We'll be joined in the studio by Jack Shaheen, but first I want to play some excerpts from the film version of his book. It's directed by Sut Jhally, and the New York Premiere of the film was at the Cinema East Film Festival on Thursday. (source)
The excerpts she mentioned include statements from the trailer for the movie, which you can view right now :
For the Movie/DVD website, click here
Amy went on, after the excerpts, with this short, but succinct interview with Jack:
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, featuring Jack Shaheen, the award-winning media critic who wrote a book by the same title. In this last few minutes, he joins us live in our firehouse studio. That film has just premiered in New York. Jack, the significance of the media?
JACK SHAHEEN: Well, as Goebbels said, if you take the same images and you repeat them over and over again, and the images teach us to hate a people and to hate their religion, what happens is that we, in spite of our intelligence, our innate goodness, actually turn around and let these images despise and vilify an entire people.
You just had a guest, a young Iraqi girl that lost both her legs as a result of a bombing in Iraq. If you look at Rules of Engagement, one of the films that I talk about in the book and in the movie, you see a Yemeni girl with one leg on a crutch, who lost her leg when the Marines shot her. But in the end, this little Yemeni girl is not a victim, but a terrorist. So we cannot empathize with this girl who walks around with a crutch.
If you go and you see the new film called The Kingdom, Arab children again are portrayed as terrorists. So what's happening now is the trend has taken us to a point where we look at all those people, namely Arabs and Muslims, as the enemy other, even children. So when a young Iraqi girl loses both her legs, so there's a victim that takes place over in the Middle East that we don't see, we don't see the suffering, we don't see the injury. And then, even if we do, our hearts do not reach out for that victim, primarily because we've been taught by the media that those children are not to be trusted.
AMY GOODMAN: Jack, do you hold out any hope -- we didn't get to the part of the film where you talk about images that you think are getting better. Overall, would you say it's worse or better?
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