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Through the Mirrors of the Soul: Afghan Eyes
“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(via roosheena)
![mohandasgandhi:
fearandwar:
To anyone who doesn’t see how The Dictator is part of a long history of Hollywood slandering Arabs and Muslims, read this book. Until then, I really don’t give two shits about how “it’s just comedy, dude! Stop being so serious!”
One of the saddest things this book revealed to me was not just how bad the stereotypes. It’s the way even movies that have nothing at all to do with the Middle East or anything like that throw in Arab/Muslim (because in Hollywood, the two are always the same) as asides. For instance, Father of the Bride Part 2. It’s a movie about a father upset about his daughter’s pregnancy. Midway through, though, they throw in a horrible Arab/Persian stereotype of a dictatorial Middle Eastern male who is greedy, oppresses his wife, and screws over an honest white guy.
That’s how Hollywood works.
The Dictator is hardly alone in its racist portrayal of Arabs. Arabs are the new token villains in Hollywood films, similar to the way Russians were during the Cold War only, it’s a lot more racist.
And thus we have the Timeline of International Villainy. To create drama, especially in action and war movies, Hollywood needs bad guys, and in their time, the Japanese and Germans, and later the Koreans and Vietnamese, served that role. For a long while, commies were useful foils (with their taste for world domination, nukes and vodka), but with the end of the Cold War, the Soviets became the Russians, and the Russians only worked if they were gangsters, and Hollywood already had the Italians to do that job. Colombian drug traffickers were employed as handy replacements, but then coke just felt … dated. Transnational corporate evildoers are okay, if not that sexy. But there just has been something about those Arabs. They’ve got legs.
In an interview before the premiere, Shaheen says that the OPEC oil embargo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis all conspired to cast the Arab as film villain beginning in the 1970s. “We pray and we kill,” Shaheen says of the depiction. Like other stereotypes on film — of blacks, Jews, gays, Latinos, Native Americans — Arabs are now in the crosshairs.
“The Arab serves as the ultimate outsider, the other, who doesn’t pray to the same God, and who can be made to be less human,” says Shaheen, who argues that movies and TV shows do matter — that they shape public opinion at home and abroad. “Do you have any idea what it must be like to be a young person watching this stuff over in the Middle East?” he says. And if you ask Shaheen who even cares about an old Chuck Norris film, he answers, “Have you ever looked through a TV Guide? These movies are on television constantly. The images last forever. They never go away.” [Source]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4d7xeUYZS1qhwm08o1_400.jpg)
To anyone who doesn’t see how The Dictator is part of a long history of Hollywood slandering Arabs and Muslims, read this book. Until then, I really don’t give two shits about how “it’s just comedy, dude! Stop being so serious!”
One of the saddest things this book revealed to me was not just how bad the stereotypes. It’s the way even movies that have nothing at all to do with the Middle East or anything like that throw in Arab/Muslim (because in Hollywood, the two are always the same) as asides. For instance, Father of the Bride Part 2. It’s a movie about a father upset about his daughter’s pregnancy. Midway through, though, they throw in a horrible Arab/Persian stereotype of a dictatorial Middle Eastern male who is greedy, oppresses his wife, and screws over an honest white guy.
That’s how Hollywood works.
The Dictator is hardly alone in its racist portrayal of Arabs. Arabs are the new token villains in Hollywood films, similar to the way Russians were during the Cold War only, it’s a lot more racist.
And thus we have the Timeline of International Villainy. To create drama, especially in action and war movies, Hollywood needs bad guys, and in their time, the Japanese and Germans, and later the Koreans and Vietnamese, served that role. For a long while, commies were useful foils (with their taste for world domination, nukes and vodka), but with the end of the Cold War, the Soviets became the Russians, and the Russians only worked if they were gangsters, and Hollywood already had the Italians to do that job. Colombian drug traffickers were employed as handy replacements, but then coke just felt … dated. Transnational corporate evildoers are okay, if not that sexy. But there just has been something about those Arabs. They’ve got legs.
In an interview before the premiere, Shaheen says that the OPEC oil embargo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis all conspired to cast the Arab as film villain beginning in the 1970s. “We pray and we kill,” Shaheen says of the depiction. Like other stereotypes on film — of blacks, Jews, gays, Latinos, Native Americans — Arabs are now in the crosshairs.
“The Arab serves as the ultimate outsider, the other, who doesn’t pray to the same God, and who can be made to be less human,” says Shaheen, who argues that movies and TV shows do matter — that they shape public opinion at home and abroad. “Do you have any idea what it must be like to be a young person watching this stuff over in the Middle East?” he says. And if you ask Shaheen who even cares about an old Chuck Norris film, he answers, “Have you ever looked through a TV Guide? These movies are on television constantly. The images last forever. They never go away.” [Source]
(via syrianlady)
