Popular show, 'negative stereotypes'

Not everyone was happy to see Jack Bauer freed from a Chinese prison.

In this season of Fox's hit show 24, Arab Muslims are portrayed as terrorists for the second time in three years - a characterization that has incensed Muslim-rights groups here on campus and across the country.

In the current season, which debuted Jan. 14, Muslim terrorist Abu Fayed detonates a nuclear weapon in suburban Los Angeles.

Penn's Muslim Student Association President and Wharton and College junior Samir Malik said the organization is disappointed with Fox's choice to portray Muslims negatively again.

"It's unfortunate that the show perpetuates such negative stereotypes of Muslims," he said.

College freshman Aysha El Shamayleh, cultural-awareness chairwoman of Penn's Arab Student's Association, agreed, saying 24 portrays Arabs as "irrational, aggressive, barbaric and ignorant."

She believes that the prominence of the show in America and around the world is dangerous to Arabs.

"24 is a well-established, popular show in America and abroad," she said. "Its content is spread on a very wide scale."

The criticism extends to national Muslim rights groups, with Rabia Ahmed, the spokeswoman for the Council of American-Islam Relations in Washington D.C., saying that the use of Muslim terrorists was "unoriginal" and that she was "disturbed by Fox's revisiting of this theme."

And racial-stereotyping experts say the claims made by El Shamayleh and Malik may be well-founded.

Penn Law professor Regina Austin, who specializes in race relations, believes that the portrayal of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists "confirms people's ignorance."

She emphasized the need to view each person as "deeply contextualized, socially connected and individually complex" in order to avoid stereotypes.

To that end, Fox has recently portrayed some Arab characters in a more positive light, introducing an Arab American government agent, Nadia Yassir, and an American Muslim, Walid Al-Rezani, who works with the FBI.

El Shamayleh, Ahmed and Malik all recognize this as a step in the right direction - Malik says the move is a "more accurate portrayal of Muslims."

But Ahmed and El Shamayleh said they still desire more "balance" on the show.

Last week Fox released a statement to The Associated Press saying that "24 is a heightened drama about anti-terrorism.

"After five seasons," the statement read, "the audience clearly understands this and realizes that any individual, family or group [ethnic or otherwise] that engages in violence is not meant to be typical."

In the middle of season four, Kiefer Sutherland, the actor who plays the protagonist Jack Bauer, also taped a short message that aired before the show once in the middle of the season reminding viewers not to harbor anti-Muslim sentiments.

Ahmed called this a "Band-Aid approach" but added that "it is always good thing to remind viewers that [24] is fiction."

But despite the criticism, Malik said the possibly negative portrayal won't stop him from watching, describing himself as a "pretty passionate fan."

24 "still has entertainment value if watched with the mind-set that it is fiction," he said.

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