[Editor: There are, without doubt, examples of the very
negative ways Arabs are
sometimes described in the American media, but Emara generalizes to such an extent that it
seems that most,
if no2t all media, are guilty of that. That creates the picture of ’the great Satan’ and
a strong anti-
American sentiment. It is also not certain that all accusations are correct. I do not know of a quote
of
Kissinger who supposedly said not to believe any Arab.]
In Ahram newspaper of March 23, 1997, I
read an article entitled, "The picture of ugly Arabs in the American mass media" in which the writer Reda
Helal
gave some examples of the horrible stereotyped pictures that deform Arab and their image in the
American
media.
In the movies Arabs are terrorists and sexual pests. In the press Arabs are bearded
fat people with
crooked noses and gaps between their teeth. They sit on the ground, with women and girls in
front of
them.
In "Hiram Western Dictionary" Arabs are head cutters, swindlers, cheats, dealers,
hangers and
vagabonds. In the Oxford Dictionary for Children, Arabs are cheating traders or men wearing
old clothes, letting
their wives walk behind them, wearing black clothes and carrying heavy loads on their
heads. In television
serials, Arabs are bad people living in tents, and they are more Nazi than the Nazis
themselves. They own women,
camels, and oil fields. They hate the highly-educated and are preparing a
new Holocaust for the Jews.
The
picture is no better in the writings of academic professors. For
Professor Harold Bloom, the prophet of Islam is
a man who deserves no place in history, shown on a horse,
holding his sword among a military detachment. For Alias
Canity, a Nobel Prize laureate, Islam is a bloody
religion with hundreds of millions of terrorists. Meanwhile,
dear Kissinger says, "You should never
believe any Arab".
President Nixon made a statement in which he said
that many Americans had begun to
consider all Muslims bloody, irrational and uncivilized enemies, strong evidence
of the false and horrible
picture that dominates the minds of Americans.
If these facts tarnish our image in
Western culture,
then the important question is how to reform this picture and change these concepts. Some people
think that
the way to improve our image in Western culture and media is through public relations, by changing our
present values and religion to fit with Western systems and interests. But I do not think so.
We must
remember the most beautiful pictures in the Western culture are those of Salah El-Din El Ayubi, of our
soldiers who
attacked the Bar Lev line and that of the stone-throwing children [Salah el-Din fought the
Crusaders with great
success, the Bar Lev line was the Israeli defence line in the Sinai which was taken by
the Egyptians in the October
war of 1973, the stone-throwing children are a reference to the Palestinian
youth throwing stones at Israeli
soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza] Search in the Western media and
compare the picture of the Vietnam hero Giab
to that of the Shah of Iran. Which of them is respectable and
which is contemptible?
