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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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.

Whoa! Even Back to the Future? 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 the

Crusades. But we can try to make sure history

doesn’t keep repeating itself.

Okay, 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).

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…”Arab”?

While Hollywood historically has sometimes given

“good Arab” roles to non-Arab actors, it has also

sometimes 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 the world’s worst Catch 22! For

example, take “Mr. Habib,” the scheming Middle-

Eastern villain in Father of the Bride Part 2 who

is played by Eugene Levy.

Those aren’t even real words he says to his wife!

It’s just vaguely Middle-Eastern sounding

gibberish! [PAUSE-RESET] 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 Homeland producers wanted it to!

As insidious as it is to flatten entire cultures

and populations into The Land of Squiggly Writing,

there is 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. 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 are 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 that? You can be white, black,

brown and still be Arab. But not all people from

the Middle East are Arab and vice versa -- like,

oh 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. [SHIFT] If you’ve been

paying attention thus far, then 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

familiar with: 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 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!

Sikhism and Islam are two completely different

religions! The fact that Sikhs are so often the

targets of anti-Muslim hate crimes makes it crystal

clear that Islamophobia is all about race. The only

reason some Sikhs--those with brown skin--are

sometimes the targets of Islamophobic violence is

that they are also perceived as Middle-Eastern, and

Middle-Eastern is perceived as Muslim, and Muslim

is perceived as scary!

Whew! Thanks, Jack Bauer, what would we do without

you 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 even the absolute bare minimum of effort or

research when representing the Middle East.

Modern films, TV shows and games definitely

perpetuate Islamophobia, but it’s no exaggeration

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 by 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, [SAD] 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. [SARCASM] It’s *almost as if* we don’t know how

to contend with women as real people.

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, with

its different cultural mores, don’t allow for the

same kind of easy objectification of these brown

women’s bodies -- and so we resist including them

at all.

And when Arab or Muslim women do appear, they’re

either offered as mysterious, sexually wanton

creatures who offer temptations for white male

heroes -- think belly dancing seductresses if the

story is set in the past -- or niqab-clad secret

purveyors of violence, if the story is set in the

present.

At least we can thank 24 again for casting the

great Iranian actor Shohreh Aghdashloo show-RAY ag-

DASH-loo in season four as a Muslim terrorist who

is also a wife and mother! [PAUSE] But there are

artists, critics, and writers who are 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. Oh crap, I think we just missed a call

from Muslim comedian, Zahra Noorbakhsh … let’s see

if she left a message, cause I know she has

feelings about all this.

Oh crap, I think we missed a call, I wonder who it

could be. To the feminist answering machine.

There’s tremendous harm in centuries of images that

reduce entire nations, cultures and religions to

the status of subhuman savages. As Jack Shaheen,

the author of Reel Bad Arabs, has said,

In the wake of the September 11th attacks [PAUSE]

former “Worst President Ever” George W. Bush used

the term “axis of evil” to describe nations

including Iran and Iraq, in an effort to drum up

support for the “War on Terror”. And it worked.

More 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.

And again, it worked! 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. [SERIOUS] 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 or 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 Committee 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, fear-mongering

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!

Iraq, Syria, what’s the difference?! It was one of

those countries 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 everybody’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 millennia! It’s specifically because our media
perpetually equates Islam -- a religion followed by

nearly ¼ of the world’s population -- with evil,

terrorism, and oppression, that so many people

believe that’s what Islam actually is.

And make no mistake: Islamophobia is big business –

- and not just for Hollywood. Hundreds of millions

of dollars each year go into feeding what activist

Taz Ahmed calls “the fear industrial

complex that perpetuates racism.” Devious Russian

generals and Nazi scientists from the Cold War

won’t prop up our defense industry anymore, so we

needed some new bad guys. Come on it’s not like

we’re just going to stop making bombs, right?

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 U.S., 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.