Reel Bad Arabs - The Jewel of the Nile 1985
In my previous 5 articles I began the task of debunking the silly, unsupported notion that Hollywood and its Jews portray Arabs and Muslims as stereotypical villains as alleged in the YouTube video Planet of The Arabs.
This is post number 6 in the category Muslim Stereotypes where we will discuss the scene at the 3:54 mark in the video above.
The clip is from the film The Jewel of the Nile (1985), which takes place in Kadir, a fictional Arab country in the African desert.
Now one can argue that if the film is called The Jewel of the Nile, it is not inappropriate to set the action in a North African country. In addition, there are not too many choices of ethnic groups in North Africa. I suppose the writers, Mark Rosenthal and long-time writing partner Lawrence Konner (obvious Jews), could have chosen Berbers instead of Arabs, but American audiences cannot tell the difference between a Berber and an Arab (and neither can anyone else, so why bother?). In addition, there are 21 countries in the Arab League, but not a single country one can call Berber (even if half of Morocco is Berber), so it would have been silly to call Kadir a Berber country.
Sadly, if the action takes place in North Africa, we are stuck with Arabs.
Now in all successful Hollywood films there are good guys and bad guys. Jewel of the Nile is a sequel to Romancing the Stone, with Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito, so we cannot suddenly make them the bad guys.
To make this film work, an Arab named Omar, the ruler of Kadir, has to be the villain. It's nothing personal.
At the 3:54 mark we see Omar approaching Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) in a threatening manner and is then kicked over the parapet by Jack Colton (Michael Douglas). This is supposed to show Hollywood's stereotyping of Arabs.
The film does not say that all Arabs or Muslims are terrorists. Just this guy Omar who happens to be Arab because if the writers made him the Norwegian Ruler of a mythical Arab desert kingdom the audience would have left the theater in the first ten minutes. One can only distort reality in films so much before the audience decides to stop the willing suspension of disbelief.
The well-known names of North African dictators like Bourguiba, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Muammar al-Gaddafi, made it impossible to choose a villain in North Africa that was not Arab.
Omar was chosen as an Arab and as a villain because newspaper accounts of Arab leaders in North Africa made this representation of him believable. And as I mentioned earlier, you cannot screw with audiences' perception of truth and reality.
This film was not depicting an Arab ruler acting in any way other than how genuine Arab rulers themselves act in the real world. This is not stereotyping. If the majority of Arab rulers were nice guys, then depicting a single Arab ruler as evil would be stereotyping. Sorry, Jack Shaheen, your book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a people, is a big FAIL.
In a bit of related trivia, Konner, the co-writer of The Jewel of the Nile in 2003 produced Persons of Interest, a feature-length documentary about the illegal detentions of thousands of Muslims in the aftermath of September 11, which premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and which was very sympathetic to the Muslim point of view, so it would be hard to argue that Konner went out of his way to purposely depict a negative view of Arabs in The Jewel of the Nile.
