege" of Arab and Muslim Americans. This potentially lethal form of discrimination goes against all the original premises of the US's founding principles, which by their very nature must allow Arabs and Muslims who have decided to settle there just as much right to shape the makeup of the US as any other immigrant group of the past 400 years. Yet many in the US are not prepared to accept this integration of the dreaded "other". Consider this quote from Republican Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan in 1992: "For a millennium, the struggle for mankind's destiny was between Christianity and Islam; in the 21st century, it may be so again. For, as the Shi'ites humiliate us, their coreligionists are filling up the countries of the West." Buchanan's words provide an exact parallel to the remark of John Rankin, Mississippi Congressman, who was quoted in the Congressional Record for 15 December 1941 as saying: "The white man's civilisation has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism [and] one of them must be destroyed." When we are faced with parallels such as these, why should we rule out the possibilities of an awful rehash of the Japanese-American internment fiasco of World War II? According to the point-by-point analysis of The Siege put out by CAIR, "in the film we hear law enforcement officials being ordered to 'rumble', or investigate, every American-Muslim or Arab-American student organisation or community center. The terrorists in this film," the report continues, "come from all segments of the Muslim community in New York. There are terrorist auto mechanics, terrorist academicians, terrorist religious leaders and terrorist students." If this sounds scary, bear in mind that the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) has, since 1997, been implementing a programme, in response to a memorandum issued by FBI director Louis Freeh after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to monitor foreign student activities in the US. On 24 February 1997, Senator Diane Feinstein of California told the Senate Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information that she had "grave reservations regarding the practice of issuing visas to terrorist-supporting countries and the inability of the INS to track those who come into the country... using a student visa." Feinstein and many others are now more than ever calling for more stringent methods to combat what they see as a real threat from these students. Reactions in the States to The Siege Several Muslim groups were invited to pre-release screenings of the film. Afterwards, the groups made suggestions to the producers and directors, some of which were accepted. The main problem the groups had with the film, however -- that the plot line associates Islam with violence -- was disregarded. "We had hoped that Hollywood studios would cease demonising Arabs and Muslims, so that our children can grow up feeling safe and proud of their rich cultural heritage," said Hala Maksoud, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), who sent an open letter to producer Edward Zwick, saying that she would hold him directly responsible for any hate crimes resulting from the movie. CAIR is attempting to organise a grassroots campaign whereby local Muslims would be waiting outside cinemas showing The Siege on its opening day (November 6), handing out leaflets which offer accurate information about Islam and the American Muslim community to moviegoers as they enter the theatres. They would also hand out invitations to an open house at an area mosque the next day for anyone who wants to learn more about Islam. CAIR is calling this a proactive approach, and is urging younger Muslims, especially, to spearhead the effort. The hope behind the campaign, perhaps, is that the negative stereotyping in the film will actually backfire, as more people decide to try and learn more about Islam. Talk of a boycott of 20th Century Fox, the distributor of the film (and of many other highly popular films, such as Titanic) has not found much support. For his part the film's producer, Zwick, appeared on TV to say that "as people have begun to see the film, they've come to see that it's a more thoughtful and complex business than they might have imagined." By this, he means that the film ends with a condemnation of the decision to use martial law and arrest a large section of the population because of the actions of a few. This argument mirrors that of some Muslims in America who have argued that the United States is a young country that is still trying to come to grips with the lofty principles that its founding fathers set forth in the constitution. These people are optimists, who see the nation's bloody 400-year history as a period of gradual communal growing-up. In other words, it took a while before a majority of people realised that slavery was wrong, and when they did, they were willing to fight it out to the death for 5 years with their fellow citizens in order to ensure that the evil practice be abolished. That was the first hurdle, these people argue. The second challenge, which has been in progress since then, and is still going on now, is basically an attempt to make society as a whole more tolerant of women and blacks, the two groups who have traditionally been trampled on in America's past, and give them equal civil rights. The third hurdle, these optimists believe, will be religious equality, and, in their view, the catalyst for this will be Islam. For with Islam now labeled the fastest growing religion in the United States -- contrary to popular belief, the numbers are growing so fast as a result of conversions, not immigration -- these critics argue that a film like The Seige may be the precursor to a great leap of faith, whereby Americans begin to realise that they have to overcome whatever distortions and misconceptions and hatred and bigotry are currently directed against the "strange", "alien" religion of Islam. Going against the ingrained siege mentality will be tough, but if Americans can do it, these optimists argue, then America may actually be the birthplace of the world's only true Islamic state, where the community as a whole is constantly trying to improve itself. Judging by the fact that many in the US still feel the civil rights movement (the second hurdle) still has a long way to go, then this happy ending may still be a very long way away. In the meantime... It's up to Muslims and Arabs everywhere in the world (and all consumers for that matter) to start to make some really tough choices. Do we want to continue to pour money into companies that clearly are not concerned with fostering peace and harmony on Earth, that actually seem to revel in exploiting conflicts for their own base and material needs? The most glaring example I can think of is that of 20th Century Fox, producers of The Siege, who have made some 2 billion dollars in revenue from the film Titanic alone -- and that probably doesn't include all the related merchandising, all the hats, T-shirts, mugs, stationary, etc., that are being bought not only by Americans, but by Muslims and Arabs around the globe. And that's just one film out of several dozen that the company releases each year. In fact, Titanic grossed twice as much overseas (1.2 billion dollars and counting) as it did in the US. A significant portion of 20th Century Fox's earnings comes from people who have at one point or another been stereotyped, insulted, portrayed unflatteringly or in some other way demeaned by the company's products. Another multinational giant that comes to mind is Disney, famous for Arab-bashing in cartoons like Aladdin. And these, of course, are not the only culprits -- just two of many. American film companies make 5.85 billion dollars a year on overseas gross, at a 6 to 7 percent annual growth rate. All we do, when we continue to patronise these films for the sake of a little entertainment, is help them to patronise us, provide them with the funds and the impetus to continue their wanton labeling and compartmentalising, their treason and destruction of humanity. According to The Washington Post, "The global market is the engine behind Hollywood's assembly-line production of violent action films with marquee names such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis." In 1935, when cinema was still a relatively new medium, Walter Benjamin wrote: "[Mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." This is just what is happening today, raised to the nth degree. Moreover, the evidence on the ground seems to indicate that we as Egyptians have also, for the most part, completely bought into this stereotyping of Muslims. In other words, whenever we see someone with a beard or a galabiya we immediately, and without question, label them a fundamentalist. And this, without even speaking to the accused. Again, this only emphasises the point that image is everything. By the same coin, if we see someone with gelled hair, or wearing fancy clothes, we also immediately assume that they are the pinnacle of secularism, and spend most of their time drinking whiskey and trying to pick up girls. Reality is, of course, far more complex. That seems to be the problem. Complexity means using our minds, thinking about things, drawing conclusions. In other words, if I were to begin to argue that cinema, photography, television, or any other use of the image, may, in fact, parallel the dangers of alcohol which explain its banishment from Islam (even a small amount of that which is harmful in large amounts is haram), I would immediately be accused of being a fundamentalist terrorist who wants to blow up buildings. In other words, the topic itself is off limits, as are so many issues -- habits which cannot be challenged, but are just assumed to be an inevitable part of our daily, modern life. But the fact is that we are not advanced. We are not modern. We are still waging the same old battles that man has always waged, albeit on a far more intricate level. The battles, however, have remained the same. Power and religion are the two main factors that move the world, and the two are very closely interconnected. David and Mary at the Hollywood Jesus web-site ask an interesting question: Why are Americans as a culture becoming more spiritual? The answer is obvious: most Americans are not satisfied with where the country is going morally, and Hollywood, always on the lookout for a trend in public opinion, has of course caught on. Now, the latest movies all have to deal with moral issues. Just take a look at the recent crop of angel-related and religious-themed movies: The Devil's Advocate and The Truman Show, to name just two. A friend of mine interpreted it this way: with the US in moral decline and Islam spreading rapidly within its borders, the Hollywood establishment is clearly trying to say, "Look, we have some spirituality too. You don't have to leave your roots for that." Combine that with the negative stereotyping of Muslims and what do you have? A great formula for a 21st-century rerun of the Crusades. Some would say the fault for this lies not in the image of the bearded terrorist himself, but in actual events -- the setting fire to video rental shops, bombings of embassies, killing of tourists, etc. These things may have happened, but they do not have to reflect, as indeed they should not, the religion of Islam, or in fact any sort of honest dialogue at all. In the same way, we do not judge Hollywood by the porn industry, or the gangsters who started it from drug money and thuggery, even though this past has been made even clearer by the latest trend for movies about the seedy underbelly of Hollywood -- LA Confidential, Get Shorty, etc.. Nor do we judge photography by those who revel in taking pictures of naked children or the dismembering of corpses, though there are 'fringe' markets for all these things, to say the least. It is clear that we need a more honest dialogue when it comes to religion and secularism. We will not benefit from separating into camps and hurling insults across a divide.
