Yesterday, in my article Reel Bad Arabs - The Rules of Engagement 2000, I began the task of debunking the nonsense that Hollywood (and the Jews who control it) unfairly portray Arabs and Muslims as terrorist stereotypes; a claim made in the yourube video Planet of The Arabs.

This is post number 2 of a 13 post series in the category Muslim Stereotypes.

At the 0:59 mark in the video, actor Art Malik playing Arab terrorist Salim Abu Aziz announces: "You have murdered our women, and our children, and bombed our cities from afar, like cowards, and you dare to call "us" terrorists?"

This line is from the film True Lies.

Although most of the film is a comedy, here is the serious plot line: an Arab terrorist comes to America demanding that America pull all military forces out of the Persian gulf area or he'll kill thousands of Americans. Now where does Hollywood get such strange and outrageous ideas? Actually, most of the plot is based on the 1991 French film La Totale! (see, Hollywood isn't the only place that views Arab terrorists as evil).

However, I believe that writer/director James Cameron was inspired to add the "threat of mass killing if the US didn't get out of the Middle East" from real world events that occurred only a year and a half before the film hit the theaters: specifically the 1993 World Trade Center bombing on 26 February 1993.

For those Americans who usually and quickly forget these kinds of things, in 1991 Ramzi Yousef, a Muslim born in Kuwait, started planning a bombing attack within the United States. According to journalist Steve Coll ¹, Yousef mailed letters to various New York newspapers just before the attack in which he made various demands, one of which was for the United States to end interference "with any of the Middle East countries' interior affairs." He stated that the attack on the World Trade Center would be merely the first of such attacks if his demands were not met.

So is James Cameron (who is not Jewish) being unfair or dishonest in the portrayal of Salim Abu Aziz, or simply dramatizing what he read in the newspapers in 1993?

Cameron took some flak shortly after the film's release for being anti-Arab. However, there is anti-Arab, and there is accuracy and truth. If Cameron portrayed ordinary Arabs in America sneaking into hospitals and drinking the blood of Christian children, I would be the first to condemn Cameron and the film for the grotesque lie.

But the film is not about an ordinary, moderate, regular Arab in America who suddenly one day wakes up and decides to get a nuclear weapon to kick American ass. This film is about an Arab terrorist, an extremist, a whack-job who doesn't care how many infidels he kills. What is inaccurate, what is untruthful about this portrayal? Aren't all terrorists stereotypically insane, murderous, barbaric thugs?

Now here's an interesting bit of related trivia, Art Malik played the role of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in Path to Paradise, a 1997 made-for-TV film about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

At this point I should mention that Malik doesn't always play the bad guy. In the 1987 James Bond Flick The Living Daylights, he is a Mujahideen leader who helps James Bond infiltrate a Soviet air base.

Yes, Hollywood does purposely portray Arab terrorists as evil, but wouldn't it be immoral to make them appear as humane, kind, misunderstood ordinary souls?