There is one character that has made an appearance in numerous Hollywood films, novels and writings – the hostile Arab. Negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims predates the September 11 attacks by decades. The villainous Arab/Muslim takes on multiple varieties – lecherous oil sheikh, fanatical bomb-throwing terrorist, or deceitful dodger. Let’s not forget Arab women, who make an appearance either as veiled and tragically oppressed, or sensuous belly dancers tempting lustful men.

The late Jack G Shaheen, Arab American scholar and consultant, pioneered research in this area. The Hollywood Arab is a pervasive character, polluting the minds of millions of movie goers and novel readers. He elaborated, in his books and documentaries, the vilification of the Arab and Muslim cultures in numerous films, novels and media depictions. These negative stereotypes do more than a thousand words to cement hostile images and malignant misunderstandings in the public consciousness.

The barbaric Arab terrorist is a recurring presence in Hollywood action dramas. From films such Delta Force (1986), to The Siege (1998), the Arab as terrorist is portrayed as fanatical, motivated by an irrational hatred of the West, cruel and vindictive. This notion of the barbaric Arab only serves to stigmatise an entire ethnicity. The 1970s and 80s witnessed a growing number of films where the Arab terrorist – usually a Palestinian – is the villainous enemy deserving of annihilation.

Edward Said, the late Palestinian intellectual, elaborated his crucial concept of Orientalism. Said suggested that the European colonial societies in their scholarship and writings produced a contemptuous and hostile view of the Arab and Islamic worlds. Such depictions, reinforced in literature and film, only serves to buttress an imperialist view of the outsider, demonise the oppressed, and obscure the crucial role of imperialist intervention in subduing the Arabic-speaking peoples.

Said lived in the United States, and he witnessed firsthand the demonisation of the East as the eternal enemy. He not only denounced the harmful impact of negative stereotyping, but also noted the strong linkage between centres of knowledge and political power. As a Palestinian living in America, he wrote the following observation:

The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny…The nexus of knowledge and power creating ‘the oriental‘ and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance.

In this context, it is worthwhile to observe that the late Murray Bookchin, anarchist activist and mini-pop-star on the green ecological left, was a fervent Zionist who recycled tropes about the barbaric and backward Arabs in his writings. His work on democratic confederalism and ecological awareness is commendable; but he demolished his credibility as a social activist by condemning the Arab people as languishing in cultural regression and violent, irrational antisemitism.

Arab women are portrayed as either veiled, and subject to patriarchal oppression, or belly dancers, and subject to exotic sexualisation. Apparently the imperialist countries are highly advanced in women’s rights, while the Arab and Islamic nations need to ‘catch up’ to us in that regard. Patriarchy is a problem the world over, and Arab women have been fighting for their rights for decades, without any help from the purportedly enlightened West.

Indeed, the Arab regimes which we condemn for being culturally regressive – in particular the Gulf petro-monarchies – are the regimes most closely allied with the European powers. Imperial power, while projecting itself onto the rest of the world, uses negative stereotyping domestically to create pro-imperial constituencies, imbued with a racist outlook.

While the image of the billionaire oil sheikh buying up English football clubs abounds in the UK media, it is precisely the Gulf sheikhdoms – Saudi Arabia in particular, with its culturally regressive practices – that are staunch allies of Britain. The US has done its utmost to maintain the pipeline of armaments and financing to the Saudi regime, while the latter epitomises the oil-sheikh image in the western imagination.

There are numerous Arab writers and novelists articulating the struggles, trauma and aspirations of the Arab nations. We never hear about them in the Anglosphere, because they go against the grain of imperial power. They expose the falsity of the hostile stereotypes we have imbibed in the West.

Let’s put down Leon Uris’ Exodus, and pick up copies of books by Palestinian authors, so we can improve our understanding of the plight and resilience of the Palestinians. Let’s ditch the Orientalism of our predecessors for a more engaged examination of the Arab world.

In an article for the Boston Review, Jonna Perrillo, associate professor at the University of Texas El Paso, writes that for some migrants and refugees, America has been very welcoming. However, for those from nonwhite backgrounds, getting to be accepted as American has been a difficult course filled with obstacles. Her observations have contemporary relevance for the Anglospheric world, as conversations about how we define ourselves have erupted in a series of culture wars.

In 1946, 144 German children were moved from war-torn Germany to El Paso, Texas. They were the children of Nazi scientists, captured in the waning days of World War 2, as part of a secret American government programme called Operation Paperclip. The latter involved taking Nazi scientists, especially those involved in designing the V2 rockets, to the US. These ex-Nazi scientists, including the most famous Wernher von Braun, were instrumental in launching the space missions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The participation of these Nazi scientists in the German war machine was overlooked or whitewashed, as they and their families settled in the United States. The German children, attending school in El Paso, were welcomed and warmly integrated into the school community. In numerous press articles, the German students were described as smart, sociable and capable. Rewarded for speaking German, as well as learning English, there was never any question that these kids would grow up to be American citizens.

This educationally privileged experience contrasts sharply with that of the Mexican American children, who made up the vast majority of the El Paso student community. Pushed into underfunded and overcrowded public schools, these students were punished for speaking Spanish, the only language they had ever known. Condemned as antisocial, unintelligent and super sensitive, the Mexican children were viewed as the eternal outsiders, incapable of becoming a part of the American landscape, which was exclusively reserved for whiteness.

The Paperclip children, defined as white, held the key to access the best of American society. Never mixing with the Mexican children, the German kids were taught that American values of self-reliance, individual achievement and democratic tolerance were integral in becoming American. Paperclip children were viewed as basically white in the process of becoming American. If the German children could be integrated into US society, then maybe Operation Paperclip could be interpreted as something positive, or at least benevolently motivated.

As Jonna Perrillo notes:

German children were quickly embraced as “American” because they were white, whereas the Mexican American children were consistently treated as foreign despite being U.S. citizens by birth.

Mexican children, stigmatised as lazy and hypersensitive, were at the lower steps of the capitalist and racialised pyramid. It is relevant to observe here that while Paperclip children were warmly welcomed into American society, the US authorities had done everything they could to heavily restrict the numbers of European Jewish refugees attempting to enter the United States. While the most famous European Jewish refugee, Albert Einstein, did gain entry to the US, thousands of his fellow Jews were not so lucky.

It is also relevant to note that African American military veterans – who served their nation in both world wars – were rejected by the country for which they fought. Facing legalised discrimination at home, black American veterans found themselves at odds with a society for which they risked their lives.

The black Olympians who competed at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, found themselves equally ostracised when they returned home. We have all heard of the story, highly exaggerated, that Jesse Owens, gold-medal winning African American athlete, was reputedly snubbed by Hitler. That story is largely a myth; however, what is not in dispute is that successive US administrations ignored the contributions of the 18 black American Olympians.

In an irony not lost in the mists of history, the 18 African American athletes lived in a racially integrated Olympic village while in Berlin – something they could not experience in their own nation. Snubbed by the American authorities, they were eventually thanked for their sacrifices by former President Barack Obama.

We have come a long way since then, with the civil rights movement, and campaigns for racial and economic justice. However, it would be wrong to draw a false finish line underneath the issue of redressing racial inequities. There is no intention, as falsely claimed by conservative commentators, that white children will be saddened or feel guilty if we teach the history of racism and genocidal violence against the indigenous nations in our schools.

The Paperclip children were never taught about the history of systematic violence against the indigenous American nations – nor the conquest of Mexican territory in a series of predatory wars in the southwest. Removing the presence of – and crimes committed against – the indigenous nations, the Paperclip children were included in a narrative of whiteness. We can observe what a nation stands for by what it omits from its curriculum, as much as by what it includes.

This pedagogy of omission, as Perrillo calls it, can be rectified by a pedagogy of inclusion, filling in the gaps so to speak. Only then can we have an honest reckoning about ourselves.