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The Usual Suspects

By Michael Paulson
Boston Globe
Posted on Sunday November 25, 2001

Fleshy women in gauzy veils, belly dancing to finger cymbals and ouds in a seedy club.

Oily sheiks with too much money and too many women.

Angry Palestinians with red-checked kaffiyehs around their heads and menacing guns slung across their chests.

These are the images of Arabs Jack G. Shaheen sees when he watches the movies, and he watches a lot of movies.

But then he turns on the TV news. Nineteen Arab Muslim terrorists, wielding box cutters as they take over four American passenger jets and smash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

Cheering Palestinians celebrating the death of Americans, and angry Pakistanis urging on Islam to war against the West.

The timing is either incredibly bad or incredibly good for Shaheen’s scathingly angry, painstakingly detailed critique of the way the movie industry depicts Arabs, spelled out in a new book, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.”

This is a tough time to be arguing that it’s unfair to depict Arab Muslims as terrorists in the movies, given that Arab Muslims stand accused of masterminding the worst act of terrorism in the history of the United States.

But Shaheen has been arguing for years that by depicting Arabs solely as slimy, shifty, violent creeps, Hollywood has been not only misrepresenting the Arab world, but also has been creating a climate for hate. And since Sept. 11 his fears have been realized: According to testimony submitted to the US Commission on Civil Rights by the Arab American Institute, there were 326 hate crimes in 38 states in the first month after the terrorist attacks, including seven deaths, 90 physical assaults, and 85 incidents of vandalism.

“We’re at war, and this is very serious now: We cannot, and should not, give comfort to the enemy,” Shaheen says. “Every political leader in this country says we are not in a war against Islam, but is the motion-picture industry going to counter this by showing only images of

Muslims as fanatics? There certainly should be movies made based on what happened, but if those are the only images we see from now on, if we continue to vilify all Muslims and all Arabs as terrorists instead of making clear this is a lunatic fringe, what are we accomplishing?”

Shaheen has become increasingly concerned about the impact of the current political climate on depictions of Arabs in film since the Bush White House sent senior adviser Karl Rove to Beverly Hills Nov. 11 in an effort to enlist the entertainment industry in the war on terrorism. Days later, Shaheen went to the White House to meet with Rove’s aides, and told them he is concerned that the effort could backfire.

“I would say filmmakers have more responsibility now than ever to present images that do not escalate intolerance and do not separate us,” he said.

Arab-Americans, like many groups before them, have complained for years about the way they are depicted in film: too many stereotypes, too little diversity.

“We’re generally tough on enemies in the movies: sneaky Japs, sadistic Krauts in WW II, and even friends who are different, like Italian gangsters, snobby English, irresponsible, violent blacks, and drunk Irish,” says the Rev. Richard A. Blake, a film studies professor at Boston College. “Any deviation from white bread Americanism is threatening.”

But Shaheen, a onetime movie usher in Clairton, Penn., argues that negative depictions of Arabs have been unusually persistent.

“From 1896 until today, filmmakers have collectively indicted all Arabs as Public Enemy No. 1 – brutal, heartless, uncivilized religious fanatics, and money-mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews,” he writes.

The stereotyping of Arabs in movies has been widely noted over the last two decades by film critics and Arab-American advocacy groups. Shortly after its founding in 1980, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee began meeting with television and movie producers, but to no avail.

“We’ve done studies, we’ve met with network executives, we’ve been on countless TV programs and in public forums, and I think there’s a growing awareness of a problem, but where I don’t think we’ve had an impact is in the creative community in Hollywood,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.

Shaheen, who previously authored “The TV Arab” critiquing the portrayal of Arabs in television, has had his own brushes with the inside, consulting on three films: “The Prince of Egypt,” “The Siege,” and “Three Kings.”

He wound up hating “The Siege” – a movie about Palestinian terrorists that many Arab-Americans considered a disaster even though the makers included an Arab-American FBI agent – and loving “Three Kings.”

But it was his experience with the animated “The Prince of Egypt,” made in 1998 by DreamWorks, that he considers most illustrative.

The relation of Arab-Americans to “The Prince of Egypt” can only be understood in the wake of a previous animated movie, the Academy Award-winning “Aladdin,” which was released by Disney in 1992. Arab-Americans were furious about numerous aspects of the film. The two main characters, Aladdin and Princess Jasmine, are Anglicized, while the other Arabs are caricatured. According to Shaheen, “the action and dialogue imply that Arabs are abhorrent types, that Islam is a brutal religion.”

The attitude of the movie to the Arab world is made clear in the opening song, which includes the lyric:

Oh I come from a land,

From a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam.

Where they cut off your ear

If they don’t like your face.

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.

One of the top executives at Disney then, Jeffrey Katzenberg, was a top executive at DreamWorks when “The Prince of Egypt” was made. Katzenberg invited Muslim and Arab-Americans to preview the film, and Shaheen was horrified.

The two men, according to Shaheen, immediately got into a row, with Katzenberg suggesting that Shaheen might be a parent who wouldn’t show his kids Holocaust films, and Shaheen saying his kids knew more about racist images than Katzenberg did. (Katzenberg declined to be interviewed for this story. But the two men began working together, and Shaheen says the film was better because of Katzenberg’s willingness to listen.

Why does it matter? Arab-Americans say the proof is in the hate crimes after Sept. 11.

“After you vilify a people, you can do anything to them,” Shaheen says. “You can have a holocaust. You can put them in camps. You can deny them civil rights and no one will say anything. Look at all the hate crimes since the massacre. Could it be that stereotypes in part played a role?”

Shaheen, 66, is a grandson of Lebanese immigrants, who said he never felt the sting of discrimination growing up in a small steel town. An Orthodox Christian, he never met a Muslim until he was an adult.

“I never felt anything – no prejudice at all,” he said. “But it must have started with our children. They would call my attention to cartoons with some really ugly Arabs. I started taking notes.”

That was 30 years ago, and the subject of how Arabs are depicted in popular culture has become something of an obsession for Shaheen. He published his book on the depiction of Arabs in TV, a monograph on images of Arabs in comic books, and then decided to tackle films.

He thought the project would take a few years; instead, it took two decades, as he tracked down and then watched (or in a handful of cases researched) more than 900 films that depict or refer to Arabs. Holed up first in a family room in Illinois, where he worked as a professor, and then in a home office in South Carolina, where he retired to Hilton Head, Shaheen had the painful experience of spending 20 years and watching his people get bashed.

Shaheen said some of his co-workers told him to give it a rest – there was no need to visit every film archive he could find to watch every obscure movie with an Arab. But he insisted.

“Several colleagues said, ‘Look, this is ridiculous, you can write the book and say the films you saw are representative.’ But I refused to do that, because unless this image was thoroughly documented, unless the evidence was presented, no one was going to pay attention.”

The result – more a film ography than a book – simply describes the 900 films Shaheen saw.

“The women are almost always mute, carrying something on their head, clothed in black, hiding in the shadows, greedy, or fondling, like in one of the most offensive scenes in film history, in ‘Sahara’ (1983), in which Brooke Shields is being fondled by Arab women,” he said. “The men are the souk swindlers, patterned after the greedy Jew of yesteryear, with the same Semitic features and the same Semitic actions. And then you have the terrorist. They are selectively framed to be the enemy.”

Shaheen acknowledges that the images were provoked by certain realities: Palestinian terrorism starting in the 1970s, the rise of the anti-American Khomeini regime in Iran, Saddam Hussein, and now Osama bin Laden and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Hollywood attempts to capitalize on the anxiety and the hate in whatever market they’re appealing to, and the best way to do it is to capitalize on current events,” said Daniel L. Bernardi, professor of media arts at the University of Arizona and the editor of “Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness.”

“Imagine if our allies were the Palestinians. How would we represent the Israelis? Would we represent them as Hitler and the Nazis? The American media has been racist toward Arabs and Muslims.”

So are Jews to blame?

No discussion of the depiction of Arabs by Hollywood escapes that question, given the large number of Jews in powerful positions in Hollywood, the paucity of Arab-Americans throughout the industry, and the tension between the two groups.

Some scholars see a link between faith and film.

“I think it is safe to say that apart from a few isolated scenes, there is almost nothing positive to come out of Hollywood in terms of representing Arabs or Islam,” said S. Brent Plate, a professor of religion and visual arts at Texas Christian University. “I’m not sure all of the reasons for this except that it is no secret that the industry is a Judeo-Christian industry. Though not necessarily practicing Jews or Christians, Hollywood is run by people from this cultural background.”

Many of the producers Shaheen criticizes are Jewish, and Shaheen, like many other critics, links the film industry’s depiction of Arabs to American foreign policy.

Shaheen blames one former studio, Cannon, for “conscious and deliberate” Arab-bashing – he calls them “cinematic storm troopers.” One of the studio’s founding executives, Yoram Globus, was previously an Israeli government official, and Shaheen credits them with “upward of 26 hate-and-terminate-the-Arab movies.”

“We in the US are linked to Israel, and American filmmakers are linked to that image, so Israelis are heroes and Arabs are villains in almost every film. There’s no escaping that,” he says.

“But everyone in the (film) industry, whether they are Protestants, Jews or Catholics, has vilified the Arabs. I refuse to get into something that vilifies someone just because they happen to be Jewish. I have met Jewish writers and producers who hated Arabs, and some told me right to my face they used the medium and their influence to convey that image, but I’ve also worked with three Jewish producers who didn’t care if my parents came from Iceland, and if anything, their being Jewish, and therefore, sensitive [to discrimination] brought us closer together.”

In fact, Shaheen argues that Arabs are the victims of the kind of prejudice once leveled at Jews. And he repeatedly quotes Jewish critics who have objected to the depiction of Arabs in films.

Shaheen says the solution is more diverse depictions of Arabs in film.

“Why can’t we be part of a comedy team, be doctors or lawyers, or talk about our faith?” he asks. “There has never been a World War II movie where an American of Arab heritage was one of the GIs, yet we all served. My wife’s father was in World War I, and almost every Arab-American family has someone who was in one of those wars, and yet we’ve been excluded.”