Jack Shaheen is Professor Emeritus of Mass Communication at Southern Illinois University. He studies how Arabs and Islam are portrayed in American media, particularly stereotypical images.

In 2001 he wrote Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, where he surveyed more than 900 film appearances of Arab characters. Of those, only a dozen were positive and 50 were balanced. Shaheen writes "Seen through Hollywood's distorted lenses, Arabs look different and threatening."

But are these distorted lenses or seeing through a glass clearly? And is Hollywood even guilty of creating the stereotype?

At the conclusion of this series of 13 posts (This is post number 4) in the category Muslim Stereotypes I will show that Hollywood presents Arabs and Muslims as they truly are, evil when they act evil, and good when they act good, no distortion.

What I want to discuss in this article is who started the stereotype of Arab as evil.

The photo above is of a painting by Eugène Delacroix - The Death of Sardanapalus (1827-1828 - Oil on canvas) which is now hanging in the Louvre, Paris, France. Here is a quick description from Wikipedia:

Its dominant feature is a large bed on which a nude prostrates herself and beseeches the apathetic Sardanapalus for mercy. Sardanapalus had ordered his possessions destroyed and sex slaves murdered before immolating himself, once he learned that he was faced with military defeat.

Death of Sardanapalus is based on the tale of Sardanapalus, the last king of Assyria, from the historical library of Diodorus Siculus, the Ancient Greek historian, and is a work of the era of Romanticism.

The Assyrians, a Semitic people north of present day Iraq, were a race of warriors, more cruel and brutal than any other race before. Their history is filled with wars, conquests, and slave-taking.

It is interesting to note that Delacroix portrayed Sardanapalus as an Arab King in possession of black warrior slaves and white sex slaves and who had no regard for human life; that is to say, the common view that Europeans held regarding Arabs for more than a millennium.

So for centuries before Hollywood, centuries before the Jews controlled the media in the United States, there was a stereotypical view of the Arab as a bloodthirsty cut-throat who held slaves and massacred peoples.

In the YouTube video Planet of The Arabs, which is based on Shaheen's book, the claim is repeated that Hollywood relentlessly vilifies and dehumanizes Arabs and Muslims.