"Don't let a few people shape your view on an entire faith."

I just recently watched a film about Muslim Americans and how 9/11 took a toll on their lives. The film, Mooz-Lum, was released in 2010, and was written and directed by Qasim Basir . It is one of the few American films that don’t portray Muslims in the usual light that they are put in, as terrorists. I noticed several things regarding to the storyline of the film and how it was produced. It explores ingroup and outgroup functions, cultural criminology and the culture of fear.

The film fights everyday notions that we see in Hollywood movies. To begin with, we see two groups. Muslims represent the ingroup and non-Muslims represent the outgroup. The outgroup is the group toward which members of an ingroup feel a sense of separateness, opposition, or hatred. We see this grouping when Tariq(Evan Ross)’s classmate makes fun of his Muslim name in class and everyone starts laughing.

The media creates a cultural criminology. Cultural criminology is the study of crime and deviance that places criminality and its control in the context of culture. It injects people’s brains with ideas that certain people what them to believe in. Cultural criminology against Muslims was even more evident in movies after the 9/11 attacks, when Muslims started being seen and represented as terrorists. In one of the scenes, we see Tariq’s own friends trying to attack his sister and her friend because they are both Muslim. Mooz-Lum demonstrates how even Muslims were chocked from the attacks that happened in New York City and it is unjust to punish them for what a group of extremists did.

The media also created a culture of fear, it created exaggerated threats in the public’s mind that some believe are designed to achieve political goals. Politicians create the fear of Muslims in the minds of the public and that can give them the rights to start wars under the name of defending their people.

Bombers or Billionaires?

When I lived in Canada I witnessed many different kinds of stereotyping. It seems like after 9/11 there was an increase in negative sanctions towards people of darker skin tones. Despite the actual ethnicity of the person, as long as you had a brown complexion you were targeted.

In our last Sociology class we discussed how the American film industry has projected these extreme images of people who live in the Middle East in order to escalate a culture of fear. Although there were always distorted images of Arabs in American movies since the late 20th century, the impact of these images became even more profound on audiences after 9/11.

Although Canada was not affected by 9/11, airports worldwide tightened security measures as a result of the tragic event. In general, elementary and high school kids are mean. But somehow the incident of 9/11 justified their meanness. In the narrow minds of these kids, everyone of a brown skin tone was Pakistani. And they would bully these poor kids, telling them to go back to where they came from, and even asking them if they were related to the Taliban. North American children were highly susceptible to moral panic. Moral panic makes exaggerated media images and messages so much more believable.


Arabs in the film industry are normally portrayed as “bombers, belly dancers and billionaires,” the three B syndrome. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, these images were extremely dominant. Living in Qatar for the past five years only showed one trait to be quite accurate: billionaires. Although there is more to the Arab culture than money, it is quite a distinguished characteristic. If Americans showed other aspects of the Arab culture in their movies, like their food, how they love shisha and how they are actually quite normal, it would result in a major loss to the film industry and not support the American justification for intervening in the Middle East.




The movie The Kingdom, released in 2007, is about a terrorist attack on a U.S. compound in Saudi Arabia and how American special agents go in and investigate. This movie depicts how Islamists are extremists and fanatics and justifies American resolve to be in the Middle East: Arabs are evil, and Americans are heroes. Arabs can be classified as folk devils, particularly for Americans. A folk devil is a term that’s applied to outsiders portrayed as responsible for creating social problems.



The film industry usually reflects American foreign policy. During the Cold War with Russia, many films depicted communists as evil and invoked a sense of fear, again contributing to this culture of fear. However after the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. changed its foreign policy to target the Middle East and coincidentally films reflected this change.

Bombers, Belly dancers and Billionaires

Arabs have been stereotyped as sub-human throughout history and still are today to the west. They have been portrayed as barbaric, vicious and even as terrorists. Ironically enough, the power of the media industry still embraces these false mythologies. The power of both the media industry and Hollywood play a massive role in portraying these false images of Arabs to the western world at most times. Media tends to be a tool of propaganda as it is another means of expressing stereotypical and discriminatory views.


As a result of discrimination and stigma, Arab-Americans tend to be targeted the most. In this case, being an Arab is deeply discredited as it over-shadows all the other attributes they possess. In most cases, the stigma of being an Arab dominates interactions and the way others think of them. They are the minority group that are systematically excluded from participation in the American community and denied equal access to valued resources at most times. Sociologist Peggy McIntosh identifies a number of privileges that the members of the dominant group take for granted, however, the one that stood out the most was, “ I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race [or ethnicity].” This may be one of the greatest examples, as Arabs are stereotypically known for their bad timing, especially in the eyes of the west.



Racism against Arabs has increased along side the tension between the American government and the Middle East. Discrimination and racial violence increased towards Arabs following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The proposed development of building a mosque near Ground Zero of the former World Trade Centre site was another contributory factor that provoked the American community to anti-Arabism.



In reference to the documentary of “Reel bad Arabs,” by media analyst Jack Shaheen, Arabs have always been the “butt of a cheap joke.” Within the entertainment industry, Arabs have been looked at as the stupid but rich, wanting to buy chunks of American land. They’re often associated with not only living in exotic places where the men enjoy their time and money with the company of belly dancers, but also where the population is uneducated and surrounded by massacres. For instance, Dr. Shaheen insists in his documentary that the movie of “Wanted: Dead or Alive (1986),” portrays one of the worst images of Arab stereotypes. The movie represents Arabs as terrorists who want to set the place on fire, while killing millions of people and being ‘America’s most wanted’.



As once said by director of media relations for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, “ Arabs in TV and movies are portrayed as either bombers, belly dancers, or billionaires.” More often referred to as “the three B syndrome.”

Some Americans have gone as far as removing nine Arab-Muslim passengers from flying with AirTran Airways in 2009. Is this the real democracy promised? What happened to equal rights?