"The relentless cinematic assault on Arabs has been our culture's most insidious yet closeted disgrace-until now. [Reel Bad Arabs] casts a penetrating spotlight on the movies that have shaped our infinitely distorted and warped views of Arab and Muslim life."
Renee Tajima-Pena
Producer-Director, Sundance Award-Winning Film, My America
"The documentary successfully illustrates the racism inherent in blockbuster cinema, by using popular filmic examples to ensure the film's premise resonates with its audience... The film is subdivided into several chapters such as: Myths of Arabland; The Arab Threat: Mideast Politics & Hollywood; Terror Inc. Demonizing Palestinians & Muslims; Islamophohia; and Getting Real. In this way, audiences unfamiliar with visual media studies, or the history of U.S. international relations, receive an introduction into the highly controversial historical relationship between the U.S. and the Middle East."
Linnea J. Hussein
Columbia University
Film & History
"For years, with rare passion and eloquence, Jack Shaheen has raised a constant, resonating voice on behalf of the Arab in America. An undaunted warrior devoted to righting the wrongs of distortion that have too long persisted, Shaheen has displayed unwavering dedication to the cause of fair play for ethnic groups who have suffered from misrepresentation by our film industry-Arabs most of all. For his courage in protecting the integrity of an entire people against the tides of prejudice in American mass culture, we are all deeply in his debt."
Asaad Kelada
Director
"Timely and salutary ... highly recommended for all public and academic libraries."
Library Journal
"... A well conceived and constructed documentary... This film raises a number of important issues around stereotypes that would prove valuable as discussion in media, film and cultural studies courses. Recommended."
Educational Media Reviews Online
"It came as quite a shock to suddenly recognize a form of racial stereotyping that is so widespread-yet somehow invisible-and almost as old as the cinema itself. Dr. Shaheen carefully documents an astonishing array of Arab villains, sheikhs, and maidens. Highly recommended!"
John Skillin
Director, Audio Visual Services, Montclair Public Library
"Jack Shaheen continues to be a piercing laser of fairness and sanity in pointing out Hollywood's ongoing egregious smearing of Arabs."
Howard Rosenberg
Los Angeles Times TV Critic
"Reel Bad Arabs performs an invaluable service by visually demonstrating the sheer volume of unrelenting negative images found in Hollywood films... Shaheen stresses that Hollywood's Arab images now seriously interfere with the ability of Americans to think rationally about the Middle East. Jack Shaheen says, 'Enough.' No sane person could disagree."
Cineaste
"This taut, well-argued analysis of ethnicity betrayed shows us the power of Hollywood's movies to miseducate the senses-and, since the senses are its gateways, to distort the soul."
Camelia Anwar Sadat
"Jack G. Shaheen has long been a prophet in the Hollywood wilderness, writing from carefully documented scholarship that exposes the film industry's negative portrayals of Arabs and Muslims."
James M. Wall
Senior Contributing Editor, The Christian Century
"Calm, measured, fair, even-handed, and compassionate. A powerful and important film that validates the human dignity of Arabs and Muslims."
Laurence Michalak
Director of CEMAT, the Overseas Research Center in Tunisia of the American Institute of Maghreb Studies
"An excellent starting point for discussions about media representations of race, gender, and religion, the relationship between politics and entertainment media, and the effects of stereotyping."
Journalism History
"Jack Shaheen is a one-man anti-defamation league who has exposed Hollywood's denigration of Arabs in most, if not all, of its films."
Helen Thomas
Distinguished Journalist and Author
"Jack Shaheen exposes in appalling detail this nightmare side of the Hollywood dream machine."
Christopher Dickey
Author, Innocent Blood
Middle East Editor Newsweek Magazine
"How can one ignore this thesis given the accumulative impact of the compiled images coupled with Dr. Shaheen's commentary? Very impressive work."
Janice Welsch
Professor Emeritus, Western Illinois University
Co-author, Multicultural Films: A Resource Guide
