MEDIA FEATURE JULY 2-9, 2012 ISSUE

How the Media Created the

Muslim Monster Myth
From Arab bandits to TV terrorists, the history of Islamophobia
in US popular culture is long and ugly.
By Jack Shaheen

JUNE 14, 2012

You can hit an Arab free; they’re free enemies, free villains—
where you couldn’t do it to a Jew or you can’t do it to a black
anymore.
—Sam Keen, author of Faces of the
Enemy

In 1918 American movie audiences were treated to their

first major silver-screen glimpse of a reel bad Arab. In
Tarzan of the Apes, the first of six popular Tarzan films to
vilify Arabs, viewers got to see brutal Arab slave masters
whipping African slaves and forcing their kidnapped
Englishman “to endure ten years of agony,” all the while
brandishing guns and scruffy goatees. It was quite a debut.

Three years later, with the release of Rudolph Valentino’s

box-office hit The Sheik (1921), audiences got their second
sustained peek at big-screen Arabs. Still brutal and erratic,
these Arabs had the added awfulness of being lecherous
and rapacious. “When an Arab sees a woman he wants, he
takes her,” promised the titillating blurb on The Sheik’s
movie posters.

For four decades I have been tracking these kinds of

images of Arabs and Muslims in more than 1,200 feature
films and hundreds of television programs, from dramas
and news documentaries to comedies and children’s
cartoons. Along the way, I’ve discovered that anti-Arab and
anti-Muslim stereotypes have a long and powerful history
in American popular culture. Constantly repeated, these
damaging portraits have manipulated viewers’ thoughts
and feelings, conditioning them to ratchet up the forces of
rage and unreason. Make no mistake: fictional narratives
have the capacity to alter reality. As the Florentine
philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli reminds us, “The great
majority of mankind are…more influenced by the things
that seem than by those that are.”

American images of Arabs and Muslims have remained

remarkably consistent over the decades. Despite the
diversity of Arab and Muslim experience, reel Arab women
have appeared mostly mute and submissive—belly dancers,
bundles in black and beasts of burden. Arab men have
fared no better, appearing as Bedouin bandits, sinister
sheiks, comic buffoons and weapon-wielding terrorists. As
a result, when readers open the pages of Holy Terror, the
2011 graphic novel by comic book icon Frank Miller, the
warped messages they receive about bloodthirsty Muslims
read almost like companion drawings for John Buchan’s
1916 novel Greenmantle. (Sample Buchan line: “Islam is a
fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit
with the Quran in one hand and a drawn sword in the
other.”) And my late friend Edward Said’s 1980 Nation essay
“Islam Through Western Eyes” feels as relevant today as it
did thirty years ago. “So far as the United States seems to
be concerned,” he wrote, “it is only a slight overstatement
to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as
either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of…
the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has
entered the awareness of even those people whose
profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have
instead [are] crude…caricatures of the Islamic world
presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable
to military aggression.”

And yet, despite the consistency of these representations,

the last decade has brought profound and critically
important changes in the ways Muslims and Arabs are
portrayed in the United States. The catalyzing event was
September 11, when nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists killed
nearly 3,000 Americans. It was an attack designed, cruelly
and perversely, to inflict maximum cinematic as well as
real-life horror, and in its traumatized aftermath, the shape
of American fantasies began to shift. Added to the Arab
threat was the Muslim threat, and as this new threat
materialized, it also intensified. While anti-Arab and anti-
Muslim imagery had long been part of the background
noise of American bigotry, Arabs and Muslims now became
the chief bogeys of our most paranoid fantasies. They were
no longer simply some Evil Other From Over There; now
they were the Evil Other From Over There and Here, wild-
eyed supervillains in the ongoing American epic of good
and evil.

To put a sharper point on it: in a 1977 60 Minutes special

titled “The Arabs Are Coming,” Morley Safer warned that
Arabs were “invading” by buying up US businesses and
farmland; in 1990 The National Review sounded a similar
alarm in a cover story titled “The Muslims Are Coming!
The Muslims Are Coming!” accompanied by the requisite
picture of marauding men on camels. Today’s media-
makers, by contrast, have dispensed with the future tense
altogether, as well as anything as nonthreatening or absurd
as camels. Instead, they drape their Muslims in shredded
American flags and shriek, The Muslims have arrived and are
about to destroy us! Or, as Newsweek blared from the
newsstands in June 2003, “Al Qaeda in America: How the
Terrorists Are Recruiting—and Plotting—Here.”

This change happened overnight, or so it seemed, as

scores of programs began displaying Muslim Americans
and Americans with Arab roots as “terrorists,” falling into
the stale trap of “seen one, seen ‘em all.” These “terrorists”
waged holy wars against their fellow Americans from
sleeper cells in Los Angeles and mosques in Washington.
Series such as 24, The Unit, The Agency, NCIS, Sleeper Cell,
Threat Matrix and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye exploited post-9/11
fears, pummeling home myths that made the profiling,
imprisonment, extradition, torture and even death of these
one-dimensional characters more palatable to the public.
Producers made few, if any, distinctions between American
Arabs and Arabs, between American Muslims and Muslims,
as if it were impossible to be truly American and Arab or
Muslim.

This kind of viral paranoia has a long and sordid history in

this country, as Richard Hofstadter persuasively argued in
his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”
Fueled by the “animosities and passions of a small
minority,” the paranoid style has helped to stir many of our
most virulent “scares”: from the anti-Masonic and anti-
Catholic movements of the nineteenth century to the
more recent “Yellow Peril” and “Red Menace.” And now, of
course, there’s the “Green Menace” (green being the color
of Islam) with its high-pitched paranoia about 1.6 billion
Muslims that serves not only to prime American audiences
for military aggression—as Said suggested in his Nation
essay—but make hefty sums of money for the media
industry.

At the forefront of this effort is a series of well-funded,

politically motivated campaigns dedicated to painting
Islam as an inherently violent and savage religion. These
campaigns are the work of a small group of wealthy
donors, misinformation specialists like Rush Limbaugh
and Glenn Beck, and groups of interconnected anti-Islam
organizations: Steven Emerson’s Investigative Project on
Terrorism, Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum and so forth.
Together they pound home the myth that mainstream
Muslims have “terrorist” ties, that Islam is the new global
ideological menace and that Muslims are intent on
destroying Western civilization. Then they spread their
message far and wide.

Consider Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West

(2005), the first film made by the Clarion Fund, a pro-
Israel nonprofit organization. Steeped in hatred, the film
uses propaganda to convince the masses—including law
enforcement officials, military personnel and public
servants at every level—of its righteousness by
systematically dehumanizing Muslims as the evil, alien
“other.” The film’s frighteningly Islamophobic message also
draws parallels between Islam and Nazism. Shockingly, the
fund persuaded major newspapers to distribute some 28
million DVD copies to their readers, free of charge, which
were inserted in more than seventy papers—
predominantly in swing states—before the 2008
presidential election. Only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a
handful of other newspapers refused to distribute the
DVD. (More recently, the Clarion Fund released The Third
Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, which was screened
before nearly 1,500 New York City police officers, and
Iranium, which warns of an Islamic nuclear threat.)

In an environment in which 62 percent of Americans have

never met a Muslim, these representations matter. After
all, the media mediate. Is it any wonder, then, that nearly
half of us (49 percent) say the values of Islam are at odds
with “American values”? Or that 45 percent of Americans
say they would be uncomfortable with a mosque being
built near their home? Left unchallenged, the continuous
barrage of reel Islamophobic imagery makes it difficult for
some Americans to accept real Muslims into our society—a
situation that was painfully illustrated by the protests
surrounding the reality TV show All-American Muslim.

In considering how to begin removing the sting of

Islamophobia from the media, let’s return for a moment to
Sam Keen’s stunning statement: “You can hit an Arab free;
they’re free enemies, free villains—where you couldn’t do it
to a Jew or you can’t do it to a black anymore.” This was
true in 1986, when Keen made the observation to the
Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and it is all the more
true today.

To some, dispensing with this stereotype may seem an

impossible task. Yet openness to change is an American
tradition and the strength of our society. The path ahead
may be littered with ingrained, prejudicial precedents, but
I believe these baleful portraits will be shattered, one
image at a time. Young scholars and artists will lead the
way, creating inventive new portraits that depict Arabs and
Muslims as neither saints nor devils but as fellow human
beings, with all the strengths and frailties that condition
 implies. Bold leaders and audiences of conscience will
make it more costly, morally and politically, for the media
to demean a whole population. And as Americans begin to
experience the humanity of Muslims and Arabs of all
beliefs, backgrounds, opinions and cultures, we too will
regain some of our lost humanity.

ALSO IN THIS FORUM

MOUSTAFA BAYOUMI, “Fear and Loathing of Islam”
PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ, “Deploying Informants, the FBI
Stings Muslims”
LAILA LALAMI, “Islamophobia and Its Discontents”
ABED AWAD, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts”
RAMZI KASSEM, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying
Program”
MAX BLUMENTHAL, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate”
LAILA AL-ARIAN, “When Your Father Is Accused of
Terrorism”

Jack Shaheen Jack Shaheen is an expert on images of Arabs and Muslims

in popular culture. His award-winning books include Reel Bad Arabs: How
Hollywood Vilifies a People and Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11.

To submit a correction for our consideration, click here.

For Reprints and Permissions, click here.

TRENDING TODAY Ads by Revcontent