Arab-American activists are up in arms over Hollywood constantly casting their brethren as the bad guys
UNTIL RECENTLY, ARAB-Americans trying to combat what they see as Hollywood's ongoing vilification of Arabs and Islam spoke admiringly of "the Disney Principle."
As defined by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and other allied organizations, the "Disney Principle" referred to the ostensible willingness of a few Hollywood studios and production companies to submit scripts with references to Arabs to communally-designated experts who could flag inaccuracies, stereotyping and outright defamation. Stung by charges of Arab-bashing in 1993 following the release of "Aladdin," the hit animated feature film, Disney executives issued an oral promise to do precisely that. And the company's animation department largely honored that commitment during the making of various animated spin-offs, including the recent video, "Aladdin and the King of Thieves."
In late August, however, Arab-American communal leaders gathered outside the gates of the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, to demonstrate and announce that they now wished they had named it after a more deserving entity. Disney, they charged, was again sticking it to Arabs.
This latest bout of Arab-American opprobrium was precipitated by the profusion of recent Disney films that not only appeared to disparage Arabs and Muslims, but also seemed to denigrate Americans of Middle-Eastern descent and heritage. One of the most egregious was "Father of the Bride II," a sequel to the 1991 hit starring Steve Martin and Diane Keaton in which the suburban heroes are thwarted by an Arab-American who is rapacious, uncouth and abusive both to his wife and his neighbors. Another was "Kazaam," featuring African-American NBA star Shaquille O'Neill as a genie commanded by a white American boy to trounce hordes of hook-nosed Arab baddies. Arab-Americans were also irked by "In the Army Now," a slapstick comedy in which American soldiers dispatched to the Gulf make short, if stupid, shrift of Arabs, Islam, Middle Eastern coffee and baba ghanoush. Many became apoplectic, moreover, at the appearance in a recent issue of "Disney Adventure!" a popular children's magazine, of an anecdote - which appeared under the rubric "Weird But True" - describing a "traditional Arab greeting" that involves directing one's bad breath into another's face until one of the parties flinches.
Jack Shaheen, an Arab-American journalist and professor of mass communications at Southern Illinois University, has closely observed Hollywood's treatment of Arabs. In the course of writing several books about Arab imagery in popular culture (including the 1984 tome, "The TV Arab"), Shaheen has identified over 700 feature films and countless cartoons generated in the U.S. that have depicted Arabs in terms he believes are virtually identical to the way Jews were pictured in Nazi Germany.
RECENT EXAMPLES OF SUCH films, he says, include Fox's "True Lies," Time-Warner's "Executive Decision" and many of the pictures produced by the former team of expatriate Israeli producers Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus. Popular American culture, Shaheen wrote in "The TV Arab," "tends to perpetuate four basic myths about Arabs: They are all fabulously wealthy; they are barbaric and uncultured; they are sex maniacs with a penchant for white slavery; and they revel in acts of terrorism."
"The (Hollywood) image of the sheikh, for instance," expounds Shaheen in an interview with The Jerusalem Report, "is virtually the same as that of Shylock. You see the same hook nose, the same fat lips, the same hateful leer. The Jew controls the banks, the Arab controls the oil. The Jew lusts after the Christian woman, the Arab lusts after the blonde American. The Jewish God is different, the Arab God is different. It's all the same except that the Jew dresses in a black robe, the Arab, perhaps, in a white one."
The greatest devastation, Shaheen says, is caused Arab-American children who must contend with consistently warped and abusive images of their religion, heritage, culture and history.
"You have to hide your children from the TV set and the movie theaters. But since you cannot really do that, you get a denial of heritage, a shame. No one wants to admit they have Arab roots. The result (among parents) is a feeling of helplessness - that everyone in the (entertainment) industry hates them."
Other Arab-Americans have been even more pointed in their criticism of Hollywood and its predominantly Jewish power elite, especially Don Bustany, a representative of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination League who has become a point man for the current anti-Disney protest. He contends that much of the Arab-bashing that goes down in Hollywood is the work of Jews who feel that by demonizing Arabs they may be doing Israel a service.
"You and I both know," says Bustany, a co-president of the Hollywood watchdog Media Imagery Coalition, "that Marlon Brando was quite right when he pointed out that Jews run Hollywood. The decision-
makers, the play-callers, are Jews, completely out of proportion to their numbers in the population. I am convinced that individuals who identify with Israel feel that vilifying Arabs helps the cause."
Bustany, it should be noted, is also a well-known local anti-Zionist activist - some of whose views are criticized even by fellow Arab-Americans. "Oh, I think that what Don says may be true in some limited cases," notes Shaheen, "especially if we're speaking of, say, Golan-Globus. You can't look at the body of work they've produced and conclude otherwise. But it's bullshit to say that just because someone is Jewish they have a political agenda. Once you do that, you are doing the same thing these filmmakers are doing. You're engaging in Jew-baiting."
Action film director Avi Nesher, one of several Israelis working in the Los Angeles film industry, dismisses Bustany's charge on other grounds, pointing out Hollywood has almost no interest whatever in dealing in any way with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The struggle between Arabs and Jews is regarded as a controversial matter which now must also be given to ambiguous interpretation, and U.S. films that have broached the topic have earned thorough pannings and failed to sprout commercial legs.
Rather, asserts Nesher, filmmakers have still not found the generic villains that Hollywood needs to sustain the action/adventure films audiences continue to crave, and is hard put to invent new ones. "The Germans gave us a good ride for about 45 years," he says, "and then they stopped being interesting. The Soviet Union is gone, blacks and Indians are no longer fair game, and we're all bored to tears with South American drug-runners. So who's left? Is it racist to stereotype Arabs? Sure it is. But as long as you have a society whose first thought when a Pan Am or TWA flight goes down is that the Arabs did it - and as long as Iran, Syria and Iraq bankroll these efforts and Libya refuses to turn over their perpetrators - you are going to see that racism reflected in popular culture."
Nesher points out that in "True Lies," writer-director James Cameron took care to provide star Arnold Schwarzenegger with a heroic Arab-American sidekick to contrast with the film's Muslim terrorist villains. But even Nesher, a former Israeli army commando, says he was incensed by the sick humor of a scene in which an Uzi tossed down a flight of stairs inadvertently mows down a roomful of Arabs.
"You were supposed to laugh? I fought Arabs and I had Arab friends, but this was completely dehumanizing a group."
Pop-music disk jockey and high-profile Arab-American activist Casey Kasem concedes that ridding American society of problems like the stereotyping of any of its citizens will take decades, if not generations. But if progress is to be made, he says, companies like Disney must be brought to the table, where they can listen to the concerns of those who feel they have been wounded. The problem with Disney, though, is that it won't come to the table. Letters and phone calls from incensed Arab-American communal leaders to top Disney executives Michael Eisner, Joe Roth and Michael Ovitz (all Jewish), have gone unheeded, as did the public protest on August 22. (Disney also declined to talk to The Report.)
"If Jews were being defamed or vilified and later couldn't get through to Disney," says Kasem, "what do you think would happen? It seems to me our voices were heard and totally ignored. Any vilification of any race or religion is wrong, including any anti-Jewish or Israel-bashing that goes on in Arab countries. We need to be building bridges to understand, not fear, each other."