Arabs Picket Disney, Cite Insults in Films

Arab American leaders demonstrated Thursday outside the Walt Disney studio against two Disney films that the protesters said contain insults to Arabs.

The entertainment giant, the protesters said, broke a 1993 agreement to confer with them to prevent stereotypical portrayals of Arabs.

The protesters stopped short of calling for an Arab American boycott of Disney, as conservative Protestant groups recently did on other issues.

But Don Bustany, spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told a curbside news conference that Muslim groups based in Washington have asked foreign countries with large Islamic populations to boycott Disney products until the company “stops doing what it is doing to Arabs.”

Disney officials declined to comment Thursday.

Bustany and other Arab American leaders objected to an assortment of villainous Arabic-like characters in “Kazaam,” starring Shaquille O’Neal, and a nasty, sharp-dealing neighbor named Habib in last year’s “The Father of the Bride, Part II.”

“They should show that not all Arabs are villains,” said Monir Deeb, president of the committee’s Los Angeles chapter. “There should be a balance.”

The villains in “Kazaam” include a black marketeer named Malik--the Arabic word for “owner”--the protesters said.

“I don’t think there is a deliberate attempt to harm Arab Americans,” Bustany said. “But I believe there are people who harbor less-than-positive feelings about Arabs in general, and if they get a chance to slam Arabs, they will do that--just as it happened for decades against black Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians.”

The committee members were particularly offended, Bustany said, by what the members regarded as a breach by Disney executives of an oral promise in June 1993 to consult with them about any projects involving Arabs, following a protest against the animated musical “Aladdin.”

“If they deny that they made such an agreement, then why has the TV animation division been operating under the agreement with us very constructively and very amiably?” he said.

“They were heroes three years ago,” said Bustany, referring to Arab American elation after Disney changed some lyrics in “Aladdin,” which they had protested as promoting an insultingly stereotypical image of Arabs.

As evidence of such an understanding, Bustany said that on Feb. 29, in one of many letters he sent to Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, he noted that Disney officials accepted the committee’s suggestions in the television version of “Aladdin” and in the script for a spinoff film, “Aladdin and the King of Thieves.”