Hollywood scripts stereotype Muslim characters with sustained dehumanizing epithets.

Evidence

Muslims are “camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers,” while the white Christian is “unlike the Oriental, a true human being.” The descriptors used for Arab characters in Hollywood films reveal a troubling approach to the representation of Muslims in cinema. These epithets include: ” ‘assholes,’ ‘bastards,’ ‘camel-dicks,’ ‘pigs,’ ‘devil-worshippers,’ ‘jackals,’ ‘rats,’ ‘rag-heads,’ ‘towel-heads,’ ‘scum-buckets,’ ‘sons-of-dogs,’ ‘buzzards of the jungle,’ ‘sons-of-whores,’ ‘sons-of-unnamed goats,’ and ‘sons-of-she-camels.’ ” In addition to the use of words like “savage,” “barbarian,” and “sons-of-she-camels,” language is used in film in a more coercive way. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 635

Categorization

• SEED: The animalistic epithets (‘jackals,’ ‘rats,’ ‘buzzards’) trace a direct lineage to medieval bestialization of Muslim figures — a possible angle on continuity across centuries of dehumanizing vocabulary.