By IINA,
New York : In a new book titled “Guilty – Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11”, Jack Shaheen praises American movies and TV dramas that sympathized with Muslims after the terrorist attacks, but he also condemns other films that promoted negative perceptions about Islam. “In the United States, you can say anything you want about Islam and Arabs and get away with it. In other words, as someone said, ‘You can hit an Arab free’,” said Shaheen, also author of “Reel Bad Arabs — How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” According to Reuters, Shaheen specifically criticized some movies that “portrayed Muslims in dark shades”, including “The Kingdom” (2007) and “The Four Feathers” (2002). He also condemned the popular TV drama “24”, which he said created a new “Arab-American bogeyman”.
Shaheen, an American of Lebanese origin, analyzed the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs in over 1,000 films, including at least 100 shot after 9/11. From action movies such as “True Lies” (1994) to comedies including “Father of the Bride Part II” (1995) and Disney’s animated “Aladdin” (1992), Shaheen identifies films that have perpetuated damaging stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. “The images have remained primarily fixed and have only been changed in the sense that they have become more vindictive and damaging,” Shaheen told Reuters in an interview in Beirut. “What enables these images to persist and prevail? One of the primary reasons is silence,” Islamonline reported quoting him as saying.
“There’s nobody in authority, no political leader, no Hollywood personality who has taken a stand and said that demonizing Arabs and Muslims is the same as demonizing Jews or blacks or Asians or any other racial or ethnic group,” he says. Shaheen, a retired professor of mass communications, worked as a consultant in movies such as the 2005’s “Syriana” and the 1999’s “Three Kings”.
Among other movies that Shaheen praised was the 2006’s “Babel” and “Rendition” that was released in 2007, which he describes as movies that are “more complex, even-handed Arab portraits.” But “very few people are listening,” he said. “It’s been very difficult, it’s like being a salmon trying to swim upstream. What is done is selective framing of radicals: people saying ‘death to America’. You cannot deny the reality — there are people who really want to kill Americans. But those are basically the only images we see,” he added. One of the most criticized books in Shaheen’s book is “The Kingdom”, an action movie about FBI agents going after terrorists in Saudi Arabia.
He described the movie as one of the most damaging portrayals of Arabs in which “even Arab children cannot be trusted.” Shaheen also argues that Hollywood’s negative portrayal of Arabs and Muslims helps the American government to pursue its foreign policy in the Middle East. Decades of depicting Arabs and Muslims as the enemy “made it that much easier for us to go into Iraq,” he said. “There were very few people protesting. “The images help enforce policy,” he said. “As the policy becomes more even-handed, perhaps films will reflect that, “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.