Reel Bad Arabs - The Hitman
In my previous article Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People, I pointed out villains are a necessary ingredient in Hollywood films.
However, people from other cultures and less competitive societies may not understand that American audiences only enjoy movies where heroes fight villains, where good triumphs over evil, and where obstacle after obstacle is thrown up yet overcome by our protagonist.
So when Arabs, Muslims, or Middle Easterners see themselves depicted in films as evil terrorists, they do not understand that this has nothing to do with racism or bigotry but rather is simply a plot device. Hollywood needs villains.
This is post number 5 in the category Muslim Stereotypes where we examine the YouTube video Planet of The Arabs, in which the claim is made that Hollywood relentlessly vilifies and dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims.
So lets examine another clip: At the 2:48 mark, we are introduced to a scene from the 1991 film The Hitman, where we hear Chuck Norris calling a bunch of Iranian drug dealers "camel jockeys".
Anyone with American film savvy knows that insulting someone's race, mother, wife, weight, ethnicity or food choices is done for provocation purposes, that is, to start a fight or get someone angry, and has nothing to do with racism or bigotry.
Seattle cop Cliff Garret (Chuck Norris) is undercover to take down the organizations of Italian and French mob bosses. Does this mean Hollywood Jews hate the Italians and the French? Obviously not. As for Garret, he treats every criminal with equal contempt because they are criminals, not because they are Italian or French or Iranian.
When the "camel jockey" insult doesn't stir them into a fight, he takes a taste of their hummus and asks, "You guys eat this shit?" Now everyone knows that hummus is delicious, and Garrett is feigning disgust to make the Iranians angry. Garret is no more prejudiced against the Iranians because of their ethnicity or religion than he is against the hummus.
When a cop in a movie insults an Italian mobster to provoke him, no one really believes the cop is anti-Italian or that the Jew who produced or wrote the screenplay has it in for Italians. So please, Ahmed, get over it.
When HBO put on the Sopranos, about a mob family that runs illegal activities in New Jersey, should they have substituted Swedes instead of Italians to avoid charges of stereotyping Italians? It happens that Italian mobsters do indeed control the rackets in New Jersey, why lie about it?
But why depict Iranian drug dealers? Well, the simple truth is that Iranian drug dealers are the main source of supply of Afghanistan's opium and heroin production accounting for 90 percent of the world's illicit drug trade in those products (1). It is interesting to note that in the real world Iranian drug smugglers have killed more than 3,600 Iranian law enforcement officers in the past two decades and are Iran's biggest criminal problem. Something for which they have yet to blame the Jews.
So Hollywood wasn't portraying stereotypes, but actual real-life characters.
Fars News Agency, Envoy Underscores Iran's Leading Role in Fighting DrugsAfghanistan continues to account for 90 percent of the world's illicit opium and heroin production, the UN drugs monitoring body said in its 2010 report."Most of this product is trafficked across Iran's borders. We urge the international community to pay more attention to this issue," Khazaie emphasized.
...
Iran lies on a major drug route between Afghanistan and Europe, as well as the Persian Gulf states. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iranian police have lost more than 3500 of their personnel in the country's combat against narcotics.
During the past Iranian year (ended on March 20,) Iran seized more than 1,000 tons of opium smuggled from Afghanistan, the largest producer of opium poppy in the world.
