About
In 2001, media scholar Jack G. Shaheen published Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People - an encyclopedia documenting how nearly a century of Hollywood films caricatured Arabs. The updated 2009 edition reviews 963 films and catalogues hundreds more.
This site makes the shape of that research navigable: which films, which stereotypes, which lists - as a searchable factual index. And it extends the work the book couldn't finish: documenting anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism wherever media goes - film, television, news, and games - scene by scene, in its own words.
The name is a reply to the book's title. Shaheen documented the reel bad Arabs; this project documents the real bad media - because the problem was never just the reels. And the ambition runs one step further: a community that has spent a century being misrepresented, learning to stand watch - first for itself, and in time for others too.
What we publish - and what we don't
Copyright protects expression, not facts. This site publishes facts - that a work exists, who made it, what year - drawn from Wikidata, and original writing: our category explainers and the findings themselves, labeled with our own vocabulary.
It never publishes the book's prose. No review text, no introduction, no paraphrases. If you want Shaheen's analysis of a film - and you do; it's sharp, funny, and meticulously sourced - buy the book.
Every finding is original writing, grounded in the work itself or its documented record, and reviewed before publication. New contributions are held to the stricter standard the form states: written from watching the media yourself. Submissions that copy or closely paraphrase published work are rejected.
Attribution
Film index and category labels derived from facts reported in: Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, updated edition, Olive Branch Press / Interlink Publishing, 2009. Shaheen (1935–2017) spent his career on this work; this project exists in his debt and sends readers to his book at every turn.
Catalog identity and production facts draw on Wikidata (CC0). Many seeded finding descriptions are grounded in plot facts from the English Wikipedia (text under CC BY-SA 4.0), rewritten in this project's own words. Posters and stills come from Wikimedia-hosted files, cached and served by this site; each image links to the work's Wikipedia article.
Get involved
Contribute a finding - or just use the index and tell people about it.