Why You Should Watch Reel Bad Arabs

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]I have another documentary recommendation, but first let's talk about Edward Said Orientalism. To oversimplify it, it is centuries-old cultural conditioning of Western society, so they will look down on the global south using dehumanization, demonization, and even fetishization to justify their view that people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other non-Occident places as lesser than Western society, making whatever they do okay because they are the good guys and we are the bad guys or people in constant need of saving from the bad guys. Many of the language of colonization that is still carried to today Western society came from this colonial conditioning where they normalized their atrocity. The book can be difficult to read not because Edward Said is a bad reader or the topic is painful to read. It's just the nature of academia book. They came with a lot of necessary and detailed in-depth analysis that people might find boring, unfortunately. With that said, the documentary that I want to recommend that go through this practice of Orientalism, mainly focusing on Arabs or West Asia, is Real Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies People. A documentary made from a book by Jack Shaheen who explored a thousand movies with Arabs in it from classic to popular movies. And he found that more than 900 of them are just blatant racism and Islamophobia that is based on Western fantasy and literature, not from the reality that we live in. Edward Said's book is better for its historical material depth, but to see a glimpse of how this propaganda is done through modern media, definitely give Real Bad Arabs a watch. It's also available on YouTube for free.