[R-G] How Hollywood Portrays Arabs

[Anthony Fenton]

How Hollywood Portrays Arabs

by Remi Kanazi

Global Research, June 27, 2008

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KAN20070627&articleId=9459

I love Adam Sandler. From Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore to the  
Chanukah Song, the predecessor of the Superbad generation has  
effortlessly conquered the domain of slapstick comedy and  
inappropriate jokes. But damn you Scuba Steve! If you’re going to  
propagate misinformation about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, do it  
quietly—or at least in your non-comedic life.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Sandler’s new flick, takes Hollywood  
chicanery and stereotypes that denigrate Arabs to an unprecedented  
level—surpassing hit flicks like the Kingdom, the Siege, and every  
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris movie that came before it. I  
group Zohan with other shamelessly racist action movies because a film  
should at least be minutely funny to be categorized as a comedy. For  
the Sandler diehards and hilarity-loving skeptics, I should clearly  
state: using race and prejudices to engender laughter is not the  
problem. Mel Brooks and the creators of South Park exploit stereotypes  
far beyond anything Sandler has ever done, but unlike Zohan, I don’t  
think insidious propaganda and underlying racism drive their comedy.  
After all, if this hebetudinous clunker was just comedy, Sandler and  
company wouldn’t have, as the New York Times reported, sought out Arab  
actors to give the movie "legitimacy." Their search was successful and  
a few token Arabs showed their presence to innocuously inform the  
public that it is okay to vilify the crazy towel-headed terrorists  
once again.

What makes this movie even worse than many of the unfavorable movies  
made post-9/11 is Zohan’s disarming presentation; it is a comedic  
approach to understanding the inner workings of the substandard Arab  
people. Like the job stealing Mexicans, the liquor store robbing  
Blacks, and the HIV infested gays, negative stereotypes in Zohan strip  
down the Arab people to RPG wielding animals that senselessly thirst  
for Jewish blood.

 From the start of the film, Sandler’s character, Zohan, is positioned  
as the altruistic hero—an Israeli Mossad agent who reluctantly kills  
Palestinian "terrorists," while forgoing his real dream: to cut hair  
in the US for Paul Mitchell. Zohan is "brave," "lovable," and "funny,"  
and even his stereotypical chauvinism is eaten up by women (and men)  
throughout the movie—including his eventual Palestinian love interest,  
Dalia.

Compounded with played out, corny penis gags, the Israeli narrative is  
interwoven into the fabric of the film, including propagandistic  
reminiscences by Zohan’s father who recalls the oft-repeated myth of  
being surrounded "on all sides" by powerful enemies during the Six Day  
War—a war in which Israel preemptively struck and dominated those  
"enemies." In line with Israeli and Western intelligence, Israel won  
the war in six days (and five hours, as Zohan’s father dutifully  
reminds us)—so much for existential threats and heroic narratives.  
Other historical revisions include a reference in a verbal battle  
between a Palestinian and Israeli shop owner, in which the Palestinian  
proclaimed, "Give it up, like you gave up the Gaza Strip!" This biting  
taunt, while not as blatant as the common stereotype, infers that  
Israel "gave up" the Gaza Strip and further insinuates that Israel had  
claim to it. The "humorous" jeer glosses over the glaring reality:  
Israel still occupies Gaza’s borders, airspace, imports and exports,  
and has economically strangulated and suffocated 1.4 million  
Palestinians in the world’s largest open-air prison.

But rewriting history (and regurgitating jokes from 1996) is hardly  
the movie’s worst crime. The portrayal of Palestinians as ugly, dirty,  
incompetent, stupid, goat loving terrorists was jammed down the  
viewer’s throat more times than Zohan’s lame hummus jokes. It becomes  
obvious to the audience why these good looking, suave, kindhearted  
Israelis have to kill these evil Palestinian "terrorists"—because they  
hate Jews more than they hate soap. The most egregious grievance by a  
Palestinian "terrorist" throughout the film was the stealing of a pet  
goat. Israel has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians since the start  
of the second intifada, including nearly a 1000 children, yet the main  
gripe of these rabid "terrorists" is a stereotypical love for hillside  
animals. This "inoffensive" scenario is the equivalent of a scene in a  
Hollywood "comedy" made by a Palestinian filmmaker stereotypically  
portraying Jews as pissed off about being sent to Auschwitz because  
they found out that Hitler was going to make them pay for the train  
ride.

A particular scene in Zohan went beyond comprehension: Sandler’s  
casting agency rounded up a handful of children to play Palestinians  
throwing rocks at Zohan. What does Zohan do in response to the actions  
of these soon-to-be terrorists? He gleefully catches the stones and  
turns them into the equivalent of a balloon animal. One is supposed to  
toss aside any arising sensitivities and overlook the many instances  
Israeli snipers and soldiers have shot Palestinian children in the  
head or taken their eyes out with rubber bullets because of these  
rocks Zohan takes with a smile. The posturing of the noble and affable  
Mossad agent is a slick attempt to humanize Israel and make the Mossad  
(an outfit that has engaged in countless operations of state  
terrorism) look like the valiant GI Joe force in the Middle East  
combating jihadi thugs in the name of good. But Sandler’s character is  
not only a hero, he’s also a humanitarian. There are multiple scenes  
where Zohan informs the audience that Israelis do their best to  
minimize the loss of innocent Palestinian life, when an examination of  
the conflict by Israeli human rights organizations exposes quite the  
opposite.

Other stereotypes saturate the movie. The Palestinian salon that Zohan  
gets a job at is described as a dump, Palestinians constantly cheer  
for the "terrorists," a crowd of Palestinians applaud the death of  
"heroic" Zohan (which he faked), and the "terrorists" are so stupid  
and illiterate that they purchase Neosporin instead of liquid nitrogen  
to make their bomb to kill Zohan. There is no distinction made between  
Hezbollah, Hamas, jihadists, and terrorist sexcapading sheiks.  
Furthermore, the film conveniently illustrates how Israelis in the US,  
as "fellow" natives of the Middle East, suffer the same discrimination  
and tribulations as Arabs in a post-911 world. Oddly, Israelis are  
passed off as "brown" and "other" like the Arabs in the film, yet  
Zohan’s parents look like European Ashkenazi Jews. Moreover, while  
Israelis are shown as native hummus loving Middle Easterners, Zohan’s  
family is portrayed distinctively differently from the backwards  
Arabs. Zohan’s parents are sweet, comforting, reasonable and accepting  
from beginning to end, not rigid like their Arab counterparts. Even  
when Zohan finally captures Dalia’s heart, his parents show up in  
America and warmly embrace their relationship without question—while  
Dalia and others resist the notion of a courtship between the two and  
tells Zohan that her family would never accept him. Ah, if only all  
Arabs could just get to know Israelis and see how kind, generous, and  
amorous they all are, the sooner we could all sit in a circle singing  
Kumbaya over s’mores and unfunny Zohan hummus jokes.

The worst dialogue throughout this 102 minute laughless action flick  
is made by Dalia (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui), Zohan’s eventual  
Palestinian love interest. She serves at the omnipotent propagandist— 
blaming the troubles of the conflict on "extremists" and "hate" on  
both sides. She endlessly and vaguely laments about how much "hate"  
there is "over there," and describes to Zohan that things are  
"different here." As any knowledgeable American knows, Palestinians  
and Israelis love each other here in the US; they frequently have bake  
sales together; they form sit-ins for blind coexistence on college  
campuses; and have Palestinian/Israeli karaoke nights where they sing  
their favorite Beatles tunes like Give Peace a Chance. What Sandler,  
and co-writers Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, fail to understand is  
that before there was Hamas, Yasser Arafat, Fatah, the PLO, or any  
resistance movement, there was the dispossession of the Palestinian  
people, whereby 780,000 indigenous Palestinians were displaced from  
their homeland by Jewish gangs and terror groups. Flash forward 60  
years and the Palestinian people are living in squalor in demolished  
towns and refugee camps enduring a 40 year occupation that  
strangulates their economy and diminishes any semblance of normalcy or  
a proper life. What we are to believe by watching this film is that if  
everyone would just stop "hating" (which Israelis are depicted as  
clearly willing to do, while Palestinians resist it vehemently)  
Israelis and Palestinians could effortlessly live together in harmony.  
But "hate" has little to do with a conflict rooted in a people’s  
desire for basic human rights and an end to oppression.

In the end, everything ends up happy and joyful: Zohan gets the girl,  
he saves the block from a conniving mall developer, and the  
"terrorists" stop terrorizing. But the jovial ending left a sour taste  
in my mouth. As nearly a dozen "nameless" Palestinians were killed by  
innocent and heroic Israeli soldiers last week and another report of  
the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza went unnoticed in the US press,  
people were laughing all over the country at how stupid, feeble,  
violent and backwards Arabs are. A diehard Sandler fan proclaimed:  
"He's making it for 13 year old boys. It's Critic Proof." That’s what  
scares me most of all.

Remi Kanazi is the editor of the forthcoming anthology of poetry,  
Poets For Palestine, which can be pre-ordered at www.PoetsForPalestine.com 
. Remi can be contacted at remroum at gmail.com.


Remi Kanazi is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global  
Research Articles by Remi Kanazi