National Geographic and Hollywood were prime twentieth-century vehicles of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism

Evidence

In addition, during this time, Hollywood films like The Thief of Baghdad and literature like Leon Uris’s Exodus and The Haj, as well as James Michener’s The Source, continued to reinscribe these racist views about Arabs and Islam. Little notes that it was The National Geographic, more than any other popular media, that really did the heavy lifting in terms of not-so-subtly imparting anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism through its travel journalism. Its reporting over decades depicted the Arab world as hopelessly backwards, derelict, superstitious, and irrational. In Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen exposes how popular media has continued to use these American-made anti-Arab stereotypes to sell box office tickets world-wide. An example of this was the appalling original lyrics to the Disney film Aladdin, set in a pre-modern Arabia fictionalized into Agrabah, “where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face; it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Jack Shaheen’s Reel Bad Arabs and Said’s Orientalism resonate with the reader’s Islamophobia-literature corpus and would connect to Aziz’s Racial Muslim argument about cultural production feeding legal racialization. — connects to: National Geographic travel journalism was the leading channel imparting anti-Arab racism — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 216; Hollywood has depicted Muslim men as medieval villains since the 1920s — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 596; Early Hollywood Middle East films encoded their era’s colonial logic (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• National Geographic travel journalism was the leading channel imparting anti-Arab racism #expands (0.90) — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 216
• Arab and Muslim representation in American film has been persistently vilifying #expands (0.90) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 674
• Hollywood has depicted Muslim men as medieval villains since the 1920s #expands (0.88) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 596
• Hollywood shifted from exoticizing Arabs to presenting them as killable villains #expands (0.88) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 31
• Hollywood codes Muslim dress and Arabic script as racialized resistance markers #exemplifies (0.85) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 417
• Early Hollywood Middle East films encoded their era’s colonial logic #expands (0.80)
• American national identity was partly forged through media portrayals of foreign Arabs #qualifies (0.78) — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 72
• Seven post-1948 crises drove American media portrayals of Arabs as violent and irrational #qualifies (0.76) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 616
• Anti-Palestinian racism historically produced Islamophobia in the United States #qualifies (0.75) — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 21