Tyrant: hate TV series coming this summer reveals more about Hollywood than Arabs and Muslims
By Ali Younes
The Arab Daily News has uncovered a brewing conflict and war of words involving the executives at FX channel that produces the upcoming TV series Tyrant and its creator Gideon Raff.
Ray Hanania, the Managing Editor of the Arab Daily News, has reported that FX channel executives have pushed out the original writer of the series which is set to air on June 24, Gideon Raff, because he disagreed with their drive to make the series hateful and racist towards Arabs. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate is a big business in the American entertainment industry in Hollywood films and in cable TV productions.
Tyrant will force American TV viewers to drink from the same poison chalice of racist and stereotypical typecast representations of Arabs and Muslims as violent and crazed terrorists.
Gideon Raff is a young, talented Israeli screenwriter and TV producer who created the hugely popular Israeli drama Hatufim or the “Kidnapped” that later was re-developed by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa for Showtime under the name Homeland. Tyrant, just like Homeland, is allegedly about the “ complexities” of the Middle East. The truth, however, is much simpler than this.
Both shows, in reality, are about exploiting the psychological hunger to beat up on Arabs and Muslims as the one segment of human race responsible for all the terrorism problems of the wonderful western civilized world.
Yes, it is true, and a fact that the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, happened to be Muslims, and that an extremist Muslim ideology is a real threat to civilized societies – Arab and Muslim societies are included – around the world.
Raff, Showtime and FX, and other Hollywood executives are exploiting, bending and twisting those unfortunate facts in order to satisfy the innate hunger for revenge against Muslims and Arabs. In essence, Shows like Homeland, Tyrant and 24, are like the drugs Americans need in order escape from reality and kill their enemies in their imagination on TV screens, while Raff and the executives at FX and Showtime are the kingpins who shamelessly make tens of millions of dollars from feeding Americans this drug of anti-Arab and Muslim hatred to escape from reality.
The specious argument that all of the terrorism against America and the West is driven by Muslims and Arabs is a lie that fuels this entertainment bigotry.
The negative representations of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood, in fact, reveal more about Hollywood than Arabs or Muslims. It reveals that studios, executives, and production companies will go to any length, including exploiting the darkest desires hidden inside the depths of human psyche in order to make money. What does that make them to be? One would argue, perhaps, that they are a shade or two above the actual gun-touting extremist terrorists parading in the streets of a war-torn middle eastern country.
What if one day, thinking out loud, that some crazy individual, under the influence of such shows, decided to mass kill or shoot innocent Muslim or Arab Americans in their place of worship or community centers. This is no longer a farfetched scenario or a figment of my imagination, this is unfortunately has become our tangible reality in America.
We know incidents like these have already happened many times over in American cities against Jewish Synagogues, Sikh temples and Mosques. We also see it happening in other forms through massacres at our high schools or movie theaters by unstable young men who became under the influence of Hollywood’s skewed version of reality.
The executives in Hollywood should not wait for yet another massacre against innocent worshipers or movie goers or high school students in the middle of America to wake up and act responsibly. How would the executives at FX or Showtime or Gideon Raff feel about such scenario, not if, but when it happens again? mostly likely nothing, they already laughed their way to the bank and there is no need to feel bad about the people they demeaned and dehumanized in their shows already.
Ali Younes is the Editor of the Arab Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected], and on twitter @clearali
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Ali Younes is a Senior Political Analyst for The Arab Daily News online newspaper. He is a veteran news-editor, Journalist, and a Middle East analyst working for major American news network . He is based in Washington, D.C.
Reach Ali at [email protected]
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