Each side perceived the other through cinematic stereotypes.

Evidence

Later I realized how the twelve community leaders present—speaking with accents and in Arabic with each other, mostly darker-skinned, accompanied by a mystical-looking sheikh, and breaking in the middle of the meeting for prayer—must have looked like movie characters to them. But, as everyone knows, in the movies we are the bad guys. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 56

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism field, and to the broader motif of mutual misperception the reader has been tracking across several books.