SEPT 23, 2010
In 1921 heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, starring in the black-and-white film The Sheik, introduced Americans via the big screen to the Arab—the progenitor of today’s loosely defined, hysteria-inducing, mosque-building, uppity enemy. In the movie, Arabs were portrayed as exotic, temperamental, prone to rape and having small hands.
Those were the good old days.
Today’s Islamophobic rapture, with its equally absurd extremes of Koran bonfires and public service announcements in which Muslims have to remind their fellow Americans that they are (good) Americans too, should not come as a surprise. Arabs and Muslims have a long history of being perceived and portrayed as utterly foreign to America. [full story]