It has been more than seven years since the first edition of this book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People was published. It has indeed proved the first reference about hundreds of American movies that had projected such an assortment of hateful Arab and Muslim images over such a long period of time. The author, Lebanese-American director Jack Shaheen, has presented dozens of lectures at major universities and multicultural conferences worldwide on his best-selling book. It's, in a nutshell, a much-needed, long overdue contribution to the literature of film. The book has evoked very positive feedback and though-provoking responses from so many critics that the Media Education Foundation (MEF) decided to produce and release a film version of the book, which itself became the first-ever TV documentary focusing on stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. Some readers might be surprised to know the fact that portraying Muslims and Arabs as villains has been around for more than a century, reaching and affecting most of the world's six billion people. From the earliest silent films of the 1880s, damaging portraits have become so prevalent that viewers of film and TV shows demonstrating these stereotypes may come to perceive reel Arabs as real ones. From 1896 until today, filmmakers have collectively indicted all Arabs/Muslims as Public Enemy number 1: brutal, heartless, uncivilized religious fanatics and money-mad cultural ‘others' bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews. The 1001-page book contains analyses of both pre- and –post-9/11 movies and at great length. That brings the total number of films covered in this book to nearly 1,100. All 1,100 movies clearly demonstrate that Arab stereotypes were ‘contaminating' minds long before 9/11. The writer says that Hollywood's reel-bad-Arab formula has remained unaltered: filmmakers paint Westerners as bright, brave heroes and Arabs as dangerous, dumb baddies. Nearly all the newly added films depict Arabs as villains. And he mentions a plethora of examples: In films like Desert Thunder (1998) and Bravo Two Zero (1999), they focus on killing American soldiers in Iraq; and in The Black Knight (1954), Arabs relish killing unarmed, devout Christians. Movie serials such as The Black Box (1913) and the Adventures of the Flying Cadets (1943) also alleges an Arab-Nazi connection. While Arab sheikhs are notorious for kidnapping blondes in movies like Angelique and the Sultan (1968); and Arabs are sinister slavers who torture and kill Africans in Nature Girl and the Slaver (1957). Scores of slurs or epithets are also used to refer to Arabs and Muslims in such movies, among them ‘sand niggers', ‘filthy beasts,' desert goons,' ‘low-down desert bamboozles,' and ‘flea-bitten sons of dogs.' Hence, the popular caricature of the average Arab and Muslim in such movies is: he is robed and turbaned, sinister and dangerous, engaged mainly in hijacking airplanes and blowing up public buildings. The writer cites this famous quote by late American journalist Sydney Harris in one of the book's chapters: "It seems that the human race cannot discriminate between a tiny minority of persons who may be objectionable and the ethnic strain from which they spring. If the Italians have the Mafia, all Italians are suspect; if the Jews have financiers, all Jews are part of an international conspiracy; if the Arabs have fanatics, all Arabs are violent. In the world today, more than ever, barriers of this kind must be broken, for we are all more alike than we are different." "They (the Arabs) all look alike to me," quips the American heroine in the movie The Sheikh Steps Out (1937). "All Arabs look alike to me," admits the protagonist in Commando (1968). "Islam, particularly, comes in for unjust treatment. Today's image-makers regularly link the Islamic faith with male supremacy, holy war, and acts of terror, depicting Arab Muslims as hostile alien intruders, and as lecherous, oily sheikhs intent on using nuclear weapons. When mosques are displayed onscreen, the camera inevitably cuts to Arabs praying, and the ngunning down civilians. Such scenarios are common fare," says the writer. The writer says innocent people usually pay the price for the generalization and vilification of their entire race. These stereotypes in the movie industry badly affected about six to eight Million Muslims and Arabs in the United States. He also draws the readers' attention to the fact that most of the world's 1.1 billion Muslims are not Arabs. They are "Indonesian, Indian or Malysian, only 12 per cent of the worlds' Muslims are Arab." "Repeatedly, they falsely project all Arabs as Muslims and all Muslims as Arabs. As a result, viewers, too, tend to link the same attributes to both peoples," he says. The writer is particularly critical throughout his book of the damaging influence of movies on the minds of the lay people as Plato once said: "Those who tell the stories also rule society." And also Henry Kissinger cautioned, "In an age when far more people gain their understanding from movies...than from the written word, the truth is not a responsibility filmmakers can shrug off as an incidental byproduct of creative license." Or in the writer's own words, frequent moviegoers many even postulate that illusionary Arabs as real Arabs. Jack Shaheen is the author of Reel Bad Arabs, a former CBS News consultant on Middle East affairs, and Professor Emeritus of Mass Communications from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Shaheen was born in Clairton, Pennsylvania, to Lebanese immigrants. Other books include: The TV Arab (1984) and Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture (1997).
