"Reel Bad Arabs"

Reel Bad Arabs introduced me to the importance of understanding Middle Eastern countries including but not limited to Iran, Palestine, Afghanistan, and Israel. For many years the headlines on television and in news papers have stereotyped people of Muslim descent as barbaric and heartless terrorists, enough to make me falsely assume that all Muslims share the same beliefs and that i should be frightened of them. To make matters even worse Arabic people have been and continue to be portrayed in movies that many Americans watch, as villains or dirty and uneducated neanderthals that degrade their women and live for the sole purpose of terrorizing the world. Without ever taking the time or effort to learn more about the people in these countries as a whole of course the only opinions I have ever had about them has been based on the negative stereotypes that I have grown seeing on television and reading in newspapers.

The image we get of the landscape of the Middle East from movies is that it is a dry and dangerous dessert that we misinterpret for being a threatening place. We get the impression that their male leaders are too rich and too stupid and have over sexed obsessions with white American women, while keeping their women masked and more so as possessions than people.

In all reality what we see in movies and read in the papers is far from the truth, although there are extremists living in the Arab world not all of their people sadistic terrorists. We as Americans falsely judge the Arab community by what the media relays to us (almost entirely about Arab extremist) without taking the time to research the community as a whole.