Planet of the Arabs : Fear and Loathing in America

Ali M Latifi — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:13:25 EDT

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

Go ahead and beat your wife!

ashwini — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:44:27 EDT

Reading this story just now, my jaw literally dropped. A German judge refused to grant a woman who was being physically abused by her husband a quick divorce (that is, without the usual 1 year separation period) because—and I am serious—she is Muslim and the beating of one’s wife is “sanctioned” by the Koran.

So this judge is saying, basically, Muslim women have no reasonable right to demand protection from domestic violence because such violence is “normal” in Islam.

Live from the Conservative Political Action Conference: On Hating Muslims

niralshah — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:41:03 EST

Do we hate all Muslims, or just some of them? The conservative mind today is confronted with difficult and troubling quandaries. With the lock-step obedience within the conservative movement and general ideological uniformity, disagreements among “pundits” on the right are typically rare. When they do occur, the results are bizarre and hilarious.

Dinesh D’Souza, the formerly anti-PC crusader turned pro-Muslim, anti-secularism cultural relativist, was put on a panel against Robert Spencer, author of popular bigotry-fodder book “The Truth About Muhammed.” Pitting these two hacks against each other led to perplexing results, as they each set up straw men of each other’s already ludicrous positions and clawed at them with weak and often contradictory logic.

Not used to having to digest shades of grey and complexity, the audience could not figure out whether to cheer or boo. When D’Souza pointed out that portions of the Koran and the Old Testament are hostile to non-believers, the response was definitely a boo. However, they seemed to agree both with Spencer’s assertion that Islam is inherently violent and Mohammed was himself essentially a terrorist, and D’Souza’s assertion that vilification of all Muslims will radicalize moderate Muslims. They wanted to believe, they want to love the Muslims, but, oh they're just so evil!

With D’Souza’s latest Islamist-apologizing tripe roundly denounced across the political spectrum, and Spencer’s cherry-picked piece of bigotry so poorly argued as to not even warrant serious analysis, perhaps one young attendee’s sentiments, addressed to me in incredulous response to D’Souza, express the confusion best: “but we can’t work with them! They want to shoot us in the face!”

Posts with the tag Muslims

Planet of the Arabs : Fear and Loathing in America

Go ahead and beat your wife!

Live from the Conservative Political Action Conference: On Hating Muslims