Right-Wingers to Hollywood: We Want More Racist Stereotypes! [VIDEO]

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:19 PM on July 10, 2007.

The latest wing-nut lament is that Hollywood simply refuses to indulge in racial stereotyping, or at least not enough of it given that we're engaged in a multi-front War on Scary Brown People Terror.

Roy at Alicublog has been cataloguing the madness, here and here. The target of opportunity for this latest battle in the right's KulturKampf is the new Die Hard movie, which, according to the plenty-plaint, fails to reinforce the central assumptions about the Islamic world that have guided our response, and the right's night-sweats, since 9/11: that all towelheads are the same, and, of course, all (or at least most) are terrorists.

According to a profoundly stupid offering by Reihan Salam writing at Slate, the problem is that Hollywood is just unwilling to portray Muslims as bad guys!

The threat of al-Qaida terrorist attacks is currently scaring America stiff. But you'd be hard-pressed to find Muslim terrorists in any of today's blockbuster action movies, which instead offer such uncontroversial bad guys as killer aliens and abusive husbands. Why is Hollywood shying away from al-Qaida-like villains?

Why indeed?

Michael Fumento wonders the same thing. He wants Hollywood to return to a time when filmmakers and government propagandists worked hand-in-hand to develop tidy racial stereotypes that helped people distinguish the good guys from the bad guys and made sure Americans' hatred was directed at the correct ethnic minority.

What got Fumento's dander up specifically was that the producers of the new Die Hard flick apparently portrayed someone who looked vaguely like an Arab as something other than a terrorist. I'm not making that up:

…one of the few good guys in the movie, the head of the FBI team that aids our hero John McClane, looks decidedly Arabic. Indeed, he played an Arab in an earlier movie.

Got that? He's looks like an Ay-Rab -- even played an Arab in an earlier movie -- and now some evil, Terror-Symp casting director hired that very same actor to play a good guy! Folks, if you ever needed proof that Hollywood hates America, there it is.

There are all kinds of appropriate responses to this line of nonsense. Roy hits most of them. But the bottom line is that these gripes are not only based on a false premise, they are based on a premise that is the diametric opposite of reality.

That is, Hollywood has long portrayed Arabs as shifty, murderous, hyper-sexualized sub-humans; they've done as good a job portraying them as depraved, as purely evil, as they ever did vilifying any other group during any other war. The only difference is that they've been at it for a very long time.

Fumento writes, "If I'm mistaken and there have been movies in which Islamists where the bad guys, please let me know. (If so, I'll bet they went straight to video.)"

Click on the clip to your right. It's a montage of Arabs -- in the movies "Arabs" and "Muslims" are pretty much interchangeable -- being portrayed as they usually are: as bad guys -- sex-fiends and buffoons who are good for nothing but being cut down in a fusillade of bullets by some proud and heroic American.

Update: Annalee Newitz points out that the bad guy in Tranformers is played by John Turturro. Whether he looks sufficently Arabic for Fumento and his fellolw goofballs remains to be seen.

Here's a bonus, a trailer from the film Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People …

Tagged as: hollywood, islamophobia, wing-nuts

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.