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!

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.

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, 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.

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 in season four

as a Muslim terrorist who

is also a wife and mother!

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.

In the wake of the September 11th attacks

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.

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.