It's officially time to retire using "the Arab guy" as a red herring in entertainment. No one's falling for it. It just wastes our time.
In Flightplan, when Jodie Foster is searching the plane for whatever nefarious person abducted her daughter, and her eyes linger on a bunch of pissed off Arabs congregating around the bathroom door, did anyone in America not think "Well, obviously they didn't do it. In a movie 10 years ago, sure, but not today. But which WASP did it?"
It's ineffective and hypocritical. What is intended, I'm sure, to play upon prejudice and teach us all an important moral lesson, fails. Instead, the filmmakers lazily practice prejudice—toward Arabs, toward us—and the only lesson we're taught is that the filmmakers think we're profoundly stupid bigots who haven't seen a movie in the past five years. Our would-be enlighteners would do well to examine whether cheaply using ethnicity as a red herring is itself offensive. You know my vote.
I knew it had gotten bad when I saw the trailer for United 93 and my dominant thought was not "Too soon" but "Wow, they actually cast Arabs as the Arab terrorists." I was expecting Mexicans.
While I'm on the topic of media and race, can we also get a moratorium on race-based "nexts?" You've heard them. When young black Phil Ivey won a few championships in the predominantly white poker world, he was immediately hailed as "the Tiger Woods of poker." When young white Adam Morrison established himself in the predominantly black world of basketball, he was predictably christened the next "the next Larry Bird."
The Woods comparison is simply insane. They have nothing in common except skin color. Ivey is presently one of the best poker players in the world. Tiger is merely immortal. The Morrison comparison is slightly more defensible (small school, great shooter, hick, soft on defense), but not when you consider the pantheon of "the next Larry Birds" to have come and gone over the years, the only common denominator again being hue. Where you at, Chris Mullin and Rex Chapman?
Repugnant, lazy reporting.
But just how shocking would it be to hear Morrison called "the Tiger Woods of basketball?" It's ludicrous, yet oddly no more so.