Ironclad Cliches

In Westerns, 99 percent of the time the villains are first of all, Indians, and then, Mexicans. Screenwriters and directors have forced upon the viewers one movie after another about the West, in which red-faced, primitive men are shouting their heads off all the time, and with harrowing ingenuity are torturing the always innocent “palefaces.” As for the Mexicans, they are permanently filthy and greedy with missing teeth. In crime movies, especially oldies, the bad guys are usually Italians. In more contemporary movies, the villains’ gallery has been enriched with Chinese, Serbs and Albanians. Speaking of spy movies, Russians have obviously represented the ultimate evil.

Hollywood and the film industry in general have lately discovered Arabs — that is, Muslims. And the idea is not to introduce them to us or get to know them, but to cram them into the ironclad villain stereotype — which had become an orphan after the fall of the Berlin Wall — to humiliate them. Hollywood makes Arabs look like maniacs who live and die to kill. I am talking about the norm rather than the exceptions. Thousands of movies with which the international television market is supplied are created based on this norm. Surely, there are sensitive and righteous movies. They get one or two awards, as acts of generosity or profound hypocrisy. However, they fail in the battle against the all-powerful norm and in unsettling deep-rooted stereotypes, which cast roles just as the pale-faced, white guys or Westerners want.

There are no innocent stereotypes in nature. They all have their own feasibility and educational value. Therefore, when the Greater Manchester Police organized a counterterrorism training exercise at the Trafford Centre, it plunged into the swamp of stereotypes only to drag up the most common, ideal example: A terrorist throwing a bomb shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

Please note that their belief system does not involve a Muslim being a terrorist (the same applies to Christians, atheists, etc.), but that a terrorist can only be a Muslim. That is obvious racial stereotyping in a country where a few days ago, Sadiq Khan, the first-ever Muslim mayor, was elected in London, despite the Conservatives’ tactic to slander him as a jihad supporter.

Could the same training exercise have taken place, however, if the main character was not shouting “Allahu Akbar”? Surely it could have. Besides, the West has been paying a high price for nonreligious, right-wing terrorism (there is a double page spread in the Greek newspaper Ποντίκι entitled “A Greater Threat than ISIS: Right-Wing Terrorism in the USA Has Caused Even More Victims than Jihad,” which is extremely enlightening). However, without shouts of “Allahu Akbar,” the message would have been incomplete, neutral, target-less. And the police must always target somebody. Afterward, they can always apologize!