Ben Shapiro, prominent pro-Israel blogger and co-founder of the far-right news site The Daily Wire, claims Hollywood has spent the last three decades refusing to tell the story of “the threat of radical Islam”. As an American Muslim woman, an avid movie-goer, and a human with eyes, I must say that statement’s pretty delusional – even for a known bigot like Shapiro, who once declared, “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage.” While announcing the trailer for his Islamophobic new film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, Shapiro posted on X that “the threat of radical Islam is real” and that Hollywood has “refused to tell that story for three decades”. He described his film as the “biggest, most audacious, funniest and most kickass film” The Daily Wire has ever released.
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be audacious about making Muslims the bad guys; Hollywood has been doing that since before I was born. In 2003, American writer and educator Jack Shaheen published Reel Bad Arabs based on his review of more than 900 films featuring Arab characters. He found that Hollywood routinely blurred Arab and Muslim identities and overwhelmingly portrayed them as violent, barbaric, greedy, sexually threatening, or otherwise dangerous.
And you don’t have to take Shaheen’s word for it. Just take a look at a few of the movies. In True Lies (1994), Arab terrorists plot to detonate a nuclear weapon in the United States.
Executive Decision (1996) features Muslim terrorists hijacking a plane and associates Islamic prayer and Quranic imagery with terrorism. The Siege (1998) envisions terrorist attacks in New York that lead to the arrests of Arab Americans. Rules of Engagement (2000) portrays US Marines killing Yemeni civilians, then proceeds to justify it.
I distinctly remember the horrific surge in anti-Muslim threats and comments on social media when American Sniper, a film that dehumanises and demonises the Iraqi people, came out in 2015. Television shows didn’t exactly take a different approach. Shows such as 24 and Homeland built major storylines around Muslim terrorists, sleeper cells, and the possibility that Muslim communities were sheltering extremists.
At times, Hollywood did give us slightly improved versions of the same story: The “good” Arab or Muslim character who helps the Americans fight the “bad” Muslims. For example, in the 2007 action thriller The Kingdom, a Saudi police officer partners with American agents to help them investigate and fight off terrorists. While it is a little better than every Arab or Muslim character being a terrorist, it still leaves us with limited options: We are either the bad guys or the exception who sees the error in our people’s barbaric ways.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
