Rami Malek cast as Bond villain? Hollywood habits die hard

Middle East Eye

Last week,  it was announced - to great glee - that Egyptian-American actor and Oscar winner Rami Malek will play "a mysterious villain armed with dangerous technology" opposite Daniel Craig in the 25th James Bond film, slated for release next year. 

BBC Entertainment tweeted charmingly: “Bismillah! Oscar-winner Rami Malek has been cast as the latest Bond villain." Appearing on “Good Morning America” to discuss the news as the audience applauded and swooned, the Bohemian Rhapsody star remarked that there have been “such great villains in film history”.

But, come to think of it, there’s also such a history of villainising Arabs in film. 

Now, it’s not my job to weigh in on the debate about whether Malek’s Coptic Christian identity should prevent him from being claimed by the Arabs.

The fact is that his heritage lies in what is now often referred to as the Arab-Muslim world - and that, regardless of how beloved a Bond villain Malek may be, this is as good an opportunity as any to reflect on Hollywood’s treatment of characters from that world. 

A February cover story on Malek for GQ Middle East muses that: “In the West, actors of Middle Eastern descent typically have two options: be ignored, or be stereotyped." This was initially the case with Malek himself, who was "a magnet for one-dimensional roles playing terrorists, brutes, and a smorgasbord of Arab caricatures". 

After playing a suicide bomber in the Fox television series 24, Malek says he decided the typecasting was "bullshit" and that he would no longer respond to "any calls that come about playing Arabs or Middle Easterners in a negative light". 

Incidentally, 24 was singled out by the late scholar Jack G Shaheen - author of, among other titles, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People - as one of the pioneers of the post-9/11 "vilification process" of America’s own Arabs and Muslims, often portrayed as “clones of Osama bin Laden”. 

Both 24 and the Showtime series Homeland, Shaheen wrote, “provid[ed] a means for the national security state to publicise fantasies of an Arab Muslim terrorist threat”.

As for pre-9/11 vilification, Shaheen’s New York Times obituary in 2017 noted that “his analysis found that of about a thousand films with Arab or Muslim characters made between 1896 and 2000, only 12 portrayed them positively”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Lessons from an ex-British MP who stood on a street corner in Beirut

Middle East Eye

In a recent dispatch for The Spectator, Matthew Parris - South African-British columnist and former Conservative member of the British Parliament - treats us to an account of “What you learn standing on a street corner in Beirut”.

The corner in question is located on Rue Qobaiyat in the trendy Mar Mikhael neighbourhood, which Parris incorrectly identifies as Beirut’s “Armenian quarter”. So much for learning things.

Our traveller has turned up there in search of a haircut at a barbershop that never opens. The wait enables him to catapult himself into the role of spontaneous sociocultural analyst, first with the finding that “strangers glance sharply at each other in Beirut”.

Of course, any half-decent Orientalist knows to present his observations re: the “Other” in Western-centric terms - hence, for example, the nineteenth-century discovery by Frenchman Gerard de Nerval, a prominent character in Edward Said’s Orientalism, that the head ornaments of Druze and Maronite women in Beirut made them “look like the fabulous unicorns which support the royal arms of England”.

Parris, for his part, situates his study of Lebanese ocular movements within a recollection of his own attendance at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, where “the Queen’s eyes darted, birdlike and alert, to left and right, taking things in”. He continues: “So do the Lebanese.”

I myself can’t say I’ve noticed this habit in the past 13 years of visiting Lebanon, but perhaps I haven’t found the right street corner. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Notre Dame and the case of misplaced empathy

Al Jazeera English

On 15 April, as news emerged of the fire raging at the iconic Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, social media was ablaze with hashtag-laden expressions of grief.

President Emmanuel Macron declared that the whole French nation was overwhelmed with "emotion", while Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo could not find "strong enough words to express the pain" she felt.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, among bazillions of others, tweeted that the incident was "heartbreaking". US President Donald Trump called it "horrible" and offered the helpful suggestion that "perhaps flying water tankers could be used" to extinguish the flames.

Meanwhile, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker bewailed the "sad spectacle" and "the horror" of the fire at Notre Dame, an institution allegedly belonging to "the whole of humanity".

Granted, humans on the receiving end of French colonial oppression or of the Catholic church's long history of crimes might fail to detect a common cause.

I'm not going to argue that it's impermissible to lament the demise of historically and globally significant architecture - or that anyone shedding virtual tears on behalf of Notre Dame automatically doesn't give a damn about other global causes.

But the magnitude of blaze-induced grief is nonetheless unsettling given that far more serious human tragedies rarely elicit such a level of international "heartbreak".

Where are the calls for flying water tankers or the all-pervasive despair when, for example, Israel periodically undertakes to set the Gaza Strip on fire? During Israel's 50-day Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the United Nations calculated that the Israeli military killed no fewer than 2,251 Palestinians, among them 299 women and 551 children.

Talk about loss and destruction. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Italy’s War on the Roma

Jacobin

In a television interview last June, Matteo Salvini — ultraright-wing Italian interior minister and deputy prime minister — responded with great modesty to pleas in the press that he rescue the city of Rome from a purported takeover by “gypsies”: “I am not Batman.”

Nevertheless, he proposed a census of Italy’s Roma population such that the non-Italian Roma might be expelled from the country. As for the Italian ones: “Purtroppo te li devi tenere in Italia” — “Unfortunately you have to keep them in Italy.”

Sane observers immediately denounced Salvini’s plan of action, warning that, besides not really being legal, an ethnicity-based population tally was reminiscent of a certain Benito Mussolini. Then again, maybe that was the point.

And while the census has yet to come to fruition, Salvini — who has long fantasized about bulldozing Roma camps — has found numerous other opportunities to play almost-Batman. A week after his TV interview, Italian authorities undertook a mass forcible eviction at a principal Roma camp in Rome — an action that, as Amnesty International noted, was carried out “in defiance of a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights.”

Amnesty’s Catrinel Motoc remarked: “Rendering dozens of Romani families homeless, including infant children, is a cruel and callous act directed against a minority who have been at the brunt of discriminatory housing policies for decades.”

Today, as we mark International Roma Day, Italy’s war on the long-oppressed group rages on. Just last month, Amnesty filed a complaint with the European Committee of Social Rights alleging a “series of breaches” of the European Social Charter owing to “widespread forced evictions” of Roma communities, “the continued use of segregated camps featuring substandard housing and lack of equal access to social housing.”

Such affronts to justice are bolstered by public animosity toward the Roma, who are estimated to number up to 180,000 in Italy. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that 82 percent of Italians held anti-Roma views — much higher than any other European nation listed.

According to popular stereotypes, Roma are filthy, lazy thieves who refuse to integrate into the civilized world and prefer to fester in squalor. But how is a community meant to integrate when it’s literally blocked from doing so, its identity criminalized and its members forced to eke out an existence on the margins? “Segregated camps” aren’t exactly the stuff of civilization. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.