The dream factory: Different equals dangerous

Edward Zwick's terrorist thriller The Siege is a film with an unenviable reputation. Long before its US opening last weekend, it was being labelled the most anti-Arab film to come out of Hollywood for years, a catalogue of dangerous stereotypes and knee-jerk hostility dressed up as slick, fast-moving entertainment.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee described it in an open letter to the media as "insidious and incendiary". Ibrahim Hooper, writing in the New York Times on behalf of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, lamented how "moviegoers are yet again introduced to Islam through a relentless barrage of terrorism and violence".

Now that the film has come out the furore has only intensified, with newspaper opinion pages and radio talk-shows inviting lengthy comment on the subject. Intriguingly, we are not dealing with some cardboard cut-out depiction of Arab terrorists as a convenient plot device. What makes the debate so compelling is that The Siege actually addresses the issue of anti-Arab prejudice full on, and claims to be a stark warning against the dangers of blanket discrimination.

"The single and simple conclusion The Siege draws is that it is impossible to generalise about Arab Americans, that the distinction between them and terrorists must be understood before we, as a nation, can grapple with our fear of the 'other'," Mr Zwick wrote in a robust response to his critics last week.

So is the film really anti-Arab, or is it in fact an antidote to all those crass depictions we have seen over the years - those Libyan bombers in Back To The Future, or the fundamentalist fanatics who set off a nuclear bomb in the Florida Keys at the end of the Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies?

The Siege is nothing if not ambitious in scope. What it aims to portray is a kind of collective lunacy in which the US government becomes so unnerved by a spate of terrorist attacks that it chooses to suspend normal democratic rights and impose martial law on its own territory.

An increasingly bloody trail of suicide bombings by Islamic fundamentalists in New York City leads the army to seal off Brooklyn, set up giant outdoor prison camps for young Arab-American males, conduct house-to-house searches and indulge in a little gratuitous destruction, torture and murder.

Then, just when fascist dystopia beckons, the country returns to its senses. The good guys from the FBI, led by an improbably heroic Denzel Washington, wipe out the last of the terrorists just in time to blow the whistle on the mad-dog military commander (Bruce Willis) grown dizzy on his own power. The Arab internees are released from prison, and America is once again declared the land of the free.

What drags the film down is its own over-reaching preposterousness. The declaration of martial law is utterly implausible to start with, so when the film attempts to explain why this is such a bad idea it merely cancels out its own central premise. The Arab terrorists are relegated to little more than a sideshow and, beyond some cack-handed attempts to explain Middle Eastern politics and the motivation of the suicide bombers, scarcely appear to be real people at all. This is where the objections of the Arab American groups are strongest. "The Siege portrays Arabs and Muslims as a homogeneous, threatening mass who are repeatedly referred to as 'these people'," the Anti-Discrimination Committee complained. "Even when 'these people' are incarcerated behind barbed wire, they do not elicit any sympathy, because they all look alike and different from the rest of 'us'."

Only one Arab American character, Denzel Washington's FBI sidekick, is presented in a positive light, but his part in the film smacks of tokenism. The other Arabs - including a sweet-mannered professor who turns out to be the most fanatical terrorist of all - do nothing to dispel the prejudice that, ultimately, Arab equals Muslim equals fundamentalist equals gun- toting raghead.

Arab Americans can no doubt take comfort from the fact that The Siege has been panned by the critics and is performing poorly at the box office. What continues to worry them, though, is that the film purports to be a liberal response to such traumatic events as the attack on the US marine base in Dhahran in June 1996, or this summer's embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Liberal, in this case, seems to be a synonym for wrong- headed and ignorant.

"Anyone who knows anything about Middle Eastern politics will find the whole thing laughable," said the Anti-Discrimination Committee's spokesman Hussein Ibish. "But the film wraps itself in a news media-style legitimacy, giving people the impression that this is a nuanced analysis of a complex issue." In other words, in the wake of the questionable US anti-terrorist raids on Sudan and Afghanistan this summer, one has to wonder if The Siege is not just a bad movie, but a reflection of bad, misinformed politics too.