Special Report on Islamophobia
The Emergence of a Distinctly American Form of Anti-Arab Stereotyping
As Melani McAlister demonstrates in her excellent study Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 (University of California Press, 2001), the development of a specifically American adaptation of traditional Western representations of the Middle East was strongly tied to the emergence in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries of a American mass market (and mass marketing), and the mass media, particularly film. Notions of oriental luxury, indulgence and decadence were used to try to entice the emerging middle class of industrialized America a new large population group with sudden disposable income but also deeply imbued with cultural norms of frugality to pamper themselves in "the manner of a pasha" by buying some commodity or other. Exotica, often associated with Middle Eastern themes, was used as an early form of advertising aimed at breaking down the resistance to spending on "frivolities" that had been deeply rooted in the dominant culture of the American public.
Similar ideas about the Arab and Islamic world essentially deployments of the images developed over centuries of European culture as described by Said and others became standard features of Hollywood movies beginning with the silent film era. As most famously exemplified by the Rudolph Valentino vehicle The Sheik (1921), the licentious, luxurious, cruel and savage but also sexually exciting - Arabs of the "orientalist" tradition were common tropes of early American films. They served as villains, as alluring but ultimately unacceptable sexual partners ("the sheik" of the film's name turns out to actually be an English lord, rehabilitating the female lead's apparent desire for him from deeply troubling to perfectly understandable), as comic relief, and as inhabitants of exotic locals for fantasy tales of the "Arabian Nights" tradition, or for spy films and thrillers. The exemplary work of Jack Shaheen, especially his invaluable compendium of American films featuring negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Interlink, 2001), demonstrates conclusively the scope and prevalence of these negative stereotypes in American films.
Against this backdrop, a series of political events inaugurated several definitive moments of transition as the American entertainment industry became the repository of a continuously developing set of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim representations between 1960 and September 11, 2001. The first clear-cut political consequence of the effect of these new hostile American representations of Arabs was the reaction to the Israeli military victory over several Arab states in 1967. It was greeted with enthusiasm, not to say rapture, by many in American society and by much of the US media. It was a turning point for the American Jewish community, which became largely enthralled with Israel and Zionism after the war and far less shy than it had previously been about expressing and pressing these sentiments in American society. It was also a watershed for Arab Americans, who were rudely awakened from a kind of collective slumber to begin to form their own sense of political self-consciousness and form their first national organizations. The war initiated a series of films that contained negative portrayals of Arabs and Muslims that were directly tied to contemporary political events, and depicted Arabs as the quintessential political and military enemy not only of Israel, but also of the West in general and the United States in particular.
However, the groundwork for this new representation of the Arab as not only a dangerous figure and a villain, but as a clearly defined anti-Western political enemy, was laid long before 1967, in Exodus (1960), an incredibly tendentious and propagandistic account of the founding of Israel in which, as Jack Shaheen has aptly noted, "the only good Arab is, literally, a dead Arab." The film was based on an even more outrageous novel by Leon Uris, and between the two of them, the film and novel versions of the founding of Israel and the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict defined the perceptions of an entire generation of Americans in a manner which cast the Arabs in the worst possible light and encouraged total identification with Israel and the Israelis. These perceptions helped shape the delighted response of many Americans to Israel's victory in 1967, which in turn prepared the ground for the next phase: the emergence of the Arab "oil sheik."
The oil embargo following the 1973 war was a national trauma in the United States, with a massive increase in oil prices and shortages around the country blamed on "the Arabs." This experience led directly to the emergence of a new stereotype that would become almost ubiquitous in American entertainments, especially comedies, throughout the 1970s the "oil sheik." Dirty, ignorant, rapacious, lustful, profligate, cruel and irrational, the oil sheik was, as many have noted, a slightly-warmed over version of the oldest of anti-Semitic calumnies the Jewish money lender transposed onto another group of Semites. This almost always involved a depiction of caricatured Semitic features instantly recognizable from European anti-Semitic traditions. The oil sheik became such a ubiquitous device of comedy, villainy and corruption in 1970s American popular culture that, at the end of the decade, when the FBI wanted to test the willingness of some members of Congress to accept bribes in the notorious ABSCAM sting operation, they dressed Italian-American agents up as "oil sheiks" - one purporting to be from Lebanon, a country without any oil reserves whatsoever. When the then-head of the FBI William Webster was confronted with the question of why the Bureau would have posed Italian-American agents as Arabs, he replied that there was a need to approach the Congressmen in question in the guise of someone who might be expected or easily believed to be capable of offering a bribe to a politician (although at that time there were no know cases in which Arabs had bribed members of Congress). This scandal was the proximate cause for the creation of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in 1980.
The oil sheik would soon be supplanted with a new, more ominous dominant stereotype of the Arab in the American entertainment industry the Arab-Muslim terrorist. The experiences of the United States with the Iranian Revolution and its strongly anti-American tone, above all the seizing of the US Embassy in Tehran and the holding of its staff as hostages for many months, combined with the bombing of the marine barracks and US Embassy in Beirut and the spate of hostage-taking incidents in Lebanon, helped give the Arab-Muslim terrorist a central place in the imagination of American audiences. A long series of films made by an Israeli company, Cannon Films (also known as Golan-Globus Productions), promoted this image in a series of highly successful low-budget movies that depicted heroic Americans (often with Israeli allies) battling crazed fundamentalist killers. Films such as Wanted Dead or Alive (1987), Iron Eagle (1986), Delta Force (1986) and many others did their best to promote the ugliest stereotypes of the cruel but cowardly Arab terrorist as the essential and fundamental enemy of the West and Israel specifically, and decency and humanity in general. In the main, these films were characterized also by a distinctly low-budget, low-brow quality that partially helped to offset their defamatory content.
It is worth noting that, by this stage, Arabs were now being subjected to revivified versions of the two favorite anti-Jewish stereotypes employed by traditional anti-Semites: the rapacious Jewish banker and the wild-eyed, bomb throwing Jewish revolutionary. These calumnies found their contemporary Arab parallels in the oil sheikh which, as noted above, is the updated version of the Jewish moneylender or banker, and in the figure of the insane Arab-Muslim terrorist, the contemporary version of the fanatical Jewish bomb-throwing revolutionary. Indeed, in the first quarter of the 20th-century in United States and some other Western countries, the words Jewish and terrorist (or Bolshevik and anarchist, for that matter) were virtually synonymous. It is, therefore, logical that these twin calumnies could so easily be shifted from one group of Semites to another, but it is also sadly ironic that some Israelis and Jewish Americans should be at the forefront of the propagation of what amount to crude anti-Semitic stereotypes.
The 1990s saw a mainstreaming of these images into higher budget, higher profile films, a process that culminated in the blockbuster True Lies (1994), a high-budget, high-profile vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. While True Lies clearly indicated the arrival of the Arab-demonizing action flick at the top of the Hollywood pyramid, the film retains the cartoon-like and preposterous qualities of its low-budget precursors. The same cannot be said of what is still the most recent development in the genre, The Siege (1998). Most of the earlier action films featuring crazed Arab-Muslim terrorists, including True Lies, never asked to be taken seriously. The Siege contains the same defamatory images, but presented itself as "realistic," serious and responsible. The Siege aims at maximum verisimilitude and does its best to seamlessly weave its own fictional world with that of television news. The plot unfolds as if nothing more than a logical extension of real events. Through these and other techniques, including the use of the images and voices of well-known journalists and commentators such as Daniel Schorr and Arianna Huffington opining on the fictional events depicted, playing themselves so to speak, the film makers did their best to blur the boundaries between actual events and their fictional movie.
While there were a few notable exceptions The 13th Warrior (1999), which featured an Arab Muslim hero, and Three Kings (1999), which dealt with the first Gulf War in a manner sympathetic to the Iraqis in general virtually all depictions of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films (and US television as well) in the 20th Century were in some manner negative. Neutral or positive characters were few and far between, almost unnoticeable among the multitudes of crazed bombers and oil sheiks. For many years, Arab-American and American Muslim organizations had been warning film producers and TV companies that this pattern of negative representation of Arabs and Muslims, especially the stereotype of the crazed Muslim terrorist, and the virtual absence of neutral or positive depictions, could, under the wrong circumstances, contribute to a wave of hate crimes and discrimination. I was personally involved in many such meetings with entertainment industry officials in the years leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks. My sense is that the entertainment industry in general never took these warnings seriously, yet the backlash of hate crimes, discrimination and civil liberties abuses in the months after the terrorist attacks indicated the extent to which our concerns were well-founded.
The link between the backlash and the representation of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood movies can be demonstrated in many ways, but most obviously because of the fact that in some of the most tragic instances, the violence was directed not against Arab or Muslim Americans, but against Sikh men, who traditionally wear beards and turbans. The fact that Sikhs were a common target of some of the worst violence that was intended against persons of Arab origin suggests a strong link between hate crimes and popular culture. No one with even a passing familiarity with the peoples of Asia would confuse a traditionally-dressed Sikh man with a typical Middle Eastern Arab, but those informed by Hollywood stereotypes certainly might. The bearded, turbaned Islamic terrorists of countless films from the 1980s and 1990s bear far more resemblance to Sikhs than to Arabs, and South Asian actors have frequently been cast as Arab terrorist villains in Hollywood films, such as the Pakistani actor Art Malik cast as the Arab terrorist villain "Salim Abu Aziz" in True Lies many actual Arabs perhaps not being sufficiently dark-skinned or "non-European" looking enough to convey the crude racial messages consciously or unconsciously intended by producers.
