Why Is It So Easy to Dehumanize Arabs and Muslims?
As New York's potential first Muslim mayor faces racist attacks, we must examine how Hollywood and Western media have dehumanized Arab and Middle Eastern people.
On June 22, 2025, the United States launched military strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities, with President Trump announcing that the sites were "completely and totally obliterated." Within hours, social media exploded with a surge in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate speech. TikTok posts began "explicitly calling for the destruction" of Middle Eastern communities, while others featured "disturbing references to Hitler and Nazi ideology."
Just days later, Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary triggered another wave of Islamophobic attacks. Republican members of Congress and Trump administration officials immediately targeted the assemblyman who could become the city's first Muslim mayor. Stephen Miller called Mamdani's win "the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration." Representative Andy Ogles accused him of supporting terrorists and demanded Attorney General Pam Bondi strip his citizenship. Charlie Kirk connected him directly to 9/11, writing: "24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City."
Meanwhile, CAIR's latest civil rights report revealed that complaints about anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents reached 8,658 in 2024, the highest number since data collection began in 1996.
But none of this reaction was surprising. After decades of systematic dehumanization through Western media and culture, most Americans have been primed to see Arab and Middle Eastern people as inherently threatening, backward, and disposable. The real question to grapple with here isn't why the hate surged, it's how we got to a point where an entire region of people could be so easily written off as less than human.
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Early Hollywood Stereotypes
In 1993, Disney had to change the opening lyrics to Aladdin because they were so blatantly racist that the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee launched protests. The original version of "Arabian Nights" described the Middle East as a place where "they cut off your ear if they don't like your face," adding, "It's barbaric, but hey, it's home." Aladdin made over $500 million and became a cultural staple for an entire generation of American children.
That Disney lyric perfectly captures how Western media has portrayed Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim people for over a century. These three groups are often conflated in popular imagination, even though not all Arabs are Muslim and the vast majority of Muslims worldwide aren't Arab. But the stereotypes imported onto these communities have become so intertwined that they function as one massive dehumanization campaign.
Research shows that Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment directly affect American public opinion on foreign policy, including how we perceive intervention in places like Palestine and Israel. When people have been conditioned to see entire populations as inherently violent or primitive, it becomes disturbingly easy to justify occupations and bombings against them.
Film Industry Analysis
Film scholar Jack Shaheen spent years analyzing nearly 1,000 movies made since 1896 that portrayed Arab people. His findings in "Reel Bad Arabs" showed that 936 films depicted Arabs negatively, while only 12 offered positive portrayals. And this was before 9/11, when anti-Arab stereotypes became even more widespread and vicious.
Shaheen traced these ideas directly to the Orientalism of British and French authors who visited the Middle East after their empires carved up the region following the Ottoman Empire's collapse. But in American cinema, anti-Arab stereotypes have almost always been deployed to support U.S. political agendas in the region.
Take the 1960 blockbuster "Exodus," which depicted Israel's foundation story from the perspective of European Jewish settlers. Based on a bestselling novel, the film has been credited with "Americanizing the narrative of Israel" by framing it like the American colonists' search for freedom: brave pioneers entering an "undeveloped land" and taking up arms against both the British and the native population to establish independence.
As Shaheen noted, the movie's one-dimensional characterization of Palestinians introduced "filmgoers to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and populated it with heroic Israelis and sleazy, brutal Arabs." Even Barack Obama has cited the book's author as one of his starting points for understanding the Middle East. Palestinian critic Edward Said argued into the 2000s that "Exodus" still provided "the main narrative model that dominates American thinking" about the region.
Media Influence on Foreign Policy
Throughout the later 20th century, terror attacks by Arab extremists were dramatized and sensationalized to reinforce preconceived notions that stereotyped Islamic and Arab people as religious zealots threatening Western peace. The 1977 film "Black Sunday" revolved around an Israeli military agent working with the FBI to stop a Palestinian terrorist planning to blow up 80,000 Super Bowl attendees, including the president.
These fictional narratives had real-world consequences. A powerful example is the infamous Nayirah testimony, where a young woman completely fabricated claims about Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators and leaving them to die. This false testimony helped build public support for the Persian Gulf War under George H.W. Bush. And like his father, George W. Bush later lied about weapons of mass destruction in Arab hands to justify the Iraq War.
The post-9/11 period saw countless war dramas sensationalizing American soldiers' stories in the Middle East, and even the biggest movie franchise of all time participated. Marvel's "Iron Man," with a script approved by the Pentagon, featured a white American hero spending much of the film kidnapped by Middle Eastern extremists who fit every "terrorist" stereotype imaginable.
Real-World Consequences
During this post-9/11 period, hate crimes against Muslim and Arab people became five times more common. The violence spilled over to unrelated groups, as Sikhs, South Asians, and Black people mistaken for Arabs all became targets.
We rarely encounter depictions of Arab and Middle Eastern people in their full humanity: laughing, smiling, being close with family. Instead, anything "different" about Middle Eastern cultures gets mocked, demonized, and used as evidence of Arab "backwardness." Even when there are legitimate criticisms to be made about specific societies, the racialization of these issues provides justification for the impulse to invade and use military force to impose Western will.
This "civilizing mission" has justified Western intervention and imperialism for centuries. The targets change, but the logic remains identical. These people are inherently inferior and need us to save them from themselves, by force if necessary.
Current Impact
With this pop culture foundation framing most Americans' perceptions of the Middle East, it becomes clear why it's so easy for politicians today to dehumanize Arab people. A significant portion of the population has already been conditioned to see people from that region as less than human.
The June strikes on Iran and the immediate surge in online hate are the result of decades of systematic dehumanization. When Disney can casually describe an entire region as "barbaric" in a children's movie and Hollywood can produce nearly a thousand films depicting Arabs as villains, we've created a culture where an entire people can be dismissed as acceptable casualties.
The solution requires us acknowledging this uncomfortable truth. Until we actively deconstruct and unlearn those beliefs, the cycle of dehumanization and violence will continue. The question is whether we're willing to do that work before the next strike.
But here's the grim reality: it's harder than ever to find platforms willing to publish this kind of analysis.
Within hours after the US strikes on Iran, most mainstream coverage focused solely on "strategic military objectives" while completely ignoring the surge of hate crimes and dehumanizing rhetoric targeting Arab and Muslim Americans. The same outlets that might have covered rising Islamophobia in 2020 are now terrified of being labeled "anti-American" for connecting dots between our foreign policy and domestic hate.
Social media platforms are actively suppressing content that challenges these narratives. TikTok videos calling for "destruction" of Middle Eastern communities stay up, while posts documenting the historical roots of anti-Arab stereotypes get shadowbanned or removed entirely. Even academic institutions are pulling back from research on Orientalism and media representation, afraid of losing federal funding under the current administration.
The reality is stark: we need independent voices documenting how systematic dehumanization works, platforms that can't be silenced when the next military strike happens and hate surges again.
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🎬 At 5% paid subscribers: I could create a comprehensive database tracking current anti-Arab representation in film and TV, building on Jack Shaheen's foundational work.
📊 At 10% paid subscribers: I could investigate which production companies are still getting Pentagon approval for scripts that dehumanize Middle Eastern people.
🏛️ At 20% paid subscribers: We could develop educational materials connecting Hollywood stereotypes to real-world violence for schools and communities where this analysis is desperately needed.
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References
Council on American-Islamic Relations. "2025 Civil Rights Report: Unconstitutional Crackdowns." Islamophobia.org, 2025.
Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch Press, 2001.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
The Conversation. "Orientalism: Edward Said's groundbreaking book explained," 2023.
U.S. Department of Justice. "Hate Crimes: Addressing Hate Targeting Jewish, Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian Communities," 2025.
Center for Strategic and International Studies. "How Will Iran and the Middle East Respond to U.S. Strikes?" June 2025.
But they do it to us all,! I am of Latin descent. My family‘s been here since 1507 when I was growing up, we had to put up with the Frito Bandito. In classifying how Mexicans are lazy. But we’re not short of being president someday.. in America that’s possible despite this white supremacy regime in Washington. Maybe we have just grown thick skin. We are the ones who build your homes clean your homes cook your meals be at home or in a restaurant.. care for your children privately in your home or are their teachers. . We’re the ones that work in the field and harvest the food that goes on your table.. . We’re the ones who are landscapers Gardener Hardscape who do the planting sprinkler system sidewalks rebuild your fireplaces and just make your home look like 1 million bucks..
We’re the ones that are in 102+ degrees outside while the rest of the world is inside in air-conditioning . . So dehumanize we’ve been Experian this all our lives, but I figure those that are doing it. I BELIEVE THOSE THAT ARE DOING IT ARE INADEQUATE, AND WHO THEY ARE IN THEIR LIFE AND IN SOCIETY.. THAT’S MY SPIN ON IT AND MY OBSERVATION. .. . REMEMBER THIS.
UNITED WE STAND. . . DIVIDED , WE FALL .
Thank you, Khalil! For your inspiration idealism, vision and hope! I find myself in my crone years, and I see your bright star rising in the universe of justice! Blaze on, my dear friend!