WSJ: Middle Easterners reluctant to play terrorists in the movies

For most of you this article lurks behind a subscription firewall, so here's the nub, emphasis mine:

Roles for Middle Easterners in movies and TV shows have multiplied since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, bringing a jump in demand for actors who can play them. The catch: They are most often the bad guys. That is a dilemma for actors worried about being stereotyped or perpetuating a negative image of Middle Easterners. At the same time, it appears an initial wave of "us-versus-them" narratives is gradually being joined by more nuanced themes.

Can you tell me where these us-versus-them narratives are? Because I don't remember seeing them.

The article cites a couple of the actors from United 93, and yes they were terrorists, but that was a brilliant piece of cinema that should have won Best Picture, and there's no shame in being associated with that. And it cites 24, but we all know that there are like five bad Arabs every other season just to throw us off the fact that the real bad guy is always the Serbs or the Rogue British Agent pulling the strings, because even in a sensibility-shocker like 24, all evil must ultimately originate with a white dude.

(Except for Sherry Palmer, I'll grant you that one.)

Or how about the movies? Where are these simplistic black-turbans vs. white-hat shoot 'em ups? Oh, the article provides one--and a wide distribution it got, too:

Maz Jobrani, who was born in Iran and moved to California with his family when he was six years old, was trying to move into acting from advertising. He convinced himself that he could give a fair treatment to the role of an Afghan physicist who plots against the U.S. in the 2002 Chuck Norris movie "The President's Man: a Line in the Sand." He resisted wearing a turban, explaining it wouldn't be appropriate for an Afghan-American character, but the filmmakers didn't budge. "The gist of it was, 'Put on the turban so our fans can figure out who the bad guy was'," he says.

After playing a terrorist on the 2002 season of "24," he told his agent he was through playing terrorists. He has since turned to comedy, on television and live in standup.

Conservative bloggers often lament Hollywood's conscientious objector status in the war on terror. This article is particularly galling because it assumes facts not in evidence: that there has been a glut of movies portraying the evil of Islamism, the magnitude of the threat it represents, and the heroism of those who oppose it. Ah, would that it were so.

P.S. You never hear, say, white South Africans refusing to play bad guys because they're afraid that there will be some racial backlash against white South Africans. And when was the last time you saw a good white South African in a movie?

P.P.S. No Afghan terrorists wearing turbans? Then that must be one hell of a 'fro on Mullah Omar:

Oh? How do pigs hunt Americans?