Hollywood Does It Again

Just when Muslims saw signs of Hollywood amending its ways, out comes a movie which tops them all in terms of overall racist, stereotypical, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim content. On April 7th, Paramount Pictures released the military courtroom drama “RULES OF ENGAGEMENT,” directed by William Friedkin ("The Exorcist," "The French Connection") and stars Hollywood big timers Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. This time Hollywood ventured into relatively new terrain opting to choose the country and people of Yemen as the hateful, anti-American villains in the film. Why did they choose Yemen? No one really knows, except that the Arab-Muslim combination has always served as the perfect ingredient for big budget action dramas that include evil anti-American characters. [Note: Yemen – population 16 million – is not among those countries listed by the United States as “harboring terrorists”.]

The movie begins in 1968 Vietnam where Marine Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) saves the life of fellow Marine Hays Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones) during battle. The movie then picks up twenty-eight years later when Childers is facing court martial because of a rescue mission at the U.S. embassy in Yemen that ended in the murder of 83 Yemeni men, women, and children. Childers is charged with violating the rules of engagement in Yemen and asks Hodges, now a lawyer near retirement, to represent him.

The film’s storywriter, who also served as executive producer, is James Webb; a Marine commander in Vietnam, and former Secretary of the Navy in 1987-88. On April 11, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Executive Director, Nihad Awad, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen asking that the Pentagon not collaborate with the film industry on anti-Muslim stereotyping. "This film, which was produced with the cooperation of the Department of Defense, seems to justify the killing of Muslim men, women and even children,” Awad said. Awad also pointed out that past anti-Arab and anti-Muslim films such as 'True Lies' and 'Executive Decision' were also produced in cooperation with the Defense Department.

Upon release of the film, American Muslims and Arab-Americans launched a nationwide protest, from Washington D.C to Los Angeles, against the film for its negative and racist characterizations of Muslims and Arabs. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Communication’s Director, Hussein Ibish, wrote an open letter to Paramount Pictures Chair Shelly Lansing denouncing the film as racist and offensive. Ibish cited several negative scenes throughout the film such as the portrayal of angry Arab children who are shown cursing and firing guns at U.S. Marines; the impassioned and anti-American Yemeni crowd gathered outside the embassy; the cassette tape recordings which urge “all good Muslims” to kill Americans. “These are indeed the images that lead to the high incidence of hate crimes against Arab Americans, that produce airport profiling, that have led to the use of secret evidence in American courts, that make the everyday lives of Arabs in the United States that much more difficult and dangerous,” Hibish wrote in his letter.

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