Apartheid

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of Arabs that are essentially the same as the racist images of Jews promoted by the Nazi
German film industry. The similarities do in fact seem to outnumber the differences by far.
The most important difference, it should be mentioned, is that there are in fact a few
exceptions to Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda (still) coming out of Hollywood, but at
the time of writing there are hardly any. In Nazi Germany, however, there were of course no
exceptions to anti-Jewish propaganda in the rigidly state-controlled national and local mass
media. 656 Jews, on the other hand, have due to Hollywood become the film victims of racism
par excellence. I am not saying that the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere did not
contain some of the worst manifestations of racism in history. They did. But the American
filmmakers have since almost made genocide, in the popular mind, synonymous with
Auschwitz, thus also sweeping under the carpet the white-led genocides in the Western
Hemisphere and others, as well as the ideologically very inconvenient fact that wealth and
power of the western Europeans and North Americans today depend on gains made from
those conquests, genocides, and the unparalleled theft and exploitation that came with them.
And the idea of an incompatibility between Judaism and Islam, or between Jews and Arabs, is
further fueled by European repression of European anti-Semitism through history. ‘They’ are
the extremes, whereas ‘we’ – the Europeans, the Christians – are in-between, calm, and peaceloving.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The crusades as well as the Christian Roman
Empire, for instance, reveal this attitude to be an upside-down account of intercultural
relations historically.
Out of hundreds of movies since 1980, Jack Shaheen, the Arab-American film critic
and author of ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’, and ‘The TV Arab’, found
only 12 that contained positive portrayals of Arab people. Dating back to 1914, but especially
since the end of the Cold War, Hollywood has presented Arabs as ‘quintessential evil’. For
instance, the 2000 Paramount release, ‘Rules of Engagement’, shows Arab children and
women firing at and killing heroic US elite soldiers by deviously using firearms hidden under
their clothes during a stone-throwing demonstration outside the US Embassy in Sana’a,
Yemen. To the best of my knowledge, it is the only work of fiction that effectively manages to
accuse women and children – facing armed, foreign, elite soldiers employed by the world’s
sole military superpower – of cowardice! That film and 13 others that show Americans killing
Arabs (including women and children) credit the US Defense Department for providing
equipment, personnel and technical assistance. The prevalent anti-Arab racism in the US,
however, must also partly be blamed on the strong effects of an older, eurocentric tradition of
Orientalism, as Edward Said has shown.
The American literary critic, Greta D. Little, has identified five stereotypes that have
persisted during the last two-and-a-half centuries of western literature on Arabs for adults and
children: 1.) Arabs are dirty and lazy. 2.) Arabs are ignorant, superstitious and silly. 3.) Arabs
are irrational, cruel, and violent. 4.) Arabs mistreat women. 5.) Arabs hate Christians and
engage in the slave trade (nowadays: in hostage-taking). Of course, there are exceptions, but,
again, not many, and not prominent. Moreover, Arabs are portrayed in centuries of western
literature as needing western guidance and western values. One of the worst examples of this
kind of racism is the book, ‘The Arab Mind’, by Raphael Patai, which was published in 1976.
The book was being used as late as 2003 by the US military to brainwash its own soldiers in
preparation for invading Iraq and for the ensuing US military occupation of that country. Its
long chapter on the purported Arab sexual taboo ridden with shame and repression is
supposed to have shaped US military torture techniques during that occupation, as
exemplified in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison murders and extreme humiliation of
indigenous suspects by illegal US occupation personnel. 657
656 Sardar: Orientalism, 1999: 95ff
657 Shalal-Esa: Writer Documents Hollywood’s Vilification of Arabs, 2001. See also Shaheen: “Rules of
Engagement”: A Highwater Mark in Hollywood Hate Mongering with U.S. Military “Cooperation”, 2000: 15f,