Page - 195 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Kenneth Starck | Perpetuating Prejudice 195 research cited included film and the work of Jack Shaheen, to whom we now turn our attention. No one has studied more thoroughly or written with more passion about the negative depiction of Arabs in film than Jack Shaheen (2001). Of Arab descent, Shaheen is an American scholar who over a period of 20 years analyzed Arab portraits and themes in more than 900 films. These have been compiled in a 574-page book from A (Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion) to Z (actually Y, Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, also known as A Slow Descent Into Hell and Finishing Tough). There is pertinent data about each film, plus a summary and the author’s observations. What emerges is not a pretty picture. Over the years Arabs appear in a wide range of settings, nearly always disparagingly and seldom as normal human beings. Shaheen wrote: I am not saying an Arab should never be portrayed as the villain. What I am saying is that almost all Hollywood depictions of Arabs are bad ones. This is a grave injustice. Repetitious and negative images of the reel Arab literally sustain adverse portraits across generations. The fact is that for more than a century producers have tarred an entire group of people with the same sinister brush (p. 11). His evidence speaks volumes. There are the slurs – “rag-head”, “devil- worshiper”, “camel-dick”, “dune dumper”, “desert bandit”, and more. There are the characters – billionaires, bombers, and belly dancers, as he writes. In sum, the “reel” Arabs are not, after all, real Arabs. According to his analysis, five Arab character types emerged from the films he reviewed: - Villains – “Beginning with Imar the Servitor (1914), up to and including The Mummy Returns (2001), a synergy of images equates Arabs from Syria to the Sudan with quintessential evil” (p. 14). - Sheikhs – “The word ‘sheikh’ means, literally, a wise elderly person, the head of the family, but you would not know that from watching any of Hollywood’s `sheikh` features, more than 160 scenarios, including the Kinetoscope short Sheik Hadj Tahar Hadj Cherif (1894) and the Selig Company’s The Power of the Sultan (1907) – the first movie to be filmed in Los Angeles” (p. 19). - Maidens – “They (Arab women) appear as bosomy bellydancers leering out from diaphanous veils, or as disposable ‘knick-knacks,’ scantily-clad harem maidens with bare midriffs, closeted in the palace’s women’s quarters” (p. 22).