In such films, Israeli Jews and their American friends are frequently played by popular and good-looking Jewish-American actors such as Paul Newman, Tony Curtis, and Kirk Douglas, as well as handsome non-Jewish actors such as Yul Brynner, John Wayne, Jane Fonda, Frank Sinatra, Charlton Heston, George Peppard, Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arabs, predictably, are routinely portrayed as and cruel, cynical, and ugly.
During a publicity interview for her 1981 film "Rollover" (in which "the Arabs" destroy the world financial system), actress Jane Fonda, "the progressive leftist" of the 1960s, bluntly expressed her own bigoted view of Arabs: "If we are not afraid of the Arabs, we'd better examine our heads. They have strategic power over us. They are unstable, they are fundamentalists, tyrants, anti-women, anti-free press."10
It is not possible to recount here all of Hollywood's many anti-Arab or anti-Muslim pictures over the last several decades, but here are some representative productions:
In "Exodus" (1960), brutal Arabs kill an attractive 15-year-old Jewish girl played by Jill Hayworth; in "Cast a Giant Shadow" (1966), Arabs leer and laugh as they shoot an Israeli woman trapped in a truck; in "Network" (1976, and winner of four Academy Awards), a crusading television news commentator warns that Arabs, "the medieval fanatics," are taking control of the US; in "Black Sunday" (1977) an Israeli plays the hero, while Arabs are the villains and terrorists who want to kill Superbowl spectators, including the President of the United States; in "The Delta Force" (1986), "Iron Eagle" (1986), and "Death Before Dishonor" (1987), Hollywood shows viewers how to deal decisively with the low-life, no-good, dirty Arab terrorists; in the Disney studio's animated film production, "Aladdin" (1992), the theme song brazenly refers to Arabia as barbaric ("It's barbaric, but hey, it's home"); in "True Lies" (1994), an Arab terrorist with nuclear weapons has to be stopped; in "Executive Decision" (1996) yet another group of Arab militants hijacks an American plane; and in "Kazaam" (1996), an Arab criminal and a black genie enjoy eating a "centuries-old Arab delicacy," a plate of goats' eyes.
More recent motion pictures with negative images of Arabs or Muslims include "Not Without My Daughter" and "The Siege". In "The Siege", Muslims wage a bombing campaign against innocent Americans. In response, federal authorities declare martial law and carry out mass arrests of Muslims and Arabs across the United States.11
Television
It is difficult to exaggerate the role played by television in shaping the mindset and outlook of the American people. Dr. George Gerbner, former Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, put it this way: "Television, more than any single institution, molds American behavioral norms and values. And the more TV we watch, the more we tend to believe in the world according to TV, even though much of what we see is misleading."12
Like the US motion picture industry, American television is dominated by Jews and supporters of Zionism. While American Jews constitute only about two or three percent of the US population,13 Irving Pearlberg, a Jewish-American television writer, maintains that no less than 40 percent of American television writers are Jewish.14 During the early 1990s, notes New York University professor Norman Cantor, "one TV network was already headed by a Jew (Laurence Tisch at CBS), and Jews are prominent executives and producers at the other two major networks as well."15
Ben Stein, Jewish-American author of The View From Sunset Boulevard, forthrightly acknowledged:16
A distinct majority, especially of the writers of situation comedies, is Jewish ... TV people have certain likes ... and dislikes ... and these likes and dislikes are translated into television programming. In turn, this problem raises the public acceptance of the favored groups and the public dislikes of the resented groups.
Given this reality, it is hardly surprising that one rarely, if ever, sees a Jewish or Israeli figure portrayed as a villain on American television. On the contrary, Israelis in particular and the Jews in general are routinely portrayed in the American mass media as heroic, insightful, sophisticated, witty, intelligent, compassionate, physically attractive, confident, humane, and successful.
On the other hand, like the Arab in Hollywood movies, the US television Arab is often physically unappealing, wealthy, stupid, sexist, crude, lazy, uncultured, cruel, rude, greedy, fanatical, antiAmerican, and anti-Christian. He is often portrayed as a terrorist, a plane hijacker, a polygamist, a ***-maniac, a hostage-taker, a murderer, a kidnapper of young blond-haired, blue-eyed women, an as an oil sheikh blackmailer, and oddly dressed (often in a red-checkered kuffiyyah headdress, or in ungainly gowns or robes).
News reporting on American television, as well as its presentations of history and other serious subjects, routinely has a distinctly pro-Israeli or pro-Jewish slant. This is understandable, of course, given the prominent role of Jews in television news departments, and the many Jews (often with obvious Zionist biases) employed as reporters, frequently covering the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Middle East generally.
Seldom does America's Zionist-oriented media fairly present the Arab or Muslim point of view, particularly on such issues as the plight of displaced Palestinians, oil polities, or the struggle against Western imperialism. For example, the Zionists who invaded Arab Palestine during the 1930s and 40s, are frequently (and misleadingly) referred to as "homeless" Jews. Similarly, Israeli military actions against Arabs over the last 50 years are routinely justified as acts of "retaliation" against Palestinian and Arab aggression or terrorism.
Whereas the Zionist-Jewish point of view is frequently presented on American television without challenge, the Arab or Muslim point of view (when is even adequately given) is often presented only together with a "balancing" Zionist-Jewish perspective.
In addition to producing films and programming that are supportive of Israel, and distorting the views and positions of Arabs and Muslims (especially with regard to the struggle against the Zionist occupation of Palestine), Hollywood and the American television networks effectively censor pro-Arab and pro-Muslim motion pictures and television programming. During the 1970s, for example, American motion picture theaters and television networks boycotted and "killed" a pro-Palestinian film produced by Vanessa Redgrave, the well-known British actress and leftist activist.
James McCartney, a veteran American journalist, once said what many Arabs and Muslims have thought for decades:17
It is my personal belief that if the media as a whole in the western world bad done an adequate job in reporting from the Middle East, it would not have been necessary for the Palestinians to resort to violence to draw attention to their case.
Christian Apologists
Many non-Jews also help promote a distorted pro-Zionist and anti-Arab portrayal of the past and present on American television. This is especially true of the Christian fundamentalist "televangelists" - such as Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggert, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and Oral Roberts - who have dominated America's "religious" broadcasting. These passionate defenders of Israel and Zionism show no sympathy for the plight of fellow Christians under Zionist rule, but even castigate Christian and Muslim Palestinians for resisting Zionist oppression and the Jewish subjugation of their historic homeland. This is not only tragic, but ironic in light of the fact that Israel treats the Christians (and Muslims) under its rule essentially as second-class citizens.
Such apologists for Israel often engage in gross distortions of history. For example, some Christian televangelists cite alleged massacres of Hebrews in ancient times (portrayed as the equivalent of modern Israelis) at the hands of the Assyrians (who are portrayed as the equivalent of modern-day Arab Syrians), and at the hands of the Babylonians (portrayed as the equivalent of modern-day Arab Iraqis). Ignored, however, is any mention of the numerous ancient Hebrew massacres of Philistines (the ancestors of today's Palestinians), as reported in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). In the Sixth Chapter of the book of Joshua, for example, we read as follows: "And they [Hebrews] utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and , with the edge of the sword."18