Reel Bad Arabs
October 22, 2007
Amy Goodman interviews Jack Shaheen, the author of Reel Bad Arabs, on Hollywood’s stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims. (The interview does not appear until a few minutes into the video)
The Fanonite
“…for the last forty years, our thought has been trapped in hollow structures of language, a stale, dead but immensely successful rhetoric. This has represented, in my view, a defeat of the intelligence and of the will.” — Harold Pinter
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October 23, 2007 at 8:42 am
thanks for this.
going to post something about it later.
his general point is correct but there is a factual error. in the film ‘network’ the bit with the people shouting out the window happens long BEFORE he makes the speech about the arabs buying america. doesn’t change his general point but it is worth mentioning.
October 23, 2007 at 1:24 pm
[...] check out Reel Bad Arabs at fanonite.org on a similar [...]
October 24, 2007 at 9:00 am
The correspondence between current Arab stereotypes and previous anti-semitic ones is less pronounced than that with US Cold War anti-Soviet propaganda.
If the words”Arab/muslim”strike fear and loathing into the American psyche now,it was “Russian/Soviet” in Cold War times.The Hearst and Luce press along with Disney propagandized for US attacks on China and the Soviet Union throughout this period.The attacks then envisaged were not the regime change/counter-terrorist ops of today but frontal military assaults with nuclear weapons.
The US public was softened up by corporate media,especially Hollywood,paranoia re-the communist world until use of the nuclear threat by Dulles,MacArthur,Kennedy,Kissinger and the like no longer raised eyebrows in the US even if it put the fear of God up her European NATO allies!
Shaheen’s snapshots of anti-Arab hysteria seem pretty much on a par with the paranoia of Cold War times.The reason we now see palaces with solid gold taps in the bathroom upstairs and Black and Decker
basements downstairs,along with Tag ‘em and bag ‘em waste-the-motherfuckers scenes of righteous slaughter is because the US is still engaged in the same war for world conquest they were on throughout the twentieth century.
Films are the most direct means US aggressor elites have at their disposal to enlist public support for the current bout of imperialist conquest.Arabs just happen to be the main obstacle to US expansionism right now.Goebbels has been the Defense Dept./Hollywood role-model par excellence.
9/11 was the home-produced movie they used to sell the War on Terror.Like Oklahoma City the atrocity bore not Arab fingerprints at all but all the hallmarks of the homegrown compulsion to fascist violence with which we are all numbingly familiar.
Shaheen’s take on this corporate media onslaught of dehumanization made no reference to the Cold War or the current state of militarism in the US.
When at the end of the DN interview he lamented that for all their intelligence and innate goodness Americans were still suckers for hateful dehumanizing propaganda I nearly threw up!
I look forward to Samuel Jackson and Tom Cruise’s next project:Waste the Motherfuckers in Yemen!
It’ll be a sell out!