The 'towel-heads' take on Hollywood

by Brian Whitaker

THE AMERICAN embassy in Yemen is under siege, at the mercy of a frenzied mob. The Marines go in and whisk the ambassador away by helicopter in the nick of time. But as the riot continues Yemeni men, women, boys and girls fire rifles at the Marines.

Colonel Terry Childers orders his troops to shoot back. Within seconds they have massacred 83 Yemenis and wounded 100 more. Never mind, though: the victims are only a bunch of fanatical towel-heads.

Rules of Engagement, which comes to British cinemas this week, has been described as "probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood". Those are the words of Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, but professional film critics have been no less scathing.

Paul Clinton of the Boston Globe wrote: "At its best, Rules of Engagement is merely bad, a sad and confused flick ... at its worst, it's blatantly racist, using Arabs as cartoon-cutout bad guys, and unrealistic in its depiction of a conflict in the Middle East."

Despite its critics, Rules of Engagement became a top box office success in the US earlier this year, earning $15 million in just one weekend. Its director is William Friedkin, who in the 1970s won Academy Awards for The French Connection and The Exorcist.

After the massacre in Yemen the filmís story switches to the United States, where Colonel Childers is court-martialled on his return - rightly, many people would think. But here the film runs into deeper trouble because the case against Childers has been rigged and the audience are meant to sympathise with him. The message, apparently, is that it's OK to murder a few dozen foreigners where American lives are at stake.

Why Arabs and Muslims figure in Rules of Engagement at all is a mystery. The original (entirely fictional) story - written by James Webb, Secretary of the US Navy under the Reagan administration - placed the events in an un-named Latin American country.

The makers, Paramount, won't explain why they relocated it, beyond saying Latin America was "too topical". Some suggest they were anxious not to offend United States' hispanic population which, at 31 million, is shortly expected to overtake blacks as the largest minority group.

Another view is that Hollywood is running out of bad-guy stereotypes that it can get away with. A lot of minority groups have worked over the years to sensitise the industry and to gain positive representation in films. Last year, the Directors Guild of America finally - after 85 years - got around to cancelling its award for D W Griffith's white supremacist film, Birth of a Nation.

According to Godfrey Cheshire, a critic on the New York Press, Arabs are "the only vicious racial stereotype that's not only still permitted but actively endorsed by Hollywood ... If Childers had mowed down a hundred Africans or Swedes, say, it might be a little hard for us to see our hero's act as just like that earlier murder in Vietnam: harsh but justifiable, perhaps even heroic. Arabs deserve it, anyway - they're the enemy, the dark, fanatical other, aren't they?"

In the early days of Hollywood, Arabs were over-sexed exotic creatures, living in the desert, riding camels, fighting among themselves and buying women at slave markets.

The 1970s - probably as a result of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the oil embargo - saw the emergence of a much more strongly antipathetic character: the oil sheikh - rich, vengeful, corrupt, sneaky and, above all, fat. This, says Ibish, was basically nothing new: it was a re-casting of the classic anti-semitic Jewish banker stereotype of the 1920s.

From the 1980s onwards, Hollywood Arabs have generally been crazed terrorists ñ evolving more recently into crazed terrorist Islamic fundamentalists.

Ibish says: "These negative stereotypes are rooted in the very aggressive role that the US plays in the Middle East. The stereotypes emerge from the popular culture then inform government policy, and that reinforces the willingness of producers of popular culture to promote the stereotypes, and so on. It's a spiral."

Chris Doyle of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding says that while black actors have made inroads into Hollywood there are very few Arab actors - which may be part of the problem. The only famous Arab actor in the west is Omar Sharif, now aged 68. Alec Guinness played an Arab in Lawrence of Arabia and the hero in The 13th Warrior (one of the few recent films to show Arabs in a positive light) was Antonio Banderas, a Spaniard.

Films often try to avoid smearing entire categories of people by including one or two warm-hearted characters on the other side. The Siege, a 1998 film about Arab-Muslim terrorism in the US, did this (though some critics condemned it as tokenism). But Rules of Engagement makes no such concessions.

The two initially sympathetic Yemeni characters turn out to be just as bad as the rest. There's a little girl, aged about seven, with appealing eyes and only one leg, who struggles about on crutches but is later seen with a gun. And a supposedly respectable Yemeni doctor ends up perjuring himself in the witness box.

"It's the total demonisation of an entire culture, without any respite," Ibish says. "That's very unusual and itís qualitatively different from other films."

In the face of these criticisms Paramount has issued a written statement saying: "Rules of Engagement is a dramatisation and a fictional account of the consequences of extremism in all its forms.

"The film is not an indictment of any government, culture or people. Rather, it explores the human tragedy and consequences that can result when people of any society are put in extreme situations."

But Yemen's ambassador in Washington, Abdulwahab Alhajjri, argues that audiences will not realise the story is fictional. "Even people who have been to Yemen are asking me 'When did it happen?' "

He is particularly concerned about an "update" at the end of the film, which describes what supposedly happened to the main characters afterwards - the cowardly US ambassador getting a promotion, and so on. This, Alhajjri feels, reinforces the impression that it's based on a true story.

"The disclaimer - that it's all fiction - comes at the very end," he says. "I've watched the film twice and nobody stays in the cinema for that."

An edited version of this article appeared in The Guardian on 11 August, 2000