Screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Jackie Salloum's 9 minute short, "Planet of the Arabs" is a montage of the dehumanizing and vilifying depictions of Arabs in contemporary American film.

Planet of the Arabs

I know that such negative depictions of minorities are nothing new or unexpected (especially as someone who studied the media and its representation of minorities) but being attacked by this barrage of images and statements in such a rapid succession makes me think about the power of a pervasive and ubiquitious media in a time of such great Arab and Muslim xenophobia.

The seemingly ignorant and hateful statements about imperialism, land grabs, the bombing of their homes, and God are part of larger more important issues that have been reduced by the media down to the sound bites and villianous statements seen in the film. 

This tendency to reduce larger societal issues down to a single hateful statement perfectly made for a soundbite is even more problematic when you think that millions upon millions of people have watched these films and television shows (the number grows even larger when you consider other forms of biased media including the sensationalized news media) and have internalized these notions whether they know it or not. Given the ubiquitiousness of the media in today's world, these depictions have served to enculturate millions of people with an irrational fear of Arabs and Muslims (as if the two are somehow inherently synonymous) and make such large global issues seem like the gripes and scape goats of a murderous group of people who want nothing more than to play the perpetual victim by blaming others for the problems of their nations.

There is of course another issue that becomes apparent in Planet of the Arabs, and that is the fact that at least some of these villianous characters were played by Arab actors - a fact that leads one to question the motives of these actors who take on such stereotypical roles that casts an entire ethnicity as the treacherous, murdering villian with no reverence for human life.

In a recent Angry Asian Man interview, John Cho had this to say about Asian Americans who take on stereotypical portrayals, perhaps the same can be said of Arab actors: 

“You can gather an army of people to hold picket signs and stand outside the studio, and say, 'we destest this portrayal'… but it doesn’t matter if there’s a guy—who they know, a peer—who’s willing to do it, who stands in front of the crew and does the buck-tooth accent. If he or she is willing to do it, it makes the protestors look like extremists.”

Ultimately the power of a film like Planet of the Arabs lies in its ability to expose the media bias against Arabs and how these portrayals can be internalized by the consumers of an increasingly pervasive media and what it means for Arab actors to take on such stereotypical roles all at once.