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The Western (mainly American) film industry leads to a commonplace and distorted view about people of Arabic descent. Arab characters in such American movies exemplify everything that is anti-Western. Cinema pigeonholes Arabs in three main ways: the Arab as being wealthy, the Arab as terrorist, and the Arab as the "other" -- one who is heathen, evil and uncivilised. Popular western cinema also stereotypes the Islamic religion and portrays followers of Islamic faith as religious fundamentalists.
Although many popular movies are made for entertainment purposes, films, being a powerful and popular form of mass communication, invariably transmit social and political messages. By portraying Arabs in a negative fashion, the Western film industry only serves to further the ideology of Western expansionism that has prevailed since the Middle Ages.
The wealthy Arab stereotype threatens the security of Americans and the American dream of prosperity. Movies like Into the Night (1985) associate Arabs with power and wealth, often through organised crime, such as smuggling operations. Other examples include Rollover (1981), where Arabs were portrayed as an evil force trying to bring ruin to the American economy, and the now famous The Sheik (1921), in which Rudolph Valentino plays a licentious sheik who captures a British woman and leads her to his wealthy residence in the desert.
The popular James Bond movie series, heralded as "one of the longest running and most successful film franchises in history," uses the stereotype of the wealthy, dangerous Arab in many of its films. In Octopussy (1983), the villain, Prince Kamal Khan, is described on the series' official Website as "an exiled Afghan prince with a penchant for free food, jewels and atomic weaponry" who "teams with a power-crazed communist general in an attempt to unleash nuclear holocaust in Western Europe." Thus, the stereotype of the wealthy Arab is invariably tied to that of the Arab as terrorist.
The image of the Arab terrorist is appallingly prevalent within the medium of film. In the movie Wrong is Right (1982), a sheik supplies terrorists with nuclear bombs to be dropped over Tel Aviv and New York. In Iron Eagle (1986), a United States Air Force pilot is shut down by a fundamentalist Middle Eastern state. The archenemy in True Lies (1994), a...