His book Reel Bad Arabs surveys some 1,200 depictions of Arabs and Muslims in the movies. “They’ve been the most vilified group in the history of Hollywood,” says the academic and author Jack Shaheen. Throughout its history, American cinema has employed a lamentably narrow set of stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. An opportunity to go to them and say: ‘What can you do to help?’ in what has called the generational struggle of our time.”īut if Hollywood has any meaningful role to play here, content is arguably exactly what should be on the table. It was an opportunity to talk to these people who shape content around the world, who shape the American brand around the world. It’s connected in the largest possible way to defeating Daesh. “It’s not like the cold war, trying to insert positive narratives into movies. “It wasn’t about asking them to make an Islamic Harry Potter,” says Stengel. “Content was off the table,” said Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Pictures Association of America.Ĭontent was also off the table at Kerry’s Hollywood trip, it appears. There was no discussion of putting government propaganda into movies, it was reported.
Just a month after 9/11, George W Bush’s top adviser, Karl Rove, convened a similar council of movie execs for a counter-terrorist pitching session, although it apparently came to nothing. This is by no means the first time in the 21st century that the White House has turned to Tinseltown.
“Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket!” As the TV satirist John Oliver remarked: “You are banking a lot on any potential militants understanding that that is sarcasm.” “Run, do not walk to Isis land,” ran the text of the ad. The CSCC also put out a parody recruitment video, repurposing Isis’s violent propaganda footage and broadcasting it under the seal of the State Department. One of its strategies, for example, was to engage directly with Isis jihadists on Twitter, but that only served to legitimise their voices. Since 2010, that role had been performed by the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) its counter-messaging often leaned towards counter-productive messaging. Kerry’s visit to Hollywood comes a month after the State Department revamped its Countering Violent Extremism programme.
The US and its coalition partners have floundered over how to respond. Still ringing in Washington’s ears and heading its PowerPoint presentations is the declaration the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri made in 2005: “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.” Isis/Daesh has been sending a steady stream of video content on to that media battlefield, the relative sophistication of which has filled western commentators with a mix of horror, concern and admiration. If you accept the notion of a “war of narratives”, it’s an area where the extremists have done most of the running. Looking at the current output, such as Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Rock the Kasbah and London Has Fallen, you could easily get the impression that Hollywood is part of the problem, rather than a potential solution. Even more so, if he asked what juicy counter-terrorism stories they had coming down the pipeline. Especially if Kerry queried what Hollywood had done to counter the “#Daesh narrative” so far. One can’t help imagining there were some awkward moments to this “great convo”, though. Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative,” tweeted John Kerry on 16 February, along with a photo of himself in a Hollywood meeting lounge with executives from Universal, Warner, Fox, Disney, Sony, Dreamworks and other big players – overwhelmingly middle-aged white men in suits.