Meme watch

The movies made them do it!

Joseph Wakim: "But long before the young soldiers were psyched up by Bush, the anti-Arab predisposition was already there. A steady diet of Hollywood films invariably cast the Arab as the quintessential villain. This generation of US soldiers would have been exposed to blockbusters such as Delta Force (1986), True Lies (1995), Executive Decision (1996), The Siege (1998) and Rules of Engagement (2000). In each conquest, the American heroes reduced the terrorist Arabs to incarceration or incineration. And in each conquest, Arabs were the villains because they were uncivilised and intrinsically evil."

Robert Fisk: "Add to that the poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood movies that depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and violent people -- and soldiers are addicted to movies -- and it's not difficult to see how some British scumbag will urinate into the face of a hooded man, how some American sadist will stand a hooded Iraqi on a box with wires tied to his hands. ...Indeed, we now depict Arabs in our films as the Nazis once depicted Jews."

Gwynne Dyer: "The American troops in Iraq are not cultural, political or historical experts. They are frightened and far from home, and a hundred Hollywood movies have taught them that Arabs are dirty, sly, cruel enemies of all that is good."

I have to admit, these movies didn't make Arabs look very good.

(Note: have these guys even seen The Siege, an earnestly liberal film in which the villains are American government officials who lock up all the Arab men after terror attacks? That's exactly the way our enlightened betters expected Americans to treat Muslims after 9/11 - and the way the NaziMedia crowd thinks America has treated Muslims after 9/11.)

Update: I haven't seen Executive Decision, but Roger Ebert (who liked it, in a "good bad movie" sort of way) noted the following in his 1996 review:

In the passenger section, Hassan comes across as a fanatic bent on destroying millions of lives. His fellow hijackers think the mission is to force the release of one of their leaders, but after the leader is released, Hassan reveals that his original demands were only a cover for his real plans. A moderate among his followers steps forward, shouts ``This has nothing to do with Islam!,'' and is shot. His function is to get the filmmakers off the hook: Hassan is a fanatic, see, and not to be taken as typical of his co-religionists. (It would have been easy to make the terrorists members of a non-sectarian movement, and I wish they had; what purpose does it serve to slander a religion?)

Posted by damian at May 12, 2004 07:26 AM