Arabs not the first: to be blown away by the movies.

In the 1950s "Reds" were gunned down in droves by Mickey Spillane's sadistic private eye Mike Hammer, while on the big screen G-men hunted down evil double-crossing "Commies" and blasted them. Take for instance this extract from Mickey Spillane's best seller One Lonely Night, published in 1951:

     "I was evil for the good. I was evil and he knew it. I was worse
than they were, so much worse that they couldn't stand the comparison.
I had one good efficient enjoyable way of getting rid of cancerous
Commies. I killed them."

Now Hollywood has another bad guy--the Arab terrorist--and he's getting mown down with equal vigor.

Dr. J.G. Shaheen is Professor Emeritus of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University and is the world's foremost authority on media images of Arabs and Muslims. He serves as a consultant with motion picture and television companies such as Dream Works, Warner Brothers, Hanna-Barbera Productions, and Showtime and regularly discusses media stereotypes on national programs and networks such as CNN and The Today Show. According to Shaheen, cinema has villanized Arabs and Muslims more than any other people and for a longer period of time. "We were gunning down subhuman Arabs way before 9/11," he said.

According to Shaheen, in movies it would seem that brutal, heartless uncivilized Arabs are hell bent on terrorizing innocent Westerners. In his study of how Arabs are portrayed in the movies for his groundbreaking book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Interlink Publishing Group, 2001) he discovered that Arabs are now without doubt Public Enemy #1. More often than not Arab males all ride camels and are out to abduct the blue-eyed blonde, while women in the Arab world are seen as "bosomy belly dancers" or "mute and submissive". We never see Arab children unless they are out to steal your wallet. "Most Arabs have never slept in a tent nor ridden a camel nor owned an oil well," he said. "The Arabs' humanity and culture is all erased. Instead of focusing on images of commonality, films are focusing on the differences between us. Most Arabs are family people," Shaheen said. "If there was one word used to describe them, it is family."

When asked to choose his most extreme example of Arab-bashing Shaheen instantly chose Rules of Engagement (d. W. Friedkin, 2000), a film he points out that was produced with the cooperation of the American Department of Defense. The scene: Samuel L. Jackson (as Colonel Terry Childers) tells his marines "to waste those mother******s" and then guns down "83 men, women, and children." Shaheen also cited True Lies (d. J. Cameron, 1994) where Arnold Schwarzenegger "guns down Palestinians like targets in a shooting gallery."

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Equating the stereotyping of Arabs with murderous hordes of Indians in Westerns and Jews in Nazi Germany, the results of such stereotyping can, says Shaheen, end in annihilation. Worse, Hollywood has, in the face of Arab stereotyping remained silent--a sure sign for Shaheen that it is likely to continue. "There is no Hollywood star or mogul with sufficient courage to reveal it and condemn it," Shaheen said.

The hatred and the fear of the Arab world, like the fear of communism, does not, Shaheen argues, come from personal contact. Rather "we are taught to hate them. It comes from the fictional bombardment of media images. It comes from what our media teaches us. Movies teach us who we should love and who we should hate. 150 countries have been taught to hate everything that is Arab and Muslim ... The longer it continues without being contradicted the more opportunity there is for men and women to be hurt. There is tremendous fear in the Arab community. If your name's Hussein, change it to Harry."

Today, according to Shaheen, the only images of the Arab world that the majority of Americans ever see is the image given to them by movies. Movies played endlessly on cable--Shaheen points out--last forever. The message they give is, almost without exception, simplistic and invariably negative. "We are equating the actions of a lunatic fringe with 1.2 billion people," Shaheen said "because we never see their humanity."

Similarly, under the shadow of Communist expansion around the world and infiltration on the home front, films in the 1950s also gave the American people a villain that was instantly recognizable. "Commies" might have been a little bit effeminate, hold Das Kapital in podgy fingers, and read more, but ultimately they were thugs motivated by greed and power rather than any political ideology. Differing little from the gangster who American audiences had been seeing for years on the cinema screen, Hollywood made a string of films exposing Communist subversion on the home front and glorifying J Edgar Hoover's G Men.

Take I was a Communist for the FBI (d. G. Douglas, 1951), in which Frank Lovejoy played Matt Cvetic--a real FBI agent who had infiltrated the Communist Party in Pittsburgh. "I had to sell out my own girl!"--shouts the blurb on the advertising poster. "I was under the toughest orders a guy could get! I stood by and watched my brother slugged ... I started a riot that ran red with terror ... I learned every dirty rule in their book--and had to use them--because I was a communist--but I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI."

One year later came My Son John (d. L. McCarey, 1952), perhaps one of the most fervent anti-communist films. In My Son John, a young man is drawn by his own intellectual vanity straight into the arms of the Communist Party and plans to flee the country with government secrets. Upon learning the truth, his mother denounces him to the authorities. When John realizes the error of his ways his former comrades murder him. "Hold fast to honor," he says in his dying words to FBI agent Stedman, played by Van Heflin. "It is sacred. I am a Native American Communist spy and may God have mercy on my soul."

The majority of movies that dealt with communism directly provided reassurance by giving the audience what it expected: recognizeable themes and images. The lines were clearly drawn, the threat was tangible and could therefore be confronted, destroyed and contained. The images of a vast FBI laboratory manned by men in white coats and the imposing Bureau headquarters in Washington D.C (with Hoover handing out orders from the top floor) were offered as a remedy to terror.

Dr. Kevin Hagopian is Lecturer in Media Studies at the Pennsylvania State University where he teaches courses on the history and politics of American film and race and the cinema. According to Hagopian, communism (like terrorism) was something to which Americans could attach a set of unnamed and unarticulated fears.

"Most professed Commie-hunters would have been hard pressed to really define the doctrines of Marxism," he said. "Terrorism is not so much a set of ideologies or even a set of political interests. For Americans it is a place holder for all that 'I fear.' We still in a sense relish our fears about the rest of the world and to an extent we as Americans continue to think that it's America versus the world. Because the Arab world is a source of religious and ethnic passions that contrast so deeply with an 'alleged way of life' their very existence is a kind of psychological threat to us," he said.

During the 1950s the evil of communism was invariably defined by the virtuousness of its enemies. In The FBI Story (d. M. LeRoy, 1959), the FBI agent was seen as practically a saint. Noble family man Frank Hardesty, as he was played by then Alist celebrity Jimmy Stewart, willingly devoted his life to the Bureau. At one point he goes to hand in his resignation but a new chief, twenty-nine year old J. Edgar Hoover cries, "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity!" and Hardesty changes his mind.

As the fight against the Soviet menace was reduced to absolutes in the 1950s, the Arab world has, according to Hagopian, "already been reduced to a level of simplicity that would be hard to surpass." And it began long before 9/11.

There is one movie scene that for him stands out above all others. "I'm thinking of a real supreme moment in the history of stereotype when an imposing noose-wearing Arab with a scimitar does a kind of "saber-foo" and Indiana Jones reaches out for his good old-fashioned American revolver and drills him. The reaction it brought in cinemas was a jolly laugh. Since then nothing has changed that set of stereotypes. It would be hard to go beyond such a reductive view of Arabs but Arabs have already been stock villains of Hollywood for the last 20 years."

In the 1950s the real life FBI snooped on and harassed its own citizens and was just as ugly as McCarthy's inquisition. Yet, in the end, it was believed that the danger was such that the ends justified the means. All of it was possible in an atmosphere of fear. In reducing the communist threat into a question of good versus evil, movies reflected the red-baiting rhetoric of the day. America, unsettled by a New World Order and plagued by an array of domestic changes, clung to simplistic interpretations. Only with vigilance and unquestioning faith in the government and the FBI could the "Enemy Within" be contained and ultimately destroyed. It was the simplicity of the anti-Communist message in the 1950s that gave it such wide appeal and made it at the same time so dangerous.

The threat of Communism in the 1950s constantly reiterated by the movies was perceived to be so real and dangerous that it easily overrode rights of individuals. When it comes to the demonization of the Arab world, Hollywood, as both Hagopian and Shaheen point out, already has a twenty-year head-start.