“No such thing as a Muslim good guy”?

Reuters reports that some British Muslims don’t seem to like how their faith and/or ethnicity is portrayed in the media:

“There is no such thing as a Muslim good guy,” said Arzu Merali, co-author of a report by the Islamic Human Rights Commission that argued that movies played a crucial role in fostering a crude and exaggerated image.

The commission’s study, based on soundings taken from almost 1,250 British Muslims, also found that 62 percent felt the media was “Islamophobic” and 14 percent called it racist. . . .

Of course, this report goes on to call for more censorship, which is stupid and appalling at the best of times, but especially when certain movies are targetted for criticism on such a ridiculously thin-skinned and ultra-sensitive basis. Consider, for example, the three movies that are singled out in this Reuters story:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), in which the only Arab character with any significant screen time and dialogue is Indiana Jones’ good friend Sallah (the one-eyed monkey man, a bad guy, has significant screen time, while the mystic who interprets the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, a good guy or at least a neutral guy, has dialogue);
2. The Siege (1998), which is all about the harmful effects that a handful of Muslim extremists and a bunch of punitive Americans can have on innocent Arabs like the federal agent played by Tony Shalhoub and his family; and
3. Aladdin (1992), in which a song makes a cheeky reference to people getting their body parts cut off in “barbaric” Arabia; the line happens to have some basis in fact, but it was deleted from all video versions of the film after people protested it over a dozen years ago. (The song was also revised on subsequent versions of the soundtrack; here is the original version, and here is the revised version.)

It would be interesting to see if this report takes into account the fact that Muslim villains are sometimes removed from movies, such as the film version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears (2002), or that movies like Kingdom of Heaven (2005) have gone out of their way to cast Muslim characters in a positive light.

In any case, if the authors of this report really want to improve their community’s profile in the eyes of the broader public, the first thing they could do is stop bitching. And I say that as one who often has to tell my own co-religionists to stop being so sensitive.