Ben Shapiro’s New Film Recycles Decades of Hollywood Anti-Muslim Tropes

US right-wing political commentator Ben Shapiro recently spoke at the CPAC Argentina 2024, Conservative Political Action Conference, on December 04, 2024 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ben Shapiro, a prominent pro-Israel blogger and co-founder of the far-right news site The Daily Wire, claimed that Hollywood has spent the last three decades refusing to tell the story of the threat of radical Islam.

While announcing the trailer for his new Islamophobic film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, Shapiro posted on X that the threat of radical Islam is real and that Hollywood has refused to tell that story for three decades. He described his project as the biggest, most audacious, funniest, and most kickass film The Daily Wire has ever released. However, making Muslims out to be the villains is a formula Hollywood has relied on for generations.

In 2003, American writer and educator Jack Shaheen published Reel Bad Arabs following his review of more than 900 films featuring Arab characters. He concluded that Hollywood routinely blurred Arab and Muslim identities, overwhelmingly portraying them as violent, barbaric, greedy, sexually threatening, or otherwise dangerous. Audiences can see this pattern in films like True Lies (1994), where Arab terrorists plot a nuclear attack in the United States, Executive Decision (1996), which features Muslim terrorists hijacking a plane, and The Siege (1998), which envisions terrorist attacks in New York leading to mass arrests of Arab Americans. Rules of Engagement (2000) similarly portrays US Marines killing Yemeni civilians before justifying the action.

Television has mirrored this approach through shows like 24 and Homeland, which built major storylines around Muslim terrorists and sleeper cells. While some projects later introduced nuanced portrayals in series like Ramy, Mo, Ms Marvel, and the yet-unreleased Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, decades of harmful stereotyping have already taken a heavy toll.

This persistent depiction of Muslims and Arabs as threats carries severe real-world consequences. In May, anti-Muslim extremists filmed themselves attacking the Islamic Center of San Diego, fatally shooting three men who stepped in to protect children at the mosque's Islamic school.

In his latest film, Shapiro attempts to modernize these tropes by centering the plot on a college campus taken over by radical Islamic terrorists who seize a Gaza solidarity encampment, establish a makeshift caliphate, impose Sharia law, and execute infidels. The trailer juxtaposes ISIL (ISIS) imagery and footage from 9/11 with footage of the 2024 protests on college campuses, linking real student demonstrations against Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza with fictional extremist violence.

Since October 7, the US political establishment has increasingly treated Palestinians, Muslims, and their allies as security threats. By turning an anti-genocide campus encampment into the starting point for an Islamist takeover of America, the film repackages an old far-right conspiracy theory.