Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 123-124, 137

Book Review

Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture

By Jack G. Shaheen, Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, 1997, 91 pp. List: $5.95; AET: $5.50

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

Dr. Jack G. Shaheen, Pennsylvania-born emeritus professor of mass communications at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and now a visiting professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, wrote the book, literally, on media stereotyping of Arab Americans. In 1974, upon returning from a one-year Fulbright teaching grant at the American University of Beirut, he began collecting material illustrating the treatment of Arabs and other Middle Easterners by U.S. television, films and the mainstream press.

The result was a series of articles printed in national publications followed, in 1984, by his landmark book, The TV Arab. His research also established the need for and helped define the mission of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an organization with which he has been informally affiliated since its establishment in 1980. Subsequently, he has lectured at universities and before Arab-American, Muslim-American and human rights organizations throughout the United States and abroad.

His new book concentrates also on the stereotyping of Muslims in the United States, which in many ways has subsumed the original problem of Arab-American stereotyping. To explain to readers why it is important to distinguish between stereotypes and realities, Shaheen submits a series of meticulously footnoted findings concerning the Muslim presence in the world in general and the United States in particular, as well as the Christian Arab presence in both.

“Islam, the fastest growing of the world religions, is now the second largest,” Shaheen points out. “It is estimated that by the year 2000, Muslims will constitute 27 percent of the world’s population. The 56 states which are predominantly Islamic constitute one-third of the membership of the United Nations...Eighteen million—nearly 80 percent—of the world’s 23 million refugees are also Muslims...

“Through immigration, conversion, and birth, Muslims are our country’s fastest growing religious group. Approximately five to eight million Muslims—African-Americans, South Asians, American whites and members of other ethnic groups—live in the United States...In 1970 there were fewer than 1,000 Muslims in Houston; today there are an estimated 60,000. Nearly half a million Muslims now reside in the Chicago metropolitan area...Approximately 400,000 Muslims live in New York City...There are more than 200,000 Muslim businesses [in the U.S.], 1,500 mosques, 165 Islamic schools, 425 Muslim associations and 85 Islamic publications.”

Turning to the Christian presence in the Middle East and among Arab Americans, Shaheen presents carefully documented statements such as these: “As [Duke University Prof.] Ralph Braibanti points out, ‘While there are profound theological differences between Islam and Christianity, there are also significant similarities. For example, social harmony with Christians and Jews has always been a central tenet of Islam...On social problems for instance, there is almost complete agreement between believing Christians and Muslims’...

“Approximately 15 million Christians—ranging from Eastern Orthodox to Episcopalian to Roman Catholic to Protestant—reside in Arab countries. But motion pictures and television programs never show Arab Christians even though the majority of America’s three million Arab- Americans are Christians. According to the American Muslim Council, ‘about 30 percent’ of Arab Americans are Muslims.”

Having established the importance of his subject, Shaheen tells some surprising tales. For example, “in 1980, during the height of the Iranian hostage crisis, a national poll gauging American attitudes toward Arabs revealed that 70 percent of the American people surveyed identified Iran as an Arab country and 8 percent ‘admitted they did not know whether it was or not.’”

Just as three-quarters of Americans could not distinguish between the Indo-European Iranians and the Semitic Arabs, according to Shaheen, nearly 40 percent of America’s Muslims are African-Americans, but the U.S. media “tend to identify them all with Louis Farrakhan’s radical and highly publicized Nation of Islam.” Yet, says Shaheen, according to The Washington Post, “Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam is ‘a tiny splinter group [with] less than 20,000 members.’”

Another bizarre fact is that in 1996 Janet Parshals, hostess of a nationally syndicated evangelical Christian radio program, erroneously told her American listeners that Muslims worship the “Moon God.” This gross misconception is by no means unique to one Christian fundamentalist preacher, Shaheen reports. It is widely repeated among evangelical media, with one such media commentator, Dr. Robert Morey, having written that the Muslim “god Allah was a pagan deity. In fact, he was the Moon-god who was married to the sun goddess and the stars were his daughters.”

Shaheen devotes 17 pages to what might best be described as Hollywood’s undeclared but seemingly endless war on both Arabs and Muslims, with villains or buffoons of either persuasion gratuitously introduced to liven up otherwise weak scripts. Many of the same examples have appeared in Shaheen’s previous writings, but the total of such slurs and slanders against one-quarter of the human race would be a sufficiently damning indictment of the American film industry to make this writer give up Hollywood films altogether—if I had not already done so long ago.

Interestingly, Shaheen makes particularly persuasive cases against CBS among television networks and Walt Disney Productions among filmmakers, despite the fact that, if memory serves me, he has been a consultant to both in the past. Presumably he was engaged to head off consumer boycotts by Arab Americans, but then found he was ignored more than he was heeded by the two companies. Shaheen suggests in several ways that it is time for Muslim and Arab Americans to unite on effective actions to halt these outrages.

To me some of the most interesting anecdotes were contained in the 35 pages (more than one-third of the book) devoted to “Print and Broadcast News.” There Shaheen cites a series of mistaken and sometimes surprisingly elaborate predictions by America’s self-described “terrorism experts,” along with networks and mainstream newspapers that should have known better, that the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island would turn out to have been carried out by Islamic groups. The Oklahoma bombing, however, was conducted by two U.S. army veterans with no foreign ties, and investigators concluded that the loss of the aircraft was due to an accidental electrical spark that ignited a gas tank.

In fact, Shaheen points out, the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism reported that of 99 international terrorist attacks against U.S. interests in 1995, 62 of these attacks took place in Latin America, 21 in Europe, 6 in Asia, 6 in the Middle East, 3 in Africa and 1 in Eurasia. Similar results were reported for 1993 and 1994. Likewise, according to Shaheen, “The Los Angeles Times reported that of 171 people indicted in the United States for ‘terrorism and related activities ‘ in the 1980s, 11 were connected to Arab groups, 6 percent of the total.”

Further, although the media are quick to label such groups as “Islamic terrorists,” no one described Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, yeshiva student Yigal Amir, or West Bank Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Muslim men and boys at prayer in a Hebron mosque, as “Israeli terrorists.” Nor did headline writers call Waco, Texas cult leader David Koresh or abortion clinic murderer Michael Griffin “Christian terrorists.”

Shaheen quotes New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal’s statement that “almost all the terrorism directed at the United States originates in the Middle East.” Shaheen also quotes some particularly biased and misleading comments from Mortimer Zuckerman, the strongly Zionist owner and editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report and owner of the Atlantic Monthly and the New York Daily News . Shaheen also cites a statement by Middle East Quarterly editor Daniel Pipes to USA Today that “the [Muslim] fundamentalists are on the upsurge, and they make it very clear they’re targeting us”; a warning by Israel apologist Amos Perlmutter in The Wall Street Journal of an “Islamic war waged against the West, Christianity, modern capitalism, Zionism and communism,” and a charge by Congressional employee and Muslim-basher Yossef Bodansky that “Islamist leadership and terrorist organizations have launched an increasing barrage of denunciations and attacks against the church.”

Shaheen also quotes extensively from Steven Emerson, whose alarmist and highly misleading documentary film “Jihad in America” was shown on PBS stations. And, in a commendable attempt at balance, Shaheen also quotes several film critics and media reviewers with obviously Jewish names who debunk many of the misleading or erroneous statements of such alarmist and generally misinformed Muslim- and Arab-bashers.

But it is here that this book, and some of Shaheen’s previous writings, frustrate this reviewer. Emerson’s use of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as a source for his questionable information was documented by an AIPAC defector in an article in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. A.M. Rosenthal’s knee-jerk support for all right-wing Israeli leaders, particularly such extremists as Yitzhak Shamir and Binyamin Netanyahu, has been on public display for years, as have the strongly Zionist sentiments of Zuckerman, Pipes, Perlmutter and Bodansky. And in his earlier writings I believe that Shaheen himself pointed out that some of the worst Hollywood offenders have been joint Israeli-U.S. production companies.

Yet nowhere in this book nor, I believe, in his previous one, The TV Arab, does Shaheen set out to square the circle by stating bluntly that the most egregious negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs originates with persons or organizations that are particularly close to and supportive of Israel, whereas the Jewish critics most likely to reject such negative stereotyping are those who seem the most detached from or least concerned with Israel.

It seems to me, therefore, that Shaheen owes his readers at least a strong suggestion that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute would make an extremely significant, if not decisive, contribution to solving the problems the book discusses. If those who know the whole truth about the major source of the negative stereotyping of Muslim and Arab Americans don’t dare to speak out, who will?

Nevertheless this book is a major contribution to the campaign to give Arab and Muslim Americans equal treatment with all of the other flavors in the American melting pot, or patches in the American quilt. To combat the problem, one must first understand it. Knowing this, Dr. Shaheen has provided a state-of-the art tool for effective use by Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, and all others who recognize that their problem is America’s problem, and their cause is America’s cause.