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Disney movie under fire A new Disney movie, released on March 5, 2004 came under fire for negative stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs. "Hidalgo" tells the so-called “incredible true story” of a 5,000-km horse race across the Arabian Peninsula, showing a U.S. cowboy hero pitching up in Aden in 1890 with his American mustang to compete against a hundred Bedouin riders on their Arab steeds. Disney claimed that the movie was built on a true story, as the scriptwriter John Fusco claimed he has searched its historical facts carefully. The film stars Viggo Mortensen - fresh from his triumph in The Lord of the Rings - as Frank Hopkins, who conquers the Middle East and his hundred competing Bedouin riders with the sort of ease and bravado the US military now hunkered down in Iraq can surely only fantasise about. The historical Hopkins, whose memoirs form the basis for the film script, claimed to have been the son of a Sioux princess, a US Cavalry trooper from the age of 12, a witness to the massacre at Wounded Knee, a buddy of the Indian chieftain Black Elkand President Teddy Roosevelt, the champion of hundreds of endurance races, including a 2,000-mile marathon from Texas to Vermont, and a regular performer in Buffalo Bill's touring Wild West Show. It was while performing with Buffalo Bill in Paris in 1889, he said, that an Aden businessman, Rau Rasmussen, invited him to compete in the Ocean of Fire, a 1,000-year-old race across Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter and up through Mesopotamia into Syria. Despite the harshness of the terrain and the physical disadvantages of his horse, Hidalgo, he crossed the finishing line in 68 days, anywhere between one and two days ahead of the nearest competition. (The film, naturally, makes the finale a lot tighter.) The problem is, Frank Hopkins was almost certainly a fabulator and a confidence man whose tales of heroic deeds were little more than tall stories. There is no mention of him in US Cavalry records, or in accounts of the Battle of Wounded Knee, or in the extensive records of Buffalo Bill's traveling show. His name does not crop up in Teddy Roosevelt's voluminous correspondence. There is no evidence that the Texas-Vermont race was even run. He was never photographed in the saddle, except as an old man "re-enacting" the exploits of his youth. As for the Ocean of Fire, it too appears not to have taken place, either in 1890 or in any other year of its supposedly glorious 1,000-year-old history. The notion of a 3,000-mile race from Yemen to Syria is in itself laughable. As the Arab News newspaper wrote recently, a race of that length starting in Aden would finish up "somewhere in Romania". Even following the most circuitous route, the horsemen would finish north of Armenia. The fact that Disney has bought into Hopkins' fantasies, all the while promoting them as an "incredible true story" in its movie trailers, has touched countless cultural raw nerves. The production drew outcry among U.S. media critics and Arabs suspecting the credibility of the story or its true aims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America's largest Islamic civil liberties group, wrote to Disney’s chairman to express concern that the movie negatively stereotypes Muslims and Arabs. It also demanded the removal of the "True Story" tag line that is touting the production. CAIR raised many concerns that the film "may contain scenes and dialogue that would serve to stereotype Muslims and Arabs and create a negative impression of Islam in the minds of moviegoers". "Given the growing prejudice against Islam, Muslims and Arabs, we believe a film with this type of dialogue and imagery could have a negative impact on the lives of ordinary American Muslims and Arab-Americans," said Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s National Communications Director, in his letter to Disney. "We sincerely hope that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry will not be added to historical inaccuracy in a film that is being marketed to families," he said. Other Arab commentators, such as Hussein Ibish of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, point to the uncom- fortable parallels between the film and the real-life fantasy of US domination in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. "The idea," as Mr Ibish puts it, "that being a frontiersman in the United States prepares you for dealing with another group of savages." The U.S. media showed a fair share of criticizing the film, with some rapping the production as based on a "history of lies". A February 17 Los Angles Times article, said that "Disney may tout ‘Hidalgo’ as ‘based on a true story,’ but, according to a headstrong posse of fact-finders, the only thing Hopkins ever galloped across was the vast plains of his imagination." The Bismarck Tribune reported on March 1, that Disney apparently changed the movie's marketing as "Hidalgo" as "based on the life" of Hopkins after a year of being known as "Hopkins hoax". One of the world's leading Native American scholars, Vine Deloria of the University of Colorado, is furious at the uncritical repetition of Hopkins' claims about his role in Sioux history. He wrote: "Hopkins' claims are so outrageously false that one wonders why Disney were attracted to this material at all, except of course the constant propensity to make money under any conditions available." (Media reports – March 10, 2004) |