Portraying Arabs: 30 Years Later

 

Video and Edited Transcript
Edmund Ghareeb & Jack Shaheen
Transcript No. 409 (11 June 2014)

 


Portraying Arabs: 30 Years Later

with

Edmund Ghareeb
Professor

&

Jack Shaheen
Author and Media Critic


  

Yousef Munayyer: We’re very happy today to be able to put on this panel event. The event is entitled “Portraying Arabs: 30 years Later.” Why 30 years later? In 1984, seminal works on the images of Arabs and Muslims in the American media were published. Jack Shaheen’s TV Arab studied the images of Arabs on television, while Edmund Ghareeb’s Split Vision looked at news, print and broadcast media. At this event today we’re joined by the authors to discuss the theses of their works 30 years later and how much has changed,  if anything at all, about the images and portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in American mass media. Past, present and future challenges to accurate depictions of Arabs and Muslims will be discussed to day. So we’re very happy to have Jack Shaheen and Edmund Ghareeb with us.

Edmund was the American University Center for Global Peace’s first Mustafa Barzani scholar of Global Kurdish Studies, he’s an internationally recognized expert on Kurds in Iraq and media issues. He taught at American University for 28 years, Georgetown in Washington DC, in Qatar, the University of Virginia and the George Washington University. He’s the editor of Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media. Split Vision is the first book of its kind to cover media portrayal of Arabs. Dr. Ghareeb has written and lectured widely on United States policy in the Middle East, U.S.-Arab relations, Arab Americans and the American media.

Seated next to him is the internationally acclaimed author and media critic, Jack Shaheen. Jack is a committed internationalist, a devoted humanist and just a really funny guy, as I’m sure we’ll all find out soon. He’s a Pittsburgh native and former CBS news consultant on Middle East affairs. His lectures and writings illustrate that damaging racial and ethnic stereotypes of Asians, Black/Native Americans and others injure innocent people. He defines crude characters, explains why they persist and provides workable solutions to help shatter misconceptions. It’s really a pleasure to be able to put together this event on the 30 year mark since the publications of these important works and to hear from the authors themselves on the status for the portrayal of Arabs today. With that, I’ll welcome Dr. Ghareeb to begin.

Edmund Ghareeb: Thank you, Yousef. Good afternoon everybody, it’s a pleasure to be with you. And it’s really a pleasure to be with my friend Jack. Actually, this panel was his idea. He’s the one who suggested and I think it’s a very good idea. Jack has, more than anyone I know, done so much to combat stereotyping of Arabs on TV, serials and film. Jack has authored a number of landmark works and studies on Hollywood and the way it portrays Arabs. He has not only been a great scholar but an activist who has done so much and continues to do a great deal to combat and fight against the stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. Jack did a great deal in his book talking about the biases that exist in the media and the myths about these biases. He says in [his book], I’m sure he’ll talk about that later, that Arabs are fabulously wealthy, they are barbaric and uncultured and they are sex maniacs with a pension for white slavery. They revel in the act of terrorism. This probably says it all about how Arabs have been portrayed in the media for a very long time.

I wanted to touch upon and mention where the ideas of these books came from. By the way, this is the first edition. It is copyrighted in 1977 but in reality it didn’t come out in 1979 because a couple of the authors who were supposed to contribute articles didn’t finish them. Also because the publisher had some health problems. I’m grateful for the work and effort the publisher of the Institute of Middle East and North African Affairs, who has since passed away, He was the one who, once he read the articles and interviews that I did with American journalists, pushed me to do a book on the subject and this was the book, and they published 5,000 copies.

The second one, a much wider and expanded work, came out in 1983. There are two people I should thank specifically, and the first one is Hisham Sharabi. Sharabi was my professor at Georgetown University and also my thesis advisor. Hisham was also instrumental in getting me a job. I had gone to Beirut before I started graduate work on my MA and PhD and worked as a journalist for the Beirut Daily Star and little for al-Hayat newspaper as well. Then Hisham asked me to be the assistant editor for a new journal that was coming out in Beirut by the Institute for Palestine Studies, this was the Journal for Palestine Studies. So I worked for him as assistant editor, well there were two of us actually. That was quite an experience, but it was much later when I returned to the United States and sent some of the interviews I did to Hisham, which he published, that he encouraged me to do more on this area of work.

The first time I really began to show some interest on this topic was when I was in Beirut working as a reporter. I began to pay much more attention to the political issues facing the region and the way the media covered the story of the region and its political conflicts, especially as this was a very tense period. I was able to go to Jordan where I covered of the hijacking of the three planes in Amman by the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) as well as part of the Jordanian Civil War. And so I began to learn. There was one article that I published at that time that got the paper banned from Jordan that week. In any case, it was very enlightening and very educational. I began to learn the problems of covering stories; it was a very interesting period.

The other thing that influenced my thinking was when I was asked to do an interview with Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who is one of the best known and top three or four Arab journalists. At that time, immediately in the period after the death of Nasser, he was both the editor of al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading paper, and senior advisor to Egypt’s President Sadat, they still had good relations at that time. We ended up talking about where Egypt and the region were going after Nasser. But at the end of the conversation, he asked me about where I was from and where was I studying. He was very critical of the way the American media was covering the Arab-Israeli conflict and Arab affairs in general. But I had the opportunity to meet with him again in 1979 when we were both invited to an international conference in London on the way the Arabs are portrayed, and the BBC had an interview with the two of us. He was very knowledgeable about this issue and raised a number of points I had not thought about and, to a certain extent, triggered my interest in this topic.

When I returned [to the United States], I began to follow and to pay more attention to how the mainstream media was covering the region. One of the important things about this time is that it was when I began to notice the lack of balance in the way the media was covering the region. There were a number of issues I noticed, for example; the United States government wanted to sell Jordan hawk missiles and there was hearing up on Capitol Hill about it. But while the New York Times and Washington Post mentioned the names of the witnesses who supported and opposed the sale, the only ones who got coverage actually, not much, were the ones who were opposed to the sale, I found that intriguing. I didn’t follow it up but I found it very interesting.

The other story that I noticed at that time was a meeting in New York of about 200 prominent clergymen. They were mostly American clergymen from different denominations; Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, and they called on the Israeli government, which had expelled some Palestinians at that time, to allow these people to return home. This story was buried or ignored by the Times. Some other papers did cover that story but none of the major papers. I thought that at least in New York and in the New York Times the story would be covered, but it wasn’t.

The most important experience that I had and that really drove me to begin talking on this issue was in 1975 the Middle East Institute had their annual conference and the person they had invited to give the opening address was Senator William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The topic was the Sinai Declaration. There was a discussion in the Congress about the topic and I assumed that the media would cover it. Well, there was nothing. I looked the following day and then the day after that. I knew somebody at the Post and I asked him to contact the person who was responsible for the news stories. He said he’d ask. After a couple of days, nothing happened. I gave him a call, he was a friend, and he said that he talked to the guy but the guy said that the Middle East Institute had sent out copies of the senator’s speech to all the major editors but he hadn’t had time to read it yet. So basically he didn’t do anything about it.

So I asked Senator Fulbright for an interview and he kindly and generously agreed. The topic was on the situation in the region and his position. I asked him a few questions about his role in Vietnam but later I asked about media coverage and he was very critical of what he called “the moralizing by the press.” And he had this to say: “I have been disserved by what seemed to me to be an arbitrary and prejudiced standard of newsworthiness in the national press, especially as applied to the Middle East. I have noted repeatedly the quantitative disparity between press coverage of Palestinian guerrilla attacks within Israel and of Israeli attacks on south Lebanon.” He mentioned actually that the number of casualties usually were much higher among either the Palestinians or the Lebanese than the Israelis.

[Senator Fulbright] also mentioned that in 1971 he had given a speech that criticized Israel’s foreign policy, this was in April 1971. He said that while most of the media covered it in a fair and balanced way, the Washington Post did not cover it. But the following day [the Post] had an article which was titled “Israeli Press Lashes Out at Fulbright”. A few days later, they had a column which he described as “vituperative.” So they didn’t cover what he said, but they were very critical of what he said and gave room to one of their columnist and also to the Israeli point of view.

To me, that was very, very important and that’s how I became very interested in following this story. I thought of interviewing a number of prominent American journalists. I was fortunate that I was able to reach a number of them, one being Peter Jennings of ABC News who was probably one of the best journalists covering international affairs. Because of some of the things he said in that interview he got a lot of heat from Israeli and pro-Israeli groups in the United States. What we ended up doing was that I was also able to get a number of other writers who contributed chapters on cartoons. Jack was working on the coverage of Arabs in television as well and we had a number of other prominent journalists: Jim McCartney, who was the diplomatic correspondent for the Gannett newspapers, and a number of others.

Basically, I will conclude here and of course we can talk more about the media, one of the things that I want to say is that the media has gone through different phases over the past four or five decades. There were periods when things improved and periods where things deteriorated. If you’re interested we can talk more because my time is over, but one of the things is in recent times generally we’ve seen a great deal of improvement in a sense. In at least one part of the coverage we’ve seen also more interest especially during the early phase of the Arab Spring, where American journalists went underground in places like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to cover the story and interact with the people who were involved on all sides. But as the story has moved from spring to summer, a very hot summer, to a frosty and cold winter, especially when we see the stories of what’s going on in Syria and what’s going on in Libya, the media appears to have pulled back and are not doing the kind of job that they’re supposed to be doing or that they did in the beginning of the Arab Spring phenomenon.

I think that one of the mistakes of many in the West, especially Western media, was the reliance on – there is no problem with relying on some activists – but they began relying a great deal on activists for their stories and for their photos and in a sense that made it very difficult for them to see things in a balanced way. I believe the issue of the media coverage will be with us for a long time. One of the good things, and this is the last point that I’m going to mention, is that we’ve begun to see a great deal of interest within the Arab-American and Muslim-American community. Not just the people like myself or Jack or two or three other people, Edward Said by the way was also one of the important figured in this area especially with his book on Islam that focused on the coverage of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. People like Michael Suleiman, Janice Terry, and Qazzaz also made significant contributions. But I’m beginning to see a lot of other people, whether students or academics, some of the Arab-American organizations and their memberships, become much more active and I think that’s a very, very healthy development to combat stereotyping. Because the danger of stereotyping is not just that it’s something pejorative and derogatory and it may not be good for your psyche, but the danger that we have seen of it over recent times is it dehumanizes a people and it creates an environment which allows for the use of force against people and that is what we have seen recently. Thank you.

Jack Shaheen: I want to thank you, Yousef; my good friend Edmund Ghareeb; ladies and gentlemen. I think before I talk about beginnings I’d like to flashback to when Edmund and I first met in a cafeteria in Georgetown and we were having coffee. I was not funny at the time, Yousef, I was very serious, and we were talking about our books and we became friends from that moment on. And then in 1979 with us in England, speaking with Mohamed Heikal, myself and Edmund was the late Edward Said. So there we were, speaking on this issue back in 1979.

It began with me in 1974, forty years ago, when my children said, “Daddy, Daddy, they’ve got bad Arabs on television.” At the time I was teaching mass communications at the Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. I was on the fast track for promotion; teaching core courses related to public television, theory and production. My research focused on nuclear war films, the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau, history of public TV and how to fix it. I was a very popular professor until my children said, “Daddy, Daddy, they’ve got bad Arabs on television.” And in that moment I said to them they could only watch television on Saturday mornings. I said you monitor those cartoons, you watch Popeye and Plastic Man etc. etc, and you let your father know what you see, and at that time we couldn’t afford a VCR, so whenever they saw a cartoon vilifying Arabs, I would run downstairs and start taking notes. And then I received a Fulbright to go to the American University of Beirut, 1974 to 1975, and at that time I thought this would make a very interesting article, TV Arab. So I came back to the states in ‘75 and I finished the article, TV Arab, and I was so happy, this was in ‘75- a great article, just terrific. 1976, no one published it, 1977 no one published it, 1978, after three years, someone finally published it. Over 50 rejection letters. And the one that is most memorable came from Harriot Van Warren, editor in chief, of the Television Quarterly: “Dear Professor Shaheen, we have read your article and find it to be excellent, however we cannot publish it, because if we were to publish it someone else would write an article about their particular group and it wouldn’t be nearly as well written as yours. So we hope you understand, sincerely, Harriot Van Warren.”

At that particular time I had two jobs, one teaching four courses and one researching Arabs on American television. I’d apply for research grants so that I could get a release time, release time meant I would only have to teach two classes instead of three, but all of my proposals came back rejected. That had never happened before. I have to admit at that time I was quite feisty, I was a little full of myself to be honest with you. When it came to mass communications I loved my work, my students loved me, my colleagues loved me, until all of the sudden I was tagged: the Arab professor. That hurt. I had never, never before in my life experienced any form of discrimination. I remember going to the research office and saying, “Why are you rejecting my proposals? Other proposals on images of blacks, Hispanics, women etc. you’re proposing those…” And he said, “Well yours isn’t really academic, its propaganda.” And these were people that I knew, I’m not talking about strangers off the street, these were my colleagues. So I think at that particular point in my life I had a choice: do I stop, or do I continue? And something, I guess my Lebanese genes never allowed me to do business, but there must have been something in those genes that gave me persistence and perseverance because I decided to move forward.

For eight years I documented over 200 television programs, documentaries, children’s shows, dramas, etc. on how Arabs were portrayed on commercial television. I couldn’t get a publisher for the book, but I did something extremely important that Edmund and I did and what needs to be done now because it hasn’t been done since we did it originally: I confronted the people responsible for the stereotype. I went to Los Angeles and New York and interviewed over 30 producers, writers, directors, people at the network level, broadcast standards and practices. I found that one-third didn’t care, one-third was sympathetic but didn’t do anything and the other third hated Arabs.

I remember I was with my wife and family staying in California out on the beach, they were on the beach and I was out running around doing interviews when a woman called me. I won’t mention her name. She said, “I don’t want to meet with you, I hate Arabs.” She had done The Rockford Files where Arabs and Muslims were vilified and the Holy Quran was abused. It was just one of the sickest TV programs. That was probably one of the most difficult tasks in my life, to sit there and have a producer rant and rave about how he hated Arabs when in fact they were Iranians and he didn’t know the difference. Or to have another producer of a TV show called Alice which featured an Arab-American called Vic Tayback in the leading role, and I said, “why don’t you make him an Arab-American?” because we were invisible at that time, Americans of Arab heritage and American-Muslims. The only images we had were Danny Thomas in Make Room for Daddy and Jamie Far running around later on as a loveable character in M.A.S.H. Other than that we didn’t exist at all.

So finally The TV Arab came into being in 1984 practically at the same time as Edmund’s book, and both books were reviewed in the Christian Science Monitor. Which is a first, I don’t think any newspaper ever interviewed two books like ours together as the gentleman at Christian Science Monitor did.

So I tell you basically those beginnings about how terribly difficult it was. Even when I began working on Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, which looks at 1,200 movies before 9/11. For Bernice and I, my wife is here with me, memories are coming back because we stayed here at Columbia Plaza, near the Watergate. We rented a place for two months where we went to the Library of Congress and everyday we sat there for six hours looking at films and taking notes because the DVDs were not available. So we had to go to the Library of Congress. But even at that particular time in doing the documentation, when I had finished the Reel Bad Arabs book, even though I had established myself as a scholar in this particular area when I was writing to publishers they wanted to change the name of the book. One publisher said “It’s not for us but I’m sure you can find other publishers,” and I wrote back and I said, “What other publishers?” and I never heard back. You know, thank God for Michel Moushabeck at Interlink Books, he’s an Arab-American, he published the book and did such a beautiful job, but even back in 2001 it was so difficult.

Anyway, there was a documentary called Terror in the Promised Land by a Canadian called Malcolm Clark, it was such a good documentary that ABC only aired it once. Not only that, they destroyed all copies of the documentary. There is only one copy, to our knowledge, that exists today and it’s the one I recorded. This February we invited Malcolm Clark, the man who did the documentary, to New York University where we screened it and had a discussion about how they had to lock the film up in a safe every night, how he received death threats and they had to have body guards. As Edmund talked about earlier, the bias and discrimination that existed were very dangerous at this point. So dangerous that this man’s life was threatened. Malcolm Clark received an Oscar for Best Documentary this year on a woman who lived through the Holocaust. He’s a great guy, great community leader and a good sense of humor.

Anyway that was the past, the present does not look good on commercial television because of 9/11. We’ll just talk television now and we’ll really get into it later on. 9/11 came and what happened?  All of the sudden American-Arabs and American-Muslims became the enemy. We became clones of Al Qaeda thanks to shows like 24 and Sleeper Cell. I remember I tried to get a job as a consultant on Sleeper Cell and they said, “No that’s ok, Dr. Shaheen. We’re comfortable with our consultants.” You bet their sweet bippy they were comfortable with their consultants, getting away with what they did. And television just advanced all of this, there are horror stories I could tell you about what happened. So we became firmly implanted in the psyche of American viewers as part of this conspiracy. Even though the 19 Arab-Muslim terrorists who attacked us, fifteen from Saudi Arabia, there were no Americans of Arab heritage, no American-Muslims were involved. And yet these shows hit home the idea that we were involved.

Interesting, through all of this, or part of this, was a TV show called NCIS. This is just to show you the impact of how these television programs are not merely entertainment but have an impact on opinion and, subsequently, policy. They created a character called Ziva David who is an Israeli agent who works with our intelligence officers, and for nine years, even wore an Israeli Star of David. This gal went around with our agents, capturing the bad guys. And if you go to Wikipedia you can read all about it, they’ll say how the Israeli consulate praised it because of the great image it gave of Israel, etc. And I was thinking, “I wonder if the producer ever thought of putting in a Palestinian agent to work with NCIS,” and what the outcry might have been had that happened, or an agent from Yemen or Tunisia. And yet he could very easily do this. Now we have shows with an Israeli connection coming up: Dig, Tyrant, Legacy, Homeland, there is all an Israeli connection involved that is pervasive. There is some good news, we had All American-Muslim that put you to sleep, even though it was very positive, we had a great series called Aliens of America that didn’t last very long but they had some very good characters. We had a very nice series called Low Winter Sun where there was an Arab-American female detective in Detroit who was terrific, but they cancelled the show. The problem is that today we are still seeing these images, with the exception of two new shows: Ahmed Ahmed is appearing in a show called Sullivan and Son and there is another TV show called Cabot College, a Tina Fey comedy, and there will be some visibility there, but we are still seeing these images only much more sophisticated in certain ways.

My son-in-law likes this horrible show called Hawaii 5-0. I remember the Hawaii 5-0 that was a good show way back when, when I didn’t have grey hair, and it was wonderful to watch. But the new version, I never watch it. So he sends me an email, “You’ve got to watch Hawaii 5-0,” and I know why. In the show, the main terrorist behind all these attacks, in Hawaii, is a guy who graduated from an Ivy League college who is from Cleveland. And he is responsible, he’s brainwashed this beautiful American blonde and another young American guy and it is all about Islamophobia. So the stereotype has kind of shifted from Arab to Muslim, or anyone who looks Middle Eastern, Pakistani, Indian, or an American who has been influenced by those God awful Muslims. There are more pressure groups around now, and media pundits like Joe Scarborough the guy on Fox; Bill “Oh My Gracious” O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and the Clarion Fund etc. So the Arab-Muslim stereotype is still there but it has sort of spread its wings. And in spite of the new organizations, in spite of up and coming Arab-American filmmakers, and in spite of scholars who are now taking our work and embellishing it and moving forward with it, which is great, I love that, we are still in deep doo-doo as they say in the south, because of these pervasive images. And what needs to be done, and what hasn’t been done, is we need to confront directly, immediately, with force and persistence, clear thinking, intelligence, and a basic sense of decency with us, the men and women who are responsible for this before it gets out of hand.

 

 

Edmund Ghareeb was the American University’s Center for Global Peace’s first Mustafa Barzani Scholar of Global Kurdish Studies. He is an internationally recognized expert on the Kurds, Iraq, and media issues. He taught at American University for 28 years and has also taught at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and in Qatar, the University of Virginia and the George Washington University. He is the author of “The Kurdish Nationalist Movement” and of the “The Kurdish Question in Iraq” and is the co-author of “War in the Gulf” and of “The Historical Dictionary of Iraq.” He is the editor of “Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media.” “Split Vision” is the first book of its kind to cover media portrayal of Arabs.Dr. Ghareeb has written and lectured widely on US policy towards the Middle East, US-Arab relations, Arab-Americans, the American media and its coverage of the Middle East and the Information Revolution in the Arab World, Iraq, the Kurds and the Gulf. He worked as a journalist for many years and has been widely interviewed by major American, Arab, European and Asian media outlets.

Internationally acclaimed author and media critic, Jack Shaheen, is a committed internationalist and a devoted humanist. A Pittsburgh native and former CBS news consultant on Middle East Affairs, Shaheen’s lectures and writings illustrate that damaging racial and ethnic stereotypes of Asians, blacks, Native Americans and others injure innocent people. He defines crude caricatures, explains why they persist, and provides workable solutions to help shatter misperceptions. Professor Shaheen has given over 1,000 lectures in nearly all the 50 states and three continents. Among those universities that have welcomed him are Oxford, Amherst, Brown, Emory, Harvard, the University of Southern California, West Point, as well as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the White House Truman Center. Dr. Shaheen is the author of four books: Nuclear War Films, Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture, The TV Arab and the award-winning book and film Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. His writings include 300-plus essays in publications such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post to chapters on media stereotypes in dozens of college textbooks. He has appeared on national network programs such as CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio, Nightline, Good Morning America, 48 Hours, and The Today Show.