Jihadi Du Jour: Pre-Existing Arab Stereotypes

In my article Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People, I wrote that Hollywood did not invent the stereotypical evil Arab, that for over a thousand years Arab and Muslim behavior led to the common held European view that Arabs were bloodthirsty cut-throats who held slaves and massacred peoples.

I am writing this post here, away from my blog, in anticipation that some Muslim apologist, who did not read the book by Jack Shaheen, will accuse me of making excuses for Hollywood and its Jews.

The average Ahmed is taught in his school that what is holding back Arabs and Muslims are the Jews who control Hollywood and the American media. For this reason he will insist that it was not Europeans who created the world's negative view of Arabs and Muslims.

These gullible Muslims believe that all the bad things reported about Arabs and Muslims are Zionist lies and propaganda generated for the exclusive purpose of keeping the Arab in poverty and ignorance. The average Muslim does not know nor is he taught that the negative view of Arabs is a consequence of 1400 years of brutal wars of conquest, subjugation, and wholesale slaughter of unbelievers.

As hard as it is for modern civilized people to believe, there are Muslims today who will swear that Islam had nothing to do with the slave trade, that there is no slavery in Islam today. That one-quarter of the world is Muslim because they freely chose Islam as their religion, that Arab armies never subjugated a single country.

The truth of the matter is that Shaheen himself admits that the negative Arab stereotype was not invented by Americans but rather inherited from Europe.

Islamic Research Priorities on Epistemology and Thought Website, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People [PDF]
The first section, “The Genesis,” discusses the negative stereotyping of Arabs in American pop culture. After this, he introduces “Real Arabs” as he has known them: his family, friends and colleagues, and people he has
met and experienced throughout his life. Another part, “The Stereotype’s
Entry,” deals with how stereotypical Arab images entered American popular
culture. Here he argues that American image-makers did not invent the negative Arab stereotype, but rather “inherited and embellished Europe’s pre-existing Arab caricatures.” He elaborates, without giving specific examples, that these inherited tales were inhabited with “cheating vendors and exotic concubines held hostage in slave markets.”

It is not Hollywood or Jews who are perpetuating the myth of the stereotypical evil and barbaric Muslim, it is Muslims themselves. It is not the Jewish press that made this headline "EU decries 'barbaric' plans to stone Iranian woman."

The international crossfire over Iran's stoning sentence for a woman convicted of adultery intensified Tuesday with a top European Union official calling it "barbaric" and an Iranian spokesman saying it's about punishing a criminal and not a human rights issue.

So. Ahmed, don't look at the Jew as the cause of your miserable life, look at yourself.