# data[].attributes.body
https://youtu.be/oO9wacE1lz8

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZohjYKGZJM

Video explaining the psychological impact of the constant news coverage of the war on terror.

# data[].attributes.headline
Laila Lalami's 12-step guide to making a successful Arab-bashing movie

# data[].attributes.subject
Laila Lalami's 12-step guide to making a successful Arab-bashing movie

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-jul-28-ca-16983-story.html

# data[].attributes.body
The “3 B Syndrome” is the term frequently used to describe the portrayal of Arabs in the mass media: as bombers, billionaires or belly dancers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/13/gods-of-egypt-posters-anger-whitewashed-cast-twitter-exodus

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/argo-ben-affleck-iran-hostage-movie-middle-east-378568

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w918Eh3fij0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Arabs And Muslims Aren't Exotic | AJ+

# data[].attributes.body
now and thanks to the United States, Iraq is enjoying democracy and freedom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
President Bush Announces Start of Iraq War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dear Hollywood: stop portraying Muslims as terrorists

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kenyan film breaks prejudice against terrorism [The Morning Call]

# data[].attributes.headline
Kumail on Representation of the "rest" in video games

# data[].attributes.subject
Kumail on Representation of the "rest" in video games

# data[].attributes.body
A documentary about how US Media has constructed a narrative about international terror threats when in fact domestic terrorism is to blame for most civil unrest.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Deepa Kumar, a leading scholar on Islamophobia, argues that U.S. media have turned Arabs and Muslims into the new face of terror, even though only a tiny fraction of Muslims and Arabs have ever committed a terror attack, and...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Constructing the Terrorist Threat | Kanopy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Deepa Kumar, a leading scholar on Islamophobia, argues that U.S. media have turned Arabs and Muslims into the new face of terror, even though only a tiny fraction of Muslims and Arabs have ever committed a terror attack, and...

# data[].attributes.body
Similar to the Bechdel test for female representation in film and tv, the Riz test (Choudry and Habib) seeks to determine whether or not Muslim representation moves beyond stereotype.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In a speech to the UK's House of Commons in March 2017, actor and rapper Riz Ahmed, a Muslim, delivered a message about the importance of diversity and representation in the media:

What people are looking for is a message that they belong. Every time you see yourself it's a message that you matter, that you're part of the national story.

But when it comes to the "national story", the one about Muslims is pretty grim. The pressing issue of Islamophobia is both fuelled and defined by the misrepresentation and stereotyping of Muslims in the media. Instead of challenging the images of the "oppressed" Muslim woman, or the violent Middle Eastern man that propagate our media, mainstream films often reinforce them. But films are also platforms with the potential to create change through alternative narratives. Our visual culture can play a crucial role in the way we understand the world. So the question is, what do our visual platforms tell us about our cultural perceptions of Muslims? In other words, how are Muslims represented in our stories?

Read more: It's not just about race and gender - religious stereotypes need tackling too

With backgrounds in education research and tech respectively, Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry have kickstarted a project that not only asks this question, but also strives to offer evidence-based answers. In an attempt to quantify the representation of Muslims, the duo has coined what they call the Riz Test. Inspired by the Bechdel test, (which challenges viewers to consider the way women are represented in whatever they happen to be watching) and Riz Ahmed's speech, Habib and Choudry use five points to measure the depiction of Muslims in films and TV shows.

In their own words, the Riz Test: "is a project to measure the portrayal of Muslims in film and TV. What's new is that we're creating a data set that measures how poorly Muslims are represented."

Any film with at least one identifiably Muslim character can be put to the test. The test asks, is the character:

Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?

Presented as irrationally angry?

Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?

Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?

If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? or if female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts?

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, the film has failed the test.

What is shocking is that many critically acclaimed shows fail the test. When I interviewed the pair about the Riz Test recently Choudry told me that the recent BBC hit drama Bodyguard "failed all five criteria of the Riz Test within the first 12 minutes of its first episode". Habib added that there "are serious consequences to these misrepresentations. Muslim women, especially those visibly marked by the hijab, are often targets of abuse and Islamophobia".

Moving beyond stereotypes

Most Muslims will tell you that the images and tropes used in portraying the community mainly rely on lazy, racist and Islamophobic stereotypes. The films that fail the Riz Test reproduce such images and, by drawing attention to these misrepresentations and moving towards something concrete and quantifiable, the test smashes any assumptions that Islamophobia in media is merely a myth.

We must demand better from our media. One way to counter this is to invite an alternative way of thinking and to challenge the discourse and culture around Muslims and their representations.

So how do we demand better representation? With its growing data set, the Riz Test is a great way of drawing attention to the problem - presenting the movie makers with evidence is a great first step that can challenge the film industry at large.

Not only do we need to diversify the roles in our current film industry, but we also need to diversify the kinds of films we watch. World cinema, I think can offer a much more complex depiction of "other" places and people - one that challenges the power dynamics at play and introduces the idea of self-representation, agency and voice.

Artificial Eye

While a good film won't solve all our problems, it can bridge gaps by bringing a diverse audience into the same space. Prominent Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won Iran its first academy award for A Separation in 2012 (he won another in 2017 for The Salesman. At a time of political chaos and isolation, Farhadi has familiarised the world with his home country through its art and human stories.

In her book Reel to Real, Sex and Class at the Movies, feminist thinker and activist bell hooks argues that films "make culture". The visual medium is strong - and representation matters. By putting pressure on the kinds of images we're exposed to, and the kind of images we reproduce, we can indeed "make culture", or perhaps, at this point, fix aspects of our culture so that our "national story" doesn't take representation for granted.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Riz Test: how Muslims are misrepresented in film and TV

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a speech to the UK's House of Commons in March 2017, actor and rapper Riz Ahmed, a Muslim, delivered a message about the importance of diversity and representation in the media: What people are looking for is a message that they belong.

# data[].attributes.body
Rules of Engagement (2000)
An absurdly racist film “designed to reassure audiences that all arabs, even civilians, even women, even children in sweet pink dresses, are deserving targets of the full weight of American military force.”
Film written by former United States Secretary of the Navy and former Marine Corps officer, Jim Webb. State endorsed dehumanisation of Arabs/Muslims.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Picture this scene: a white American man is walking through an alley in an Arab town. He sees a little girl, about six years old, in a sweet pink dress. The poor girl is stumping along on crutches, since one of her legs has been amputated above the knee. He kneels down to talk to her. "What's your name?" he asks. How does she respond to his friendly approach? She spits out something in Arabic, which he can't understand, but which is subtitled: "Killer! Killer!"

Picture this scene: a white American man is walking through an alley in an Arab town. He sees a little girl, about six years old, in a sweet pink dress. The poor girl is stumping along on crutches, since one of her legs has been amputated above the knee. He kneels down to talk to her. "What's your name?" he asks. How does she respond to his friendly approach? She spits out something in Arabic, which he can't understand, but which is subtitled: "Killer! Killer!"

The scene comes from the new Hollywood film Rules of Engagement, which has been packing in audiences in the US this summer. Much of the film is more or less straightforward, full of the clichÃ©s of the combat movie and the courtroom drama. But one aspect takes it into a different world. It is the most racist film to come out of Hollywood for many years. The target of its hate is the Arab: not just the gun-toting fundamentalist with a checked scarf on his head - though he is pretty ubiquitous - but also the Arab woman, with her eyes just showing above her chador, full of secret malevolence, and the Arab child, such as that little girl in the pink dress, already trained in aggression.

By the end of the film, we have learnt how the little girl lost her leg. We take in the story gradually, via truncated flashbacks, so that we can learn by stages how to turn any sympathy we may have for her into hate. We see her in a crowd of civilians demonstrating outside the American embassy in Yemen, when marines on the embassy roof open fire indiscriminately on the crowd, mowing down women and children. Pity and sympathy are possible at this point. But by the end of the film we have come to know her in another light: just before the marines open fire, we see her along with other women and children in the crowd, reaching into their clothes or behind their backs for weapons, which they point up at the marines.

This absurd sequence is designed to reassure audiences that all Arabs, even civilians, even women, even children in sweet pink dresses, are deserving targets of the full weight of American military force. Does it work? Well, I saw the film on a Friday night in Camden Town, north London - not the American Midwest, not some hotbed of mad patriotism - and when the marine commander, played by Samuel L Jackson, has to defend his actions in a court martial with these immortal words: "I was not going to stand by and see a marine die just to live by the fucking rules," applause erupted in the auditorium.

It's easy to shrug off the film as an isolated freak-show, one of those odd throwbacks to a less tolerant age. But the film bolsters anti-Arab sentiment when it has become less and less acceptable to demonise other races in mainstream culture. Hollywood directors may now think twice about showing Africans as childish savages, but there is clearly no such compunction about portraying Arabs as shifty liars and aggressive terrorists.

The film, in which even doctors, women and children are uncovered as crazed terrorists, frankly demonises all the Arabs that it presents. There are no exceptions. There is no back-story that attempts to give any explanation for Arab hostility. The only moment when some political propaganda is found, on a cassette tape, it turns out to be the most naive and terrifying expression of pure hate, translated thus: "We call on every Muslim who believes in God to obey God's command to kill Americans wherever he finds them."

Even the smallest details of the film work in the same direction, to show all Arabs as essentially vicious, from the Arab civilians who surround individual Americans in the streets, shouting and shaking their fists, to the Arab policemen who shiftily cover up evidence. When the character played by Tommy Lee Jones is sitting in hot rooms in Yemen with Arabs, his skin is cool and dry, while sweat drips down the Arabs' dark faces from their head-dresses. When Jones visits a Yemeni hospital, weeks after the massacre, he finds patients still lying in the same clothes that they were shot in, since Arabs are, of course, filthy and wouldn't bother to wash their wounded. It is through such detail, as well as through the plot, that the image of the repulsive Arab is propagated.

Fear and loathing of Arabs is hardly a cultural innovation. As Edward Said documented in his book Orientalism over 20 years ago, Western writers and artists have continually tried to frame Eastern culture as something mysterious and dangerous, in need of interpretation and control by the West. But Rules of Engagement represents a step up from the traditional viewpoint: in its desire to present Arabs as the most loathsome enemies of our time, it feeds off and nurtures a wider political picture.

A recent article in The New Yorker by the redoubtable investigative journalist Seymour Hersh laid out evidence of war crimes committed during the Gulf war. In it, he quoted one former member of a scout platoon in the Gulf who said he had witnessed American troops firing indiscriminately at a group of more than 300 Iraqi prisoners of war and, on another occasion, opening fire on Iraqi forces in retreat after the official surrender. At the time, he pretty much accepted what was going on. "I was as patriotic as they come," he said; "I was a gung-ho ass-kicking patriotic son of a bitch. I hated the Arabs. We all did. I dehumanised them." For this particular soldier, seeing his colleagues mow down defenceless men made him think again about that dehumanisation; for others, the turning-point never came.

If military behaviour on the ground is driven by blanket hatred, so, too, is defence strategy at the highest level. As we are seeing in the presidential campaigns, there can be no dissent in the US from a hawkish defence policy. The National Missile Defence (NMD) strategy may be eating up billions of dollars and failing every one of its test runs, but how could either George W Bush or Al Gore now suggest that it may be a rather pointless exercise? That would be electoral suicide, as every voter knows that America must do everything in its power to counter the eternal threats from its eternal enemies. Those include not only international pariahs such as North Korea, but, above all, the so-called "rogue states" of the Middle East.

The deployment of the NMD, which is meant to counter those potential nuclear threats from states such as Iran and Iraq, would require massive extensions of existing US bases in Britain. And this is something thatour government seems ready to contemplate, rather than question, this picture of a new Cold War, with Arabs rather than Communists seen as the natural enemies of the West.

The British public seems more than ready to accept that Arabs are terrorists at worst and probably less than human at best. Yes, it's right that we should still excoriate Saddam Hussein's government and attempt to punish him for his crimes against humanity. But if we were pursuing, against any other state, a policy of sanctions that was resulting in a huge increase in infant mortality and the suffering of civilians - at little obvious cost to its rulers - would British disgust be as muted as it is at the sight of the effect of sanctions in Iraq?

It seems that we are able to put up with the pointless waste of civilian human life if the civilians are Arabs. Because, as Rules of Engagement so carefully reminds us, even Arab children must be held guilty for the sins of their fathers. n.walter@btinternet.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Picture this scene: a white American man is walking through an alley in an Arab town. He sees a little girl, about six years old, in a sweet pink dress. The poor girl is stumping along on crutches, since one of her legs has been amputated above the knee.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is hysterical. Hysterical as in histrionic; hysterical as in somehow funny; hysterical as in you wish its team had worked harder to take the temperature of the world around us before sending this highly charged and obscenely blinkered James Bond manqué into the world.

Debuting Friday on Amazon Prime, this show is an updated and serialized adaptation of Clancy's perennially successful patriotic book series. Jack Ryan, world-saving C.I.A. agent, has been played by a bizarre range of performers over the years, each theoretically embodying a different but overlapping vision of masculine American heroism: Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine. The villains, too, have changed, as American foreign policy has swung wildly in the years since the character was introduced in 1984.

In this iteration, John Krasinski gets a turn at the action hero, who begins as an unassuming desk-bound analyst plagued by nightmares of combat-then is swiftly dragged into the field when duty calls. Duty, in this case, is embodied by the rise of a militant Lebanese-born Syrian named Suleiman ( Ali Suliman), whose charisma and bank statements cause Jack to take notice. The story alternately illuminates Jack's investigation and Suleiman's plot, which is seen largely through the perspective of his wife, Hanin ( Dina Shihabi), a mother of three who is beginning to have her doubts about what her husband is up to.

It seems that in order to get a portrait of a Syrian woman grappling with personal and political crises, one must also slog through the narrative of an unimpressive American man. If you guess that the show hinges on Jack Ryan rescuing her from her evil terrorist husband, well-spoiler alert!-you would be right. And that says basically everything you need to know: this is a propulsive, enthusiastic, confident action-thriller that makes a glossy, gooey narrative of American generosity and valor. It lauds Jack Ryan-a true American hero who unfailingly escalates every situation and lacks even basic collaborative skills-while neglecting to even attempt to challenge the narrative of noble American involvement and intervention abroad. Both its protagonist and its plot are based on the foundational, unquestioned notion that American-military might-the best-funded killing infrastructure in human history-is helping to save the world.

Its other primary story objective is proving that Jack Ryan deserves his white male entitlement-which indicates just how closely American myths of masculinity are intertwined with international dominance. From frame to frame, Jack Ryan is an astonishing case study in toxic narratives. I watched it twice, slack-jawed in amazement; I do not know if this is an endorsement or not.

Amazon spent quite a bit of money making Jack Ryan look good, and in the sense that this is intended to be an eight-episode action series, it succeeds. The production values still skew a little bit network TV- SEAL Team, on CBS, comes to mind. Jack Ryan lacks the richness of a big-budget movie like this summer's Mission: Impossible - Fallout, or the careful attention to detail of a prestige drama like Showtime's Homeland. Its appeal lies in a more visceral satisfaction: the guns are hot, the women are sexually available, and the explosions keep coming. For the right viewer, that's enough of a hook to overshadow the fact that the story is attempting, and failing, to yoke together two opposing forces: the lacquer of Hollywood heroism with the inherently nuance-seeking structure of dramatic television. (The credits tell their own story. TV director Daniel Sackheim, who produced one of the most beautiful moments of TV last year in The Leftovers, is an executive producer. So is Michael Bay.)

Jack's perfection makes for an inert protagonist; he is presented as a flawless hero from the moment we first see him, moodily rowing down the Potomac before virtuously biking to work. The show makes much of the fact that he doesn't appear to be an alpha male; love interest Abbie Cornish says, with sideways insinuation, that he's more of a Type B or Type C guy. But again, right from the start, there are numerous moments where Jack courageously stands up to defend his position in a meeting, takes his shirt off to casually display his pecs, or spins charm in the direction of a seemingly sexually available female-all clearly intended to indicate, quite firmly, that Jack is all man. So the question of his struggle to advance from behind a desk carries no weight, and his arc through the series carries no stakes.

As any fan of The Office could tell you, Krasinski's charm also lies less in heightening drama than in offhandedly defusing it. An internal, contained role suits him better, as indicated by his own cerebral thriller A Quiet Place. But in Jack Ryan, we're told that Jack Ryan is the rightest, truest, and bravest, over and over again. It's not only insufferable but boring, because he doesn't even have the decency to be conflicted. During a tense situation-room scene, where Jack confirms that Hanin has fled Suleiman, his boss ( Wendell Pierce, in a cartoonishly macho role) yells out, "There's a woman," as if it's exceptional and unusual for a terrorist to have an intimate life. "It's her," Jack replies, curling his left hand into a loose fist-the loose fist of benevolent American imperialism. "Then find her," says another suit in the room, with urgent, unearned intensity. I have no idea if this scene is intended to be comic or not, but I laughed.

The show is less funny when Jack Ryan tries to portray extremism-and the quantifiable human toll of the largely unsuccessful war on terror. The show not-so-subtly frames this conflict as a clash of civilizations, one that reaches its climax when four Muslim terrorists attack a Catholic church in Paris as mass is being sung. American and French forces, mostly comprising white people, team up to take down a global network of Muslims-including both bloodthirsty outlaws in the Syrian desert and mild-mannered doctors in Paris, just in case you thought anywhere, or anyone, could be counted on to be safe. The only exception is Hanin, sort of: in her attempt to separate herself from her husband's affairs, she is immediately victimized by him and his colleagues. One tries to rape her, before a (white American male) drone pilot disobeys orders to bomb her attacker. It's lurid schlock, stoking convenient and uncomplicated ideas about who is the enemy, and who are the good guys. Undoubtedly, that is what makes material like Jack Ryan so marketable.

There are scattered moments when Jack Ryan approaches nuance: in scenes that explore the relationship between Suleiman and his brother Ali ( Haaz Sleiman), Hanin's desperation, and the conflicted conscience of that drone pilot ( John Magaro). Midseason, the pilot tries to apologize to the bereaved family of a Syrian civilian. It's a painful scene, and contains poignant moments. But ultimately, what's striking is the implication that it's even possible for a person to apologize when he's anonymously and unjustly killed a man's son. It's staggering, how benevolent Jack Ryan believes its soldiers to be. Questioning overseas military intervention isn't even a partisan issue, necessarily-but Jack Ryan is all in on the fantasy.

It is normal for television to dramatize events-to fudge the dull details of a medical procedure, or heighten the drama of a courtroom. But at this moment in time, Jack Ryan's anvil-dropping approach is grotesque. With mainstream rhetoric about Muslims being what it is, it's not possible to engage with storytelling about the "war on terror" as pure entertainment. But Jack Ryan tries to do this anyway. It is grueling to attempt to see any of this as fun, when the subject matter feels so painfully insensitive-even more so than it did years ago, when Homeland debuted. This is a show selling a false narrative that many people would prefer to believe as truth, and it appears to have no qualms about that.

Jack Ryan feels like a machine designed to turn us all into the sort of viewers who disappear smiling down jingoistic Fox News rabbit holes. It assumes that we-Americans, and America-are doing a good job. Talk about a fantasy.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect the number of episodes in the series.
TV's 18 Most Gloriously Obnoxious, Unintentional Villains

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is hysterical. Hysterical as in histrionic; hysterical as in somehow funny; hysterical as in you wish its team had worked harder to take the temperature of the world around us before sending this highly charged and obscenely blinkered James Bond manqué into the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
American Sniper (2014) ⭐ 7.3 | Action, Biography, Drama

# data[].attributes.body
A military officer in command of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya, sees her mission escalate when a girl enters the kill zone triggering an international dispute over the implications of modern warfare.

Sheds light on the 'collateral damage' aspect of terrorism that is often ignored in war on terror depictions. Shows the West in a not very flattering light.

Domestic Total Gross: $18,704,595

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=hurt+locker&view=detail&mid=55EE865AE0E38F45066D55EE865AE0E38F45066D&FORM=VIRE0&mmscn=tpvh&ru=%2fsearch%3fq%3dhurt%2blocker%26form%3dEDGEAR%26qs%3dPF%26cvid%3df89ff6a7464d46c489151d3d153db4f6%26cc%3dGB%26setlang%3den-US