The TV Terrorist: Media Images of Middle Easterners

Yahya R. Kamalipour is professor of mass communications and head of the Department of Communication and Creative Arts, Purdue University Calumet, Indiana. His most recent books include Images of the US around the World: A Multicultural Perspective (SUNY Press, 1999) and Religion, Law, and Freedom: A Global Perspective (Greenwood Press, 2000) with J. Thierstein.

 

I

n the contemporary global environment, the mass media, particularly the visual media, are extremely powerful. In fact, their collective power surpasses family, religious, educational and other traditional institutions. Jane Campbell argues that “the daily barrage of images and information emerging from the media may not only underscore but may also counter, reverse, and overturn the enlightenment gained inside the classroom”.¹

 

Today, the first stories that children hear are told by television, not by parents. According to George Gerbner,

 

A child today is born into a home in which television is on an average of over seven hours a day. For the first time in human history, most of the stories about people, life, and values are told not by parents, schools, churches, or others in the community who have something to tell but by distant conglomerates that have something to sell.²

 

Almost simultaneously with the writing of this article, two hostage-taking incidents resulted in the release of captives in two different parts of the world: one in Bogota, Colombia, and the other in Cebu, the Philippines. Although tracing the ways in which these two stories were reported by the US media would yield some useful conclusions, let me just cite two newspaper headlines to illustrate the imbalance and inequity that exist in reporting stories involving Muslims and non-Muslims. “Colombian Priest Freed after 6 Days in Captivity: Rebels Suspected; Prelate Has Political Ties” was the headline in the Chicago Tribune reporting the release of a Catholic priest by kidnappers.³ On the other hand, “Muslim Rebels Release Four European Hostages” was the headline in the Munster Times reporting the release of four European hostages from a southern Philippines jungle.⁴ I have also heard, read and seen similar disparities in accounts of these two incidents in radio, television and magazine reports. It seems that regardless of the circumstances, whenever a disgruntled member of the Islamic faith is engaged in unfortunate incidents such as hijackings or kidnappings, reporters are eager to reveal his religious affiliation. In fact, labels such as “Muslim terrorists”, “Muslim rebels”, “Muslim guerrillas” and “Muslim fundamentalists” have become a standard part of the vocabulary used by many politicians and journalists. Consequently, these labels have permeated the everyday language and even the psyche of the general population, including high-school students.

Students’ Perceptions

“What images come to your mind when you think of the Middle East and Muslims?” This was a question that I posed to nearly five hundred high-school students in five cities throughout northern Indiana during a 1997 world affairs conference for which I was the principal speaker.⁵ I asked students to write, without censoring themselves, whatever images came to their minds immediately after hearing certain terms. The following results, compiled in no particular order, reveal the impact of the mass media on students’ perceptions of the Middle East, Arabs, Muslims, Iranians and Israelis:

Middle East

War, terrorism, dangerous, oil, desert, hot, camels, sand, Saddam Hussein, Kuwait, the Gulf War, PLO, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, hate, fanatics, radical, destruction, oppression, dark skin, dress funny, black veils, cab drivers, oppressed women, OPEC, always in news.

Arabs

Terrorists, Muslims, turbans, veils, hijackers, dark skins, wealth, poverty, tents, sand, sheikhs, oil, robes, harems, religious, repression, Arabian horses, anti-American, Ali Baba, Aladdin, rebels, sandals, cab drivers, Mecca, Saddam Hussein, belly dancing.

Muslims

Strict religion, mosques, Muhammad, long robes, veiled women, always praying, Mecca, holy war, Arabs, violence, terrorism, no women rights, Allah, Koran, religious, poverty, dark skin, harems, sacrifice, inequality, militant, war, Middle East, anti-American, strong beliefs.

Iranians

Ayatollahs, Khomeini, extremism, hostages, anti-American, war, oil, mean people, dark skin, terrorism, religious, poverty, Muslims, strict, fanatical, Not without My Daughter, sand, Arabs, death, hated, Saddam Hussein, Iran–Contra, missiles, oppression.

Israelis

Jerusalem, Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat, PLO, Rabin, war, American allies, hate Arabs, Palestinians, Holy Land, Jewish, religious, Star of David, Hebrews, Moses, Hanukah, West Bank, fighting, death, secrecy, peace process, powerful, Bible, terrorism, strict religion, bombings.

Implications

Quite obviously, the students’ overall perceptions of the Middle East, Arabs, Muslims and Iranians were overwhelmingly negative, while their perceptions of the Israelis generally tended to be neutral to positive. For instance, while the respondents referred to Arabs, Muslims and Iranians as “anti-American”, they referred to Israelis as “American allies”. Also, many stereotypical and prejudicial labels such as “dark skin”, “turbans”, “terrorists” or “dangerous” were used only to describe the non-Israelis.

 

Because of the strikingly similar responses given by students who lived miles apart, I routinely had to point out the participants’ overwhelmingly negative perception of the Middle East and ask whether there was anything positive that they could have ascribed to Middle Easterners or Muslims. In every city, while only a few students were surprised by the negative results, others admitted that they could not think of anything positive. Also, some of the students commented that they could not even recall having seen anything positive about the Middle East and Muslims in the media.

 

Subsequently, I distributed a map of the Middle East and asked the students to point out any distinction in terms of culture, language, geography, history or politics between the countries of the Middle East. Once again, they generally appeared to think of the Middle East as a “big blob” devoid of any geographical variation or cultural diversity. Only Israel was mentioned as a country having a distinct religion, language, culture and politics. They generally failed to mention, for instance, that Iran and Afghanistan are two Middle Eastern countries whose inhabitants are historically and culturally different from the Arabs and speak in Farsi or Persian, not Arabic. Nor did they mention the distinct cultural, geographical and political variations that exist between and within Arab nations such as Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or the differences between the two main Muslim sects, Shi’a and Sunni.

The Indoctrination Process

The stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims dates back to the Middle Ages, when the expansion of Islam into Europe pitted Arab against European, leading to Western cultural and political efforts to discredit Arabic/Islamic culture. In fact, from The Sheik in 1921 to Rules of Engagement in 2000, Hollywood has continued its relentless attack, with a few minor exceptions, on the Middle East, Islam and the Arabs. The indoctrination process begins early. During the childhood period, negative portrayals of Middle Easterners in movies such as Aladdin (1991) and fairy tales such as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” set the stage. In other words, a context is provided so that future movies and other entertainment materials can easily be built upon it. Gradually, the amount and intensity of such propaganda increases to the point that by adulthood, viewers are bombarded with sensational and harmful portrayals of the Middle East and Muslims in such Hollywood concoctions as Executive Decision (1996) and The Siege (1998). These media images then become public perceptions—the very basis for human interaction.⁶

 

According to Krista Wiegand and Abbas Malek, “distorted perceptions of Islamic culture have been customary in Western society for a long time. A long-standing distrust between Muslims and Christians has defined the pattern.”

 

In the West, during the last few decades of the twentieth century, Islamic culture has been dissected, deciphered, and categorized in numerous degrees of interpretation. Most of the analyses have been based on ethnocentric thought, generating a massive amount of negatively toned literature about Islamic culture. The key problem is a lack of cultural relativity, which allows one to judge another culture by its standards rather than by using Western standards. However, because of deep-rooted, distorted perceptions of Islamic culture, receptivity to cultural relativity is low in the West.⁷

 

Having that historical distrust in mind, it is no wonder that in August 2000 a plan to locate a mosque in southwest Palos Heights in the Chicago metropolitan area was aborted due to rallies and protests by the residents of that community.⁸ Unfortunately, today the mass media fuel and even exacerbate the existing mistrust between Muslims and Christians.

The Terrorism Fixation

In the past two decades, the issue of terrorism has thoroughly dominated the discourse of “Middle East” and “Islam” in the popular media (radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, music, motion pictures). For instance, between 1990 and 2000, over twenty high-profile and action-packed movies, including Under Siege (1992), True Lies (1994), Under Siege 2 (1995), Executive Decision (1996), The Peacemaker (1997), The Siege (1998) and Arlington Road (1999), contributed to the pervasively negative images of the Middle East and Muslims.⁹ Note the following lyrics from the blockbuster cartoon movie Aladdin (1991): “Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam; Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face; It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” In Executive Decision (1996), an Arab terrorist group, whose leader “Nagi Hassan” (David Suchet) is portrayed as a devout Muslim, hijacks a 747 jet full of passengers heading for Washington, D.C. In one scene he is shown praying and in another holding the Koran as he tries to justify his action to a frightened flight attendant.

 

The anti–Middle East and anti-Muslim portrayals are not confined to the movies or to printed materials. The various published and broadcast reports concerning the Oklahoma City bombing tragedy in 1995, the crash of a TWA Boeing 747 in 1996 and the bombing incident at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, provide further illustrations of a mindset that almost automatically assumes, often without a shred of evidence, that every terrorist act committed in the United States or abroad must somehow be linked to Muslims and Middle Easterners. Suffice it to say that in August 2000, after a lengthy and thorough investigation, it was officially announced that mechanical malfunction was the cause of the TWA crash. It was also found that disillusioned Americans, not Muslims or Middle Easterners, had carried out both the Oklahoma City and Atlanta Olympic bombings.

Portrayals of Iranians

As a member of the Iranian community in the United States, I would like to explore some of the disturbing ramifications of US media representations of the Middle East by briefly illustrating Hollywood’s portrayal of Iranians.

 

Prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Americans knew very little, if anything, about Iran. If asked, few could even place Iran on the world map. However, some had heard of an exotic, faraway, fairy tale land called Persia. (In fact, many still do not equate Iran with Persia.) Persia was also associated with Persian cats, Persian rugs, Persian pistachios, Persian princes and Persian melons. Then, and even now, most Americans did not know that Iran is a non-Arab country and that Iranians speak in Persian or Farsi, not Arabic. Prior to 1979, they had not even heard the words “ayatollah” or “Shi’ite Muslims”.

 

Ironically, for the Iranians who resided in the United States prior to 1979, the absence of a stereotypical image was a blessing. By this I mean that Iranians could define themselves individually because they were not yet typecast, nor were they associated with the existing negative images.¹⁰

 

The 1979 revolution, and particularly the hostage crisis, ignited a “war of images” between Iran and the United States that still continues. Hostilities between the US and Iranian governments, and the antagonistic media coverage of Iran, have resulted in an image of Iran that evokes hate, terrorism, fanaticism, backwardness, lawlessness and lack of respect for human rights and freedom. In fact, the hostage crisis received more continuous television coverage than any story in years. Consequently, Iran became a “hot” story throughout the world, and the mass media became the only source of news and information about Iran, hostages and the revolution. Warren Christopher, US deputy secretary of state at the time of the embassy seizure, has criticised media coverage of the hostage crisis for its lack of depth:

 

A more serious failing was the tendency to report events outside of any historical framework. At the outset of the crisis, the American people probably knew next to nothing about Iran and its history. While a better perspective on the cultural and political traditions of Iran would not have made the hostage seizure any more acceptable or justifiable, it might have made the episode more understandable and could have encouraged a calmer and more deliberate reaction. In particular, the hatred of the Iranians for the United States could be understood only against the background of gross and prolonged abuses by the Shah and the history of U.S. involvement with him, and this perspective too often was missing.¹¹

 

Similarly, James Bill has argued that Americans did not have the information to foresee the revolution, nor did they have the information to understand it. Rather than providing a context and explaining the history of American–Iranian relations, the media focused on sensationalism. Blindfolded hostages were shown on television repeatedly—in fact, this scene was incorporated into the opening collage of many television news programmes in the United States. Images were essentially substituted for explanation of the unfolding events in Tehran.¹² These images have been engraved in the psyches of those Americans who witnessed, mainly through television, that unfortunate event. Consequently, Iran lost its exotic, faraway, fairy tale image forever.

The War of Images

In 1980, Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini received so much TV coverage that a newspaper columnist dubbed American television “Ayatollah Television”.¹³

 

In concert with television, motion pictures, newspapers, magazines, talk shows, recorded music, jokes, bumper stickers, buttons, dart boards, T-shirts and toilet paper all trivialised Iranians. As if by magic, Tehran’s temperature, Iran’s currency and “Iran” in general disappeared from the rosters of newspapers and telephone directories. Even the sticker on the Persian melon was replaced to exclude the world “Persian”. The name “Iran” became a curse.

 

With the release of the hostages, the “hostage crisis” was transformed into a “hostage industry”.¹⁴ Many of the ex-hostages became celebrities, writers and speakers. The music industry released several anti-Iranian songs, including the national radio hit “They Can Take Their Oil and Shove It”.

 

Hollywood had found a new nemesis. Some of its stereotypical and anti-Iranian movies include Peacemaker (1997), in which a character, apparently without any context, says “f... Iran”. In The Hitman (1991), several criminal gangs join together to demolish an Iranian gang operating in Canada. The movie not only reinforces the stereotypical images of Iranians as unreliable, dangerous, cruel and fanatical, it also—as often is the case—makes no distinction between Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. Belly dancing, humus (an Arabic food) and other cultural representations of the Middle East blend together to portray a region devoid of any diversity. No cultural distinction is made between Arabs and Iranians, Turks and Kurds, Saudis and Egyptians. In fact, on Friday, 9 May 1997, the CBS television network aired an episode of the military adventure series JAG in which several terrorists belonging to the Palestinian Hamas group besieged a Washington hospital. They spoke fluent Farsi (or Persian), not Arabic.

 

Perhaps one of the most damaging Hollywood movies is Not without My Daughter (1990), which is based on a book of the same title by an American, Betty Mahmoody, who was once married to an Iranian physician, Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody. Note the following synopsis from the cover of the book: “In August 1984, Michigan housewife Betty Mahmoody accompanied her husband to his native Iran for a two-week vacation. To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans are despised.”¹⁵ According to Jane Campbell,

 

Not Without My Daughter ignores diversity and individuality. The film portrays all Iranians as fundamentalist Muslims bent on restoring women’s subordination. Although positioning itself as a film with feminist content, nowhere do we see any evidence of women supporting each other, except in the service of patriarchy. The female characters appear fanatical and demonic. We see no evidence of a women’s movement nor a shred of hope for social justice in “this backward, primitive country,” as Betty Mahmoody describes it.¹⁶

 

A New York Times movie critic echoed Campbell’s assertion: “Though Not Without My Daughter exploits the stereotype of the demonic Iranian, an idea with some political currency right now, it is not an exploitation film. It is, however, an utter artistic failure, and its reliance on cultural stereotypes is a major cause.”¹⁷ In an attempt to humiliate and demoralise the Iranian soccer team and its supporters, a major French television network, obviously knowing the highly negative impact of the film on viewers, aired it prior to the scheduled match between Iran and the United States at the 1998 World Cup. Since 1990, when the film was first released, it has been shown repeatedly on various American and non-American television networks.

 

Madhouse (1990), partially centring on a wealthy Iranian who is in the process of divorcing his American wife, is another damaging example. In one scene, the wife utters such insults to her husband as “you goddamn towel heads, sand rats”, and so on. Other Hollywood movies that similarly belittle Iranians and reinforce stereotypical images of them are Naked Gun (1988), Under Siege (1986), The Delta Force (1986), Into the Night (1985), Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1985), Threads (1984), The Final Options (1983), Silver Bears (1978), and many made-for-television features and docudramas such as On Wings of Eagles (1986) and Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper (1981).

Casualties of the Image War

Unfortunately, wars (whether fought by traditional weapons or modern weapons such as the mass media) produce casualties. And in the contemporary war of images, Middle Easterners, particularly Iranians, continue to suffer from a relentless attack by some US politicians and the mass media. Although the overall situation is improving, Iranian travellers are often singled out and searched at airports. Iranians face tough restrictions in obtaining visas to the United States, whether for touring, studying or visiting relatives. Discrimination against Iranians has increased in practically every sector of American society, including the US justice system. Strangely enough, in divorce cases involving marriages between Iranians and Americans, US attorneys have often used Betty Mahmoody’s book, Not without My Daughter, as “evidence” to prove that Iranian fathers are unreliable and hence should be denied any visitation rights with their own children. It is often believed that Iranian fathers may kidnap their children and take them to Iran, a backward, strange and unruly country, as portrayed in books, newspapers and magazines, on radio and television programmes, and in movies.

 

Other discriminatory incidents include the following: in spring 1997, a radio talk-show host in the San Francisco Bay area made a number of offensive remarks against Iranians shortly after a devastating earthquake in northeastern Iran. In an on-the-air conversation with radio listeners, she reportedly commented that not only would she not send a penny to help the earthquake victims, but rather, if she had the means, she would bomb Iran off the surface of the earth.

 

As another case in point, a Washington Post reporter, in an article about counterfeit money, wrote: “Those darn Iranians, will they stop at nothing? Sponsoring terrorism, trying to get nuclear weapons, printing fake $100 bills.”¹⁸

Power and Responsibility

In this so-called Information Age, the global media (mainly American) play a powerful and decisive role in the enhancement or destruction of images of other peoples, places, religions and nations of the world. Hence,

 

comprehending the power and influence of global media is certainly a crucial step toward understanding the global society. Furthermore, working toward achieving a relative state of peace, mutual respect and harmony in international relations requires knowledge of all the forces (war, hunger, economic inequalities, pollution, deforestation, diseases, overpopulation, etc.) that play a role in our lives, including those forces (mass media) that focus our thoughts on certain issues, distract us from other issues, or form our perceptions of other people and places.¹⁹

 

It is true that, historically speaking, no cultural group or nation has been spared from the abuses of scapegoating, stereotyping or animosity. But today such mindless and harmful abuses have become more pervasive than ever before; they have become global. We now live in a media-induced cultural environment that is inundated by mass-produced images, images intended to serve a commercial or political purpose, from selling cigarettes and political candidates to ideologies and cultures. Consequently, our world view, or our perception of other peoples, events and places, is largely defined—often in an unrealistic and stereotypical manner—by the Western (read American) mass media, which are capable of reaching every corner of the globe.

 

Being aware of the consequences of such exploitation, should the mass media and politicians, in any given country, continue to stir up animosity, divisiveness and hate towards other peoples and cultures? The answer, of course, should be a resounding “No”.

 

***

 

ADDENDUM: As I concluded my article thus, the second Palestinian intifada erupted at the end of September. The fierce clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian demonstrators elicited an appalling deluge of anti-Islamic and anti-Arab remarks from media commentators and politicians in the United States. The abuse was of a racist virulence that could not and would not be directed publicly at any other ethnic or religious community. I rely for the examples that follow on monitoring work carried out by the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR):²⁰

 

• Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist Cal Thomas said Islam was “murderous” and “the threat of the present and immediate future”. He suggested that American Muslims are a threat to the United States, warning that “the killing of racial minorities” will be “emulated ... not just over ‘there’ but in this country”.

 

• Ric Keller, Republican candidate for Florida’s 8th District, said at a 12 October event: “I fully support the forceful and swift response of the Israelis to the brutal attack of two soldiers who were killed by a Palestinian mob. I think Palestinians are lower than pond scum for what they’ve done.”

 

• On 14 October, columnist Scott Shuger in Microsoft’s online publication Slate.com called one of the Palestinians who had participated in the killing of two Israeli soldiers “a piece of s--t posing as a human being” and other Palestinians as “turds”.

 

• MSNBC’s Don Imus called Yasser Arafat a “dish raghead” in a 17 October broadcast.

 

• New York Post columnist Rod Dreher wrote on 17 October that “unlike the Israelis, the Palestinians are not products of Western civilization, but of one informed by Islamic religion and ethnic Arab customs. Because of that, it’s easy for naive Westerners to be scandalized and perplexed by their actions ... As the only outpost of the West in that savage and irrational desert, we owe the Israelis our loyalty ... The Israelis, whatever their failings, are fighting for us and for our civilization”.

 

• Franklin Graham, vice-chairman of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and son of noted evangelist Billy Graham, said: “The Arabs will not be happy until every Jew is dead. They hate the state of Israel. They all hate the Jews. God gave that land to the Jews. The Arabs will never accept that. Why can’t they live in peace?”

 

• In a speech on 13 October, former US secretary of education William Bennett said: “There is no moral equality between Israel and the Palestinians: one is a nation of violence and terrorism and the other is one of democracy and peace.”

 

“Lower than pond scum”; “ragheads”; “pieces of s--t” and “turds”: it seems that inflammatory and hate-filled rhetoric is still publicly permissible in the United States, provided that Muslims and Arabs are the targets. 

Endnotes

1. Jane Campbell, “Portrayal of Iranians in US Motion Pictures”, in The US Media and the Middle East: Image and Perception, ed. Yahya R. Kamalipour (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), p. 178.

 

2. George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana and Herbert Schiller, eds., Invisible Crisis: What Conglomerate Control of Media Means for America and the World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 28–9.

 

3. Chicago Tribune, 6 September 2000, p. 8.

 

4. Times (Munster, Indiana), 10 September 2000, p. A11.

 

5. See Yahya R. Kamalipour, “Media Images of Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East in the United States”, in Civic Discourse and Digital Age Communications in the Middle East, ed. Leo Gher and Hussein Amin (Stamford, Conn.: Ablex, 2000), pp. 55–83.

 

6. Yahya R. Kamalipour, “Oil, Mean People, Dark Skin, Terrorism: Mental Images of the Middle East Influence Relationships”, Iranian, 1 December 2024 [http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/Dec98/Mideast/index.html].

 

7. Abbas Malek and Krista E. Wiegand, “Islam and the West: Cultural Encounter”, in The US Media and the Middle East, ed. Kamalipour, p. 202.

 

8. Janice Neumann, “Arab Rally Honors 3 for Fighting Prejudice”, Chicago Tribune, 18 August 2000.

 

9. Mehdi Semati, “Sex, Violence, and Terrorism in Hollywood’s International Political Imaginary”, in Media, Sex, Violence, and Drugs in the Global Village, ed. Yahya R. Kamalipour and Kuldip Rampal (Boulder, Colo.: Rowman & Littlefield, in press).

 

10. Yahya R. Kamalipour, “Window of Opportunity: Images of Iranians in the US Media”, Iranian, 11 August 2024 [http://www.iranian.com/Opinion/Aug98/Media/index.html]. See also, “From Exotic to Demonic: Images of the Iranians in the US Media”, Persian Heritage (winter 1999), pp. 28–32.

 

11. Warren Christopher, et al., American Hostages in Iran: The Conduct of a Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 27.

 

12. James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American–Iranian Relations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).

 

13. H. Rosenberg, “Iran: The Ayatollah Television”, Los Angeles Times, 23 January 1980.

 

14. See Hamid Naficy, “Mediating the Other: American Pop Culture Representation of Postrevolutionary Iran”, in The US Media and the Middle East, ed. Kamalipour, p. 81.

 

15. Betty Mahmoody, Not without My Daughter (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987), back cover.

 

16. Campbell, “Portrayal of Iranians”, p. 180.

 

17. C. James, “Embrace the Stereotypes; Kiss the Movie Goodbye”, New York Times, 8 January 1988.

 

18. Thomas Lippman, “Bogus Bills?”, Washington Post, 8 May 1995, editorial page.

 

19. Yahya R. Kamalipour, Images of the US around the World: A Multicultural Perspective (New York: SUNY Press, 1999), p. xxiv.

 

20. See CAIR’s report, “Racist Tone of Pro-Israel Commentators Denounced by Muslims” [www.cair-net.org/nr.asp?date=2000/10/18].