Excerpt:
Last month, as part of its Race in Hollywood series, Turner Classic Movies featured "Arab Images in Film." Dr. Jack Shaheen accompanied TCM host Robert Osborne in the screening of more than 30 movies. The selections proved entertaining and instructive, though perhaps not in the way Dr. Shaheen intended.
Jack Shaheen is the author of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Olive Branch Press, 2001), hailed by some film scholars as a courageous expose of Hollywood's racist stereotypes aimed at Arabs and Middle East culture. Shaheen, of Lebanese parentage, traces interest in this theme from his early days watching television.
He has since come across more than a thousand movies he views as detrimental to Arabs, such as Team America Secret Police and Blackhawk Down, and a few he sees as beneficial. These include The Chronicles of Riddick, Flightplan, and Kingdom of Heaven, a tale of the Crusades starring Ghassan Massoud as Saladin.