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Arab Defamation in the Media: Its Consequences and Solutions
Remember The Black Stallion? That film was a tremendous hit. My kids loved it, and my daughter, Kerri, dragged us to see it time after time. She’s said more than once when she grows up, she wants to marry a horse! In the opening sequence, aboard the ship, we see a nasty Arab cruelly whipping the horse—and later stealing the little boy’s life jacket when the ship begins to sink. In novelist Walter Farley’s original, that nasty Arab character did not exist. He was added to the film. Come to think of it, my son, Mike, must have seen that picture—and that scene—at least six times. That’s just one example of gratuitous Arab-bashing in a movie. Now let me give you one from television. Irwin Shaw’s novel, Evening in Byzantium, was made into a four-hour special. The original, touching story—about an older man in love with a younger woman—suddenly included an Arab group of nuclear terrorists, plus three rich oil sheiks asking the hero to make an anti-Israeli movie. The novel had made no mention of Arabs at all. Finally, let me give you three more quick examples of stereotyping: the notion of American cities and neighborhoods under attack by Arab terrorists. Take Back To The Future—the original: Libyan terrorists come out of nowhere and are suddenly driving around the parking lot of an American shopping center at night, shooting at the heroes, and still dressed as though they were in the Middle East! Black Sunday: more terrorists. This time they’re planning to murder spectators at the Super Bowl in Miami—including the President of the United States—by hijacking and arming the Goodyear blimp. Or NBC-TV’s Under Siege. Anyone who has seen it won’t forget the image of the terrorist’s rockets striking the dome of our Capitol Building and exploding. Pure, unadulterated fiction. They confused Iranians with Arabs—making people watching the film think those were Arab terrorists. Also, there has never been a square inch of America attacked by Arabs, or Americans of Arab heritage, ever—except on our films. Where do writers, producers and directors get this stuff? You know, there are foreign films—some made by Israelis—that show Arabs in a better light. But now, some say that the many Jewish-Americans who work in Hollywood promote the negative image of Arabs on screen. Well, I have Jewish friends in the business—many are executives—and if anyone is sensitive about stereotyping, they certainly are. Still, we’re all products of our upbringing. If you’re raised in a family where attitudes about Arabs are very negative, reinforced with what we’ve been talking about, you tend to have such attitudes. But such attitudes can change. Veteran filmmaker Ted Flicker, who is Jewish and a lifelong Zionist, is the co-creator of the hit TV comedy series “Barney Miller.” He participated in one of our Arab-Jewish dialogue workshops in conflict resolution. And after discovering that Arabs were no different than anyone else, and that they were now being defamed and dehumanized as Jews had been for hundreds of years, he did something about it. He spoke out against it, before the Board of Directors of both the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild, and his speech--titled, “Billionaires, Bombers and Belly Dancers” —was published in the newsletters of both guilds for the general memberships. Here’s part of what he said. Quote: “For those of us who remember what it was like to be Jewish in the ‘30s and ‘40s, stereotypes were part of the process that separated us from the rest of the American community. They were the cause of schoolyard fights and psychological scars that many of us carry today.
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