The FREQ Show: 00.03 Manufacturing a Muslim Menace

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This is the third episode of Feminist Frequency’s new series, The FREQ Show! With The FREQ Show, we’re answering the question, “What do representations of race, gender and sexuality in pop culture have to do with our current social and political climate?”

In “Manufacturing a Muslim Menace,” we analyze the ways in which the ubiquitous, deeply harmful stereotypical representations of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists and savages in so much popular media contribute directly to Islamophobia in our culture. More than that, they cultivate a political space in which our president can ride Islamophobic sentiment straight into the Oval Office, and then pursue policies rooted in the very Islamophobia that Hollywood has done so much to cultivate.

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"Has the crowd dispersed now?"

"No, its still out there, but unarmed.

Just chanting. You know, standard

'Death to America' stuff."

From True Lies to American Sniper,

From 24 to

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare,

western media is full of images of

evil brown people who need to be wiped

from the earth by noble righteous white men,

heroically fighting for freedom and justice.

And sure, it's so commonplace by this point

that maybe you don't even bat an eye at

old-fashioned American Islamophobia

in our media.

"[laughter]

[characters speaking in Arabic]

[protestors chanting in Arabic]

"This is a hijack!"

[passengers screaming]

"Sit down! Sit down!"

"Nobody move! Nobody!"

"All right!"

"Engage hostile targets as they appear!"

"Waste the motherfuckers!"

"You have killed our women and our children.

"Bombed our cities from afar...

"like cowards...and you dare

"to call us 'terrorists"?!"

"Here, my desert blossom.

"Keep the change!

"Have you ever considered joining a harem?"

"Oh my God. They found me.

"I don't know how, but they found me."

"Nooooooo!"

What?! Back to the Future!!

Even that beloved comedy classic

takes a moment to toss in a few scary brown men

to menace and terrorize our white heroes.

Unfortunately, we can't hop in

Doc Brown's DeLorean

and undo all the harmful representations of

Muslims, Arabs, and Middle Easterners

that have haunted our stories since,

well, basically since the Crusades.

But we can make sure that history

doesn't keep repeating itself.

Ok, ok. Maybe that's not entirely fair.

In some ways, things have changed.

Once upon a time,

non-white actors could hardly

get any work in Hollywood at all.

These days, shows like

Homeland and movies like

Executive Decision are providing some brown

actors with ample opportunity to portray

scary terrorists who get gunned down

while screaming something absurd like

"Death to America!"

It doesn't even matter if you're not actually

of Middle Eastern descent.

If you're vaguely brown, you can stick around

(to play bad guys).

"Oh, are you an artist, Mr. Thurkettle?"

"No, uh, sir. I work for a little company

"called Texan Oil."

"Well, there is no oil here, Mr Thurkettle."

"Just sand."

Now sure, not every Middle Eastern character

in films is a villain.

In the 1921 box-office smash,

The Sheik,

the dashing hero gets the girl in the end.

But the Arab world of the film is presented as

exotic and dangerous,

and the sheik himself,

the one, good, heroic Arab,

is played by Italian-American heartthrob

Rudolph Valentino.

You see, since he's not really Arab,

he's allowed to get the girl in the end.

If you think this kind of racist coding

to signify the difference between

"good" Arabs and "bad" Arabs went away with the

advent of talkies, think again.

Have you ever noticed how in Disney's Aladdin,

the good guy might as well be

a tanned American surfer dude,

but the bad guys look and sound a little more...

uh, Arab?

"You are late."

"A thousand apologies, oh patient one."

"You have it then?"

"I had to slit a few throats,

but I got it."

While Hollywood has historically given

"good" Arab roles to non-Arab actors,

it has also given not-so-good Arab

and South Asian roles to white actors, too --

denying brown people work and decent

on-screen representation in one fell swoop.

It's basically the world's worst Catch-22.

For example, take Mr. Habib,

the scheming Middle Eastern villain in

Father of the Bride 2,

who's played by Eugene Levy.

"The Habibs would like to buy the house, George."

"It's exactly what they've been looking for!"

"We've lived here for 18 years."

"I don't know if we can get everything--"

[gibberish]

Those aren't even real words

he's saying to his wife!

It's just vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding gibberish

And the written equivalent of this is

very common as well.

Video games and tv shows

constantly just toss up some squiggly text

and try to pass it off as actual Arabic.

Well, this one is Arabic,

but it sure doesn't say what the

producers of Homeland wanted it to!

As insidious as it is to flatten

entire cultures and populations into

The Land of Squiggly Writing,

there's nothing so pervasive and damaging

as Hollywood's tendency to constantly portray

vaguely-Middle Eastern people

as generic terrorists.

It's so common that, on-screen,

brown skin has practically become synonymous

with bad guys who have little or no

character development beyond

hating America and freedom fries.

[screaming]

"Allahu Akbar!"

Ah! Thanks, Jack Bauer!

What would we do without you?

One of the biggest problems with this

is that it erases the actual lives and cultures

of Middle Eastern people and leads

many Western viewers to lump all of them

into the same group.

So let's start by clarifying a few terms

whose meaning has been obscured by

media that paints the entire Middle East

with the same broad, shallow, ignorant brush.

First of all, we've done a lot of research,

on this, and as it turns out

words actually have meanings.

Weird, right?

You can't just lump Arabs and Muslims together

because they're not the same thing!

Arabs are a specific ethnic group,

united by culture and language,

and who primarily originate from

Middle Eastern countries.

Arab is not, repeat not, a racial category.

Got it?

You can be white, black, brown

and still be Arab.

But not all people from the Middle East are Arab,

and vice versa.

Like, say, ethnic Persians in Iran.

A "Muslim" is someone who practices Islam,

a religion with over 1.7 billion members

spanning a vast number of ethnic

and cultural identities.

The Muslim world actually comprises a multitude

of groups that folks often forget, including

Iranians, South Asians, North Africans,

Indonesians, black Americans...

Islam is not confined to the Middle East,

to olive-skinned people,

or just people who speak Arabic.

But despite the fact that Islam is a religion,

not a race,

it's vital for us to understand that

Islamophobia is racism.

If you've been paying attention thus far,

you might be asking yourself,

if Islam isn't a race,

then how can Islamophobia be racism?

The answer lies in another "ism,"

one many Westerners aren't

particularly familar with: that's Orientalism.

In short, the term "Orientalism" refers to how,

for hundreds of years,

Western artistic and academic history

has perpetuated an ignorant and prejudiced

view of "the East."

A view rooted in the idea of Western culture as

inherently more advanced and enlightened,

and Eastern culture as more inherently more ignorant,

irrational, primitive, and often,

highly-sexualized.

Again, Muslims come from many different races,

and span a myriad of cultural identities.

In fact, the former president

of the Islamic Society of North America

is a white woman, Dr. Ingrid Mattson;

but let's be real:

nobody who spreads the hate of Islam

is talking about white ladies.

Western media has contributed to a level

of ignorance so great, that for many

people, it has resulted in

equating Islam with scary brown people,

particularly scary brown men

from the Middle East.

It's been so effective,

that most of you probably didn't even know

that this man isn't Muslim -- he's Sikh!

It isn't just film and television that

perpetuates this kind of ignorance.

Here's comedian Kumail Nanjiani

on how video games often don't put in the

absolute bare minimum of effort or research

when representing the Middle East --

or South Asia for that matter--

which is not the same thing as

the Middle East!

"Ok, so the language we speak in Pakistan

"is Urdu.

"That's the name of the language we speak: Urdu.

"But all the street signs in Karachi in

"Call of Duty are in Arabic...

"yeah, it's a completely different language.

"And I know it does not seem like a big deal,

"but this game took three years to make.

"If you look at it, the graphics are perfect.

"You can see individual hairs on people's heads;

"when they run, they sweat.

"When they run, their shoelaces bounce!

"All they had to do was Google:

"Pakistan language."

"They were literally like,

'What language do they speak in Pakistan?'

'I don't care.

"I can't get his sideburns even."

Modern films, tv shows, and games

definitely perpetuate Islamophobia,

but it's no exxageration to say that

ignorant representations of people

from the Middle East in Western media

date back for centuries.

Orientalist paintings of the 1800s

were often characterized by

overly-sexualized depictions of daily life.

And romantic Orientalist literature

of the late 1700s and early 1800s

served to justify European imperialism,

presenting Middle Eastern people and cultures

as inherently exotic and strange.

So there's a conflation of Arab with Muslim,

and because our ideas about Islam are so deeply

linked to stereotypes about terrorism and violence,

both of those categories are associated with masculinity

and men.

While many male Muslim actors in Hollywood

can only find work playing bit parts as evil terrorists,

Muslim women are often erased altogether.

The very real advances that Arab women have made

in many parts of the world are ignored,

because depicting them would complicate

the simplistic racist narrative about Arabs and Muslims

that Hollywood continues trying to cash in on.

It's almost as if we don't know how to contend with women

as real people!

"Say what?!!!"

Filmmakers and tv producers know how to

objectify women,

how to prize them for their physical attributes,

and their appearance.

The stories we allow ourselves to tell about the Middle East

dont allow for the same kind of easy objectification

of these brown women's bodies,

and so we resist including them at all.

"Mom!"

At least we can thank 24 again for casting the great

Iranian actor, Shohreh Aghdashloo in season 4

as a Muslim terrorist who is also a wife and mother!

But there are artists, critics, and writers out there

speaking about what it means to be the target

of all this anti-brown racism;

and a lot of the most interesting critiques

are coming from Muslim women themselves.

[Phone rings]

Crap! I think I missed a call.

I wonder if they left a message?

Feminist Answering Machine!

What's up, Anita???!

It's your favorite feminist Muslim Iranian-American

comedian calling!

I was just thinking...

how come, in all the like, terroristy movies,

you know the ones where brown people are in,

why are we always, like, late?

To all of our, like, terroristy adventures.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Like, they always have these brown dudes yelling,

"Yalla! Yalla! Yalla!"

"Yalla" just means "hurry up."

It's like a thing you say when you want

somebody to hurry up.

"Yalla, let's go."

"Yalla, kids! Hop in the car so we could go to school!"

And get in on some wicked adventures

against Claire Danes and Homeland.

What is the deal with that?

Yo, seriously!

What is up with that?

"Yalla" in my house just meant

"hurry up because dinner's getting cold."

There's tremendous harm in centuries of images

that reduce entire nations, cultures, and religions

to the status of sub-human savages.

As Jack Shaheen, the author of

Reel Bad Arabs has said,

"Politics and Hollywood's images are linked.

They reinforce one another.

Policy enforces mythical images;

mythical images help enforce policy.

"We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones;

and unite the civilized world against

radical Islamic terrorism."

Recently, during the 2016 presidential campaign,

Republican candidates tossed around the phrase

"radical Islamic terrorism" as if it were

some kind of magic spell they could use to

make votes appear out of thin air.

"Radical Islamic terrorism."

"Radical Islamic terrorism."

"Radical Islamic terrorism."

"Radical Islamic terrorism."

"Radical Islamic terrorism."

"Radical Islamic terrorism."

"President Obama, if you won't say it,

I will: radical Islam."

The only reason tactics like these have any effect

is that, to so many Americans,

people in the Middle East have never been established

as human beings with real lives, hopes,

dreams and struggles.

When almost every story you've ever seen about

a particular part of the world paints the people who live there

as monolithic, evil, and scary,

you're a lot more likely to believe that it's actually true.

When people believe it's true,

they aren't just more likely to support politicians

and policies that appeal to fear and ignorance

about the Middle East.

They're also more likely to act on that

fear and ignorance themselves.

The Southern Poverty Law Center notes that

the number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled

in the United States in 2016.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Commitee noted

the same increase after the release of patriotic fever dream,

American Sniper.

2016 also saw a 67% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes,

and there's no question that Trump's racist,

fearmongering rhetoric has played a part in this

surge of xenophobia and violence.

Of course, Trump doesn't stop

with rhetoric himself.

Within the first 100 days of his presidency,

he has repeatedly tried to push through bans

preventing the citizens of several

Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States.

He dropped the US military's most powerful

non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan,

and he fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at,

I don't know, SOME

Middle Eastern country...while eating the most beautiful

piece of chocolate cake.

"I was sitting at the table,

we had finished dinner and we're now having dessert

and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake

that you've ever seen...and we've just launched

59 missiles heading to Iraq.

"...Headed to Syria."

"Yes, heading toward Syria."

[waaaaah-waaaah sound]

Iraq, Syria: what's the difference?`

It was just one of those countries

that the evil, scary brown people live in.

Now I can already hear the army of

Richard Dawkins-parroting anti-feminist twitter users

typing up their responses about how Islam is a religion

dedicated to oppressing women.

It's amazing how suddenly everyone's a feminist

when it lets them perpetuate hate against brown people

or dismiss concerns about how women are oppressed

in their own culture.

So let's be clear:

misogyny is not a problem with Islam.

Misogyny is a problem that some cultures,

which happen to be Muslim, use the religion to

perpetuate and justify.

Christianity has been used as a tool to oppress

women around the world for millenia.

It's specifically because our media perpetually

equates Islam, a religion followed by nearly a quarter

of the world's population,

with evil, terrorism, and oppression

that so many people believe that that's what Islam

actually is.

Our entertainment media's insistence

on constantly portraying people from the Middle East

as scheming oil sheiks, slavers, snake charmers,

and suicide bombers but never as real people

has real consequences.

Muslims here in the US and everyone who is,

or looks like they could be Middle Eastern

constantly face ignorance and racism.

They live in fear of the very real possibility of being

accosted or attacked because someone

takes a look at them and associates them

with everything they've seen in the movies

and everything the president has said about

people from the Middle East.

What we need now are more stories

that dispel the deeply harmful stereotypes

and encourage us to see people from

the Middle East --

whether they're Arab, or Muslim, or neither or both

as what they really are: human beings.