Arab Americans Protest Film's Stereotypes

GWU students Sherrine Eid (left) and Pakeeva Khawaja hand out leaflets at the D.C. preview of "The Siege." (By Juana Arias — The Washington Post)

LOS ANGELES – To understand the objections of Arab Americans and Muslims to 20th Century Fox's new film "The Siege," which opens today around the country, picture the following scenario:

A nefarious rabbi exhorts his extremist, ultra-Orthodox followers to plant bombs against Arab sympathizers in America. Innocents are killed and maimed. The FBI starts rounding up Orthodox Jews and putting them in camps.

Or how about this: A Catholic priest has molested an altar boy. The church refuses to hand him and other offenders over to police. The FBI starts rounding up clerics in an attempt to ferret them out.

These provocative story lines – unlikely, perhaps, but not entirely implausible – would certainly spark an outcry from Jewish and Catholic interest groups. The question is: Would Hollywood choose to portray them in the first place?

"The Siege," a thriller about Muslim terrorists who wreak mayhem in New York, feeds into American stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims that have long been reinforced by Hollywood.

But ironically, "The Siege" has the opposite intention. The film invokes the terrorist image to debunk it. It takes pains to portray a sympathetic, patriotic Arab American, played by Lebanese American Tony Shalhoub, and explores what happens to innocent bystanders (such as an Arab American who gets tortured to death) when the military tramples over civil rights in the name of security.

But American Arabs and Muslims are not convinced. "This movie participates fully in the linking of Arab culture and Islamic religious practices and terrorism. That's nothing new," says Hussein Ibish, the media director of the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. "But this movie is different. This movie purports to be a socially responsible, serious intervention ... about how American society responds to a threat. Its rampant use of discriminatory stereotypes is very dangerous for our community."

The problem for Ibish and other groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations – which will be leafletting theaters in Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago this weekend – is the clash between the movie's stated message and its subliminal images. "The characters say one thing but the cinematic language conveys an entirely different message in its imagery, its music, the camera angles," says Ibish. "And in the movie theater the language of cinema trumps everything else."

As examples, he points to ominous music that accompanies a camera shot pulling back from a mosque in Brooklyn, or the repeated image of two hands dipped into a pool of water – the ablution before prayer – as a signal for imminent violence.

"The movie criticizes the institutional measures the government takes against innocent people, but it doesn't criticize the misunderstanding of the faith that the movie reinforces," says Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Islamic council, who consulted with "Siege" director Ed Zwick during the making of the film. "It's as if it says, 'These are criminals, these filthy Arabs and Muslims, but still we should not shred the Constitution. We are higher than that.' "

The Anti-Discrimination Committee has written an open letter to Zwick holding him "responsible for any acts of hate directed against our community as a result of this extremely damaging and dangerous film."

Moviegoers attending a premiere of the movie at the Cineplex Odeon Wisconsin Avenue theater were greeted by pamphleteers from the Council on American Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association at George Washington University.

"This hits close to home," said Sherrine Eid, a graduate student in public health at GWU. "I hear it when somebody tells me, 'Camel jockeys, go home.' I have seen the previews and when you see a person praying and then see a building blow up, it feels like the same message."

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the council, emphasized that the Arab-American groups were not protesting or urging a boycott. "We're not going to play into the stereotype of Arabs as emotional and reactionary. We want people to go in sensitized to the issue of stereotyping and bias."

Zwick and the movie's producer, Lynda Obst, as well as screenwriter Lawrence Wright, express frustration with the reaction, saying that the advocacy groups have missed the point. "If their premise is that any depiction of the life of a Muslim that includes a depiction of violence, no matter how well documented, is offensive, then they cannot but be upset with the film," Zwick says. "I believe that is their premise."

He notes that he took the image of the hand-washing before a bombing from a "60 Minutes" report on fundamentalist terrorism. "It's not exactly like I invented that," he says.

Wright, who lived in Egypt for two years and has written about the Middle East for the New Yorker, says, "I think they see it with different eyes than I do. In many respects they may be oversensitive and anxious about movies because of their past treatment in Hollywood ... But it seems paradoxical to me that they would center on a movie that has their concern so much at its heart."

In some ways the protest over "The Siege," despite the film's noble intentions, shows how very vulnerable the American Muslim community feels as a minority caught in the shadow of real-life Islamic terrorism. The Islamic council and the ADC spend most of their time documenting incidents of discrimination and arguing against harassment of Arabs and Muslims by airlines and other companies.

They have made, they say, some progress in sensitizing American society to their concerns. But they don't think they have in Hollywood.

Says Awad, "I don't want to believe that there is a political agenda there, although many people see it that way. But there is a serious level of ignorance about Islam in Hollywood." Ibish complains that a ceremony in the film featuring the adolescent son of Shalhoub's character does not exist in Islam, and Awad objected to Shalhoub's drinking of alcohol (forbidden to traditional Muslims) and his exclamation of "Jesus Christ!" when something remarkable happens.

Zwick removed the exclamations, and also took Awad's suggestion to delete a tense exchange between Denzel Washington's character, the FBI chief, and an Arab taxi driver who refuses to pick him up. But he declined to comply with Awad's request to change the plot of the movie (they were already halfway through the shoot), to make the terrorists turn out to be American militiamen.

Still, one can hardly blame Awad for trying. For years, Arabs or Muslims have served as stock terrorist-villains in Hollywood films, from movie-of-the-week hijack dramas to the reality-based films like "Not Without My Daughter" to the overtly fantastic caricatures in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Navy SEALS," "The Delta Force" and, most recently, the Arnold Schwarzenegger blowout "True Lies," in which snarling Arabs threaten to nuke America to pieces.

There is a reason for this, of course. Since the 1970s many terrorist acts were perpetrated by Arab radicals, and in the past decade and a half terrorism has become a weapon used by fundamentalist Islamic extremists. The plot in "The Siege" mirrors the real-life story of fundamentalists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, down to a plot twist involving the CIA.

"This is being repeated as though it's not legitimate to portray religious Islamic groups intent on bombing America," says producer Obst. "We read about it in the newspaper."

Indeed, in an era of galloping political correctness, it has become increasingly difficult to come up with movie villains who do not offend one constituency or another. The Native American has been pretty much extinct as a screen menace for at least a decade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a desperate Hollywood has turned to aliens ("Independence Day," "Alien III"), germs ("Outbreak") and dinosaurs ("The Lost World: Jurassic Park") to provide credible, and unobjectionable, enemies. For villains of the Homo sapiens variety, Hollywood has recently turned on Serbs ("The Peacemaker") and rogue madmen of the ex-Soviet republics ("Air Force One") as bad guys unlikely to have many advocates in the United States.

To people like Wright, these days a screenwriter can't be too sensitive. "I was talking to Arab American students the other day who were offended by the opening sequence," he says, referring to a scene in which a radical sheik is kidnapped. "There is a jump cut to Brooklyn of a guy in a mosque. They felt the message this is putting out is that this mosque is involved in that violence, which is not at all the intent. The point of that jump is to say the Arab world is not so far away. That we are becoming a Muslim country, that it's part of our world, too."

Zwick protests that the advocacy groups are blinding themselves to the realities of Islamic terrorism. "The Arab American community is as diverse and as full of contradictions as any strong and vibrant minority in America," he says. "But they too have to deal with some very contradictory realities, one of which is that a fringe, fanatic, violent minority has engaged in terror."

But the problem with depicting this on a 10-foot screen, say Ibish, Awad and others, is that there may be consequences to innocent and noncinematic Arab American bystanders. "We really are concerned that this could result in hate crimes. I hope I'm wrong," says Ibish. "It may be true that they tried to make a movie that debunked racism, but they did it at the expense of Arabs and Muslims."

Says Awad: "We have been slapped on both cheeks for so long that if they kiss us on one cheek, should we thank them for that? I recognize that there are some positive images in the film. But I can't settle for that."

Staff writer Jefferson Morley in Washington contributed to this report.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company

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