Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People [Paperback]

Young Americans in film and communications courses need to face up to some pretty disturbing facts about how Hollywood has gotten away with defaming a people. The motion picture industry has made huge amounts of money by destroying the good name of nearly 300 million innocent men and women of the Arab world.

As Shaheen's REEL BAD ARABS documents the shameful vilification of an entire people, tests for college students should include questions like these:

1. How do you think Americans form their ideas about what is taking place in the Middle East?

2. How effective do you think movies are in shaping the way Americans think about the Arabs, especially Palestinians, and about the "peace process" in the region?

3. Do such perceptions impact public opinion and policy?

4. What movies can you name that presented Arabs in anything but a bad light as terrorists, oil monopolists, lechers and other villains?

5. How effective do you think movies are in manipulating the way we Americans see 'The Other,' namely Arabs, as The Enemy?

Besides the psychological and political side of his subject, Jack Shaheen has provided us with a wonderful guide to nearly 1,000 films. In spite of the bias this book lays out all too clearly, it nevertheless is guaranteed to provide much pleasure for the reader at the same time as it opens her eyes to the facts.

REEL BAD ARABS should be in every library in America and abroad, as well as on film-studio reference shelves to prick the conscience of every film producer and director and script-writer from Hollywood to Haifa.

While not a goal of the author, the book is a history of Hollywood and the development of American political positions on the Middle East. Shaheen identifies Exodus as the most effective movie in shaping American perceptions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Hardly a balanced film, this Palestinian bashing movie and others that were filmed in Israel and/or produced by Israelis in cooperation with the Israeli government, illustrate how negative Arab mages impact our attitudes about Arab Muslims, Palestinians in particular, regardless of fact. If only Hollywood stopped there, but it didn't. like a runaway train, the defamation continues.

Shaheen's telling observations are supported by evidence: for more than a century, ever since camras started cranking, about one thousand Hollywood movies have dehumanized the Arab people. As the reviews indicate, Arab diversity is ignored, countries are misnamed or simply made up, and the language ill spoken. Shaheen actually includes a list of epithets used to describe or denounce Arab peoples.

Anyone interested in the cinema, injustice, in sociology and political science will find this book enormously useful. I loved it and recommend it without reservation. Let the evidence speak for itself and damn Hollywood!

-Philip Kayal Seton Hall University

The more we segregate through negative, subliminal messages about the color of our skin or the language we speak or the religion we practice, then the more we build walls between people that have more in common than they have different.

Shaheen's book should be a call to action for media moguls to change their mode of operations. Fine, depict arabs as villians, but also depict them as heroes....heroes fighting fires, hereos saving lives in an ER, heroes coaching a bunch of high school kids to a championship football game, heroes as police officers...or as senators, congressmen and cabinet members. All these types of heroes exist as Arab-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Irish-Catholic Americans, Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, etc.. Not all Italian-Americans are mafia killers -- right? Not all Catholic priests are bad...the overwhelming majority are hard-working practicing Christians.

Seems ludicrous that these point shave to be made, but the reel bad ememies are those that generalize and throw a hate blanket over the masses. Read this book not only if you're an Arab, but also if you're looking to fight bigotry in general. You will gain confidence that there are a lot of examples to support your cause...a common cause.